COURAGE UNDER FIRE

Sound and fury over the Starbucks logo, signifying…what exactly?

Like Steve Jobs, Howard Schultz is the visionary founder of a brand phenomenon. Like Steve Jobs he stepped back at the helm of the business when it lost direction and began to founder. And like Steve Jobs he is intimately involved in all aspects of the brand.

He was recently very visible explaining the latest brand evolution, which suggests that what we have seen is more than a mere tweak of the logo.

Smile, you have a future

What is happening around the logo is just a glimpse of an unfolding brand story. The full picture is yet to be revealed but it’s a fair guess that, in a few years time when the chatter over the logo is long forgotten, it will be as redundant to think of Starbucks as a coffee brand as it is to think of Apple as a computer company.

And yet the eruption of debate over the logo is proof enough that the digital environment has created a new dynamic for those of us in the branding business.

I have already seen the words “branding disaster” used in a rush to judgment on the basis of what is, when all is told, an incomplete view of a brand metamorphosing around a business strategy. It is exciting to witness but  the commentary makes for dismal reading.

As Allen Adamson of Landor states admirably well in his Forbes.com column BrandSimple, good branding takes vision and courage – courage being one of the most critical factors in the face of so many would-be branding professionals.

“As the digital ways and means of communications increase, as the numbers of those who can tell branders what to do (and where to go) multiply by the zillions, it’s essential that those in our business focus on the end game. Will the changes help differentiate the brand in ways that people care about? If the answer is yes, stand up and stand your ground…”

This is exactly what Gap failed to do in the miserable back-pedaling over its logo. Truth be told, much of the web noise was generated by graphic designers who were affronted that an advertising agency (Laird & Partners) would be allowed anywhere near a classic brand icon. I tend to agree with them, but where was Gap to convince me otherwise? Muttering online about crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing? Where was the leadership?

In all this how easy it is to overlook the successful rebrandings, no less significant in their own way, that have been launched recently without drama.

Xerox’s logo change, for example, hailed by the company as the most sweeping transformation of its corporate identity in the company’s history, is quietly leading the company’s transition away from its legacy business of toner and paper into the customer-centric world of business services.

FPL Group, the Florida energy company, was recently recast into NextEra Energy ahead of a visionary strategy of a renewable energy future.

PriceWaterhousecoopers has become pwc; YMCA has become ‘the Y’; and Hilton Hotels has launched a new logo that has gone back to its iconic roots. Towers Watson, Symantec, Bausch & Lomb, McGladrey, Avid and Kraft Foods have all undergone brand changes with scarce a blip on the digital radar screen.

Ultimately, rebranding can not be managed by popular approbation. Change will always have its detractors. The web has given them a voice which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, is not so much public opinion as published opinion.

Customer input is essential for the maintenance of a healthy brand, but brand maintenance is one thing, innovation and brand leadership is another. Once a sound strategy is in place, companies just have to bite the bullet and get on with it. As Howard Schultz is demonstrating, rebranding in an age of digital anarchy is a time for vision, courage and leadership.

WHAT iPAD MEANS

Apple’s iPad tablet device is shipping April 3 and already it’s looking like another hit for Steve Jobs…yes, in spite of initial reaction to the name.

I must admit, I am bemused by the continuing name controversy. Admittedly, for women of a certain age it is entirely understandable they would connect the word ‘pad’ to a hygiene product in free association. In context, however, that association would be drastically minimized.

When we speak of launch pads, legal pads, bachelor pads, ink pads or pad locks we know exactly what is being referred to. There are no jokes, snickers or shudders when someone asks for a note pad. In such contextual instances, association of the word ‘pad’ to a feminine hygiene product is not only unlikely, it is perverse.

So it will be with the Apple iPad. It will come to mean the computing platform of the future without anyone blinking an eye (see Walt Mossberg‘s comments in the Wall Street Journal).

In naming, context is everything.

Oddly, the prevailing negative views about the iPad name are coming from men. For some reason have assumed the banner of female disdain and just can’t get beyond the tampon. How their minds work is a matter for them and their psychologists.

The iPad: context is everything, ladies

Is a legal pad an item of personal hygiene for female lawyers? How about a launch pad – is that a contraption for applying Maxipads? What about ink pad? Or mouse pad…

Pardon the puerile analogies. Of course you know what these kind of ‘pads’ are. So, to force such interpretation of their meaning through association with a feminine hygiene pad would be perverse. But that’s no worse than what happened this week with Apple’s iPad.

Within seconds of the unveiling of the iPad by Steve Jobs, Twitter lit up with women complaining and/or joking that the name immediately made them think of …iTampon.

Experts who should know better fanned the flames. “It’s an unfortunate name choice,” contended Michael Silverstein, senior vice president at Boston Consulting Group and author of “Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World’s Largest, Fastest-Growing Market.”

“They needed to do a research protocol and testing for a product that would offend no one while making clear its technical, functional and emotional benefits,” he said in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Are you experienced?

That may be the way they think in the literal world of management consulting. What he clearly does not understand is that, when it comes to names and naming, experiential context is everything. Just is we do not suppose a cell phone is for making calls in jail, that Virgin Atlantic is an airline for the sexually inexperienced, or indeed Apple is a company that manages orchards, the iPad will create its own context and it will be become just as familiar and accepted as iPod.

The trap to guard against with new names is the natural tendency of people to associate an unfamiliar name with something that it is familiar. The statement that begins, “It reminds me of…” has led to the premature dismissal of many a good name candidate.  Associations are important, but focus should be on whether the the product or company that is being named could create new, positive meaning around the word, rather than rear-view association.

There’s nothing that can be done with plain bad names, such as the Ford Probe. But just imagine if iPad had been called the iTablet, which some bets were on before the launch. Would alarmed physicians be advising us not to use one more than a twice day, and then only after meals with a glass of water? Of course not. They know what hypochondriasis is.

What was that name again, Steve?

 

Peeling the Apple

Buried in the article mentioned in the previous post [Google? What kind of name is that?] there is an inevitable reference to Apple.

In the article Paola Norambuena, who runs the naming division at Interbrand, said: “If you took the Apple name away and sold all of its other assets, they wouldn’t be worth as much”.

As with many things in the branding industry, there is an overwhelming amount of unsubstantiated received wisdom that is accepted as truth. This line of thinking about Apple seems to be a variation of a quotation, beloved by namers everywhere, which is attributed to John Stuart, former CEO of Quaker Oats. It goes something like this:

“If this business were split up, I would give you the land and bricks and mortar, and I would take the brands and trademarks, and I would fare better than you”.

This is probably so in the commodity business of breakfast cereal in which oats are oats are oats. Quaker did a great job of processing oats in their brick and mortar assets and getting them into the breakfast bowls of the nation. Apple, I would argue, is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Feb 5, 1996

Apple as a business has not always been the shining success it is today. As the BusinessWeek cover tells, the company and the brand were nearly managed into oblivion by a succession CEO misfits after Steve Jobs left Apple Computer in the mid-1990s. They viewed the business’s core product as manufacturing beige computers that fewer and fewer people wanted.

The Apple brand was rescued by Steve Jobs on his return, first through product revitalization and marketing and then by new product innovation. Today the brand is inextricably wound around the intangible capital of design, functionality, retail environments, product integration, content convergence, the Internet, marketing and the brilliance of Steve Jobs and his team.

What other assets does Apple have to sell? The company does not own its manufacturing plants. The brand is everything.