Chairman of Saffron Brand Consultants and co-founder of brand consultancy Wolff Olins, Wally Olins is widely regarded as one of the most experienced practitioners of branding.
In his 2003 book On Brand, Olins explores the role that branding plays in business and in popular culture. It’s less a textbook than a personal commentary on “the cultural phenomenon” of brands, and its witty, uncompromising and straight-talking style makes it a thoroughly enjoyable and useful read.
Olins’s approach to explaining why brands work is to simply outline their significance to consumers and to businesses respectively.
“Branding these days is largely about involvement and association; the outward and visible demonstration of private and personal affiliation. Branding enables us to define ourselves in terms of a shorthand that is immediately comprehensible to the world around us.”
Addressing the benefits of branding for businesses, Olins discusses how VW – a company that originally placed all its marketing efforts on functional appeal – gradually discovered the commercial benefits of mastering the emotional as well as the rational elements of its brand.
In subsequent chapters, Olins explores how brands originated simply as marks of quality for FMCG companies, and how they subsequently “grew up” into significant and complex intangible assets – valued equally by consumers, services, B2B companies, political parties, charities, and even countries.
One of the most useful chapters offers some practical advice on how to create and sustain a successful brand – although as Olins points out, they are rather guidelines than instructions as few rules are universally applicable in the branding world.
Like his early employer, David Ogilvy, Olins’s starting point is that brands should have a consistent and coherent promise stemming from a powerful emotional idea (a ‘Big Idea’). Olins suggests that around this core idea there are broadly 11 key considerations that need to be analysed and managed:
1. The four brand vectors (or ‘Senses’): Product, Environment, Communication, Behaviour. In other words, the different ways in which a brand manifests itself.
2. Brand architecture: The organisational structure of your brand – whether it is monolithic (e.g. Nokia, Lego, Tesco), endorsed (e.g. Apple i-tunes, Ford Mondeo), or branded (e.g. Diageo’s Guinness, Johnnie Walker, Baileys etc).
3. Whether the brand is invented or reinvented: each requires very different considerations and strategic approaches.
4. Product quality: The “licence to take part in the race”.
5. The inside and the outside: brands have two roles – persuading outsiders to buy and persuading insiders to believe.
6. Differentiators or core ideas: most successful brands have a clear and simple idea that sets them apart. Good design is essential to giving creative life to the core idea.
7. Breaking the mould: identifying opportunities to reject existing convention and to go for something entirely new (e.g. Apple). Typically realised through design, but occasionally via a different business model (e.g. IKEA).
8. Reducing risk through research: Branding inherently involves risk, but good research can be used to indicate what people are moving towards emotionally, and to analyse successes and failures post-launch in order to learn lessons for the future.
9. Promotion: a brand needs to be heard, if it is to succeed.
10. Distribution: Coverage is the key to success – Disney is a great example of how to create impact with overlapping distribution channels (film, DVD, book, musical, merchandise etc…).
11. Coherence, clarity and convergence: Every aspect of a brand must reinforce everything else.
In summary, On Brand is a punchy, forward-looking distillation of wisdom from one of the industry’s major spokesmen. Olins presents a compelling case for how the relevance and power of brands will continue to grow, and thus the importance of understanding how best to manage them. Happily, Olins avoids the marketing lingo bingo and cuts to the chase – making a number of useful practical suggestions for how to approach the task and build a successful brand, for the benefit of businesses and consumers alike.
