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Posts from the ‘HP’ Category

Oct 2

The Legacy of ‘Just Do It’? Imperative Rebrands on the Rise

It’s been 25 years since Nike launched the renowned ‘Just Do It’ brand line, and their place as a global brand leader was reconfirmed this week as they came 24th in Interbrand’s Best Global Brands survey, showing a brand value increase of 13%.  Earlier in the year, Fast Company crowned it the most innovative company of 2013.  However, despite their 25 year dominance, other leading brands have only recently begun to emulate the imperative expressed in ‘Just Do It’.

‘Just Do It’ uses the imperative tense – ordering, commanding or instructing us to do something.   It captures the spirit of Nike’s athletes, yet also speaks directly to Nike’s mission statement and the idea that there is an athlete in all of us.  It challenges us, orders us, to ‘just do it’.

Of the 182 most valuable brands in the world, only 6% use the imperative tense in their encapsulation of what their brand stands for.  But this is on the rise.

Close to half of the world’s most valuable brands who rebranded in 2012 and 2013 use the imperative to encapsulate what they stand for.  Consider,

Gap – Be Bright
Pepsi – Live for Now
Ford – Go Further
Pizza Hut – Make it Great
Intel – Look Inside
HP – Make It Matter

The rise of ‘imperative rebrands’ is likely down to three things.

1. An increasing focus on the importance of employees as drivers of the brand and the customer experience.

Many of the brandlines above speak as powerfully to employees as they do to the end consumer.  It’s clear that HP’s ‘Make It Matter’ is as much a rallying cry internally to drive much-needed innovation, as it is a mandate to their customers.  As Ford indicated in their launch of Go Further,

The company is exhorting its 166,000 worldwide employees to “Go Further,” too, because executives believe that making Ford’s “internal brand” consistent with its new external messaging can create profound synergies that benefit the company in significant ways. “What we aim to do is inspire behavior,” Matt VanDyke, Ford’s director of global communications, told me. “Go Further” is “more than an advertising tagline. We want to institutionalize it as part of our culture.”

2. The understanding that successful marketing today needs to encourage deep consumer engagement with the brand.

The imperative tense asks you actively do something – to get involved.

3. The need for brevity.

In the increasingly cluttered and splintered media world we live in, brands struggle to get their brand ideas across.  Ford’s long form of their brand idea is “we go further so you can”: more polite but less directly engaging and memorable. The imperative tense uses the verb’s short infinitive form (make, look, go) – and that may make the brand idea more memorable.

The downside of this approach is that we may not like brands to command or instruct us to do something.   When Smirnoff told us to ‘Be There,’ some may have responded with an equally direct two word response…  This may have been partly why, after 3 years of using the phrase, they walked away from ‘Be There’ when they broke a new global campaign last year, to adopt a new line, ‘Yours for the Making’.

Brands need some credibility as an arbiter of cool, or to have garnered a great deal of respect, to talk to us in the imperative – so perhaps it is only the brand leaders who can get away with it, since we already feel like we know them and value their opinion.   Friends can talk to us this way; but not strangers.  New brands should beware of this approach – it may backfire.

Mar 20

Does Your Brand Need A Spring Clean? Declutter What You Stand For Before It’s Too Late

Seven of the world’s top 33 brands fell in value last year.  The one that declined most was HP; down an average of 23% across BRANDZ, Interbrand and Brand Finance’s valuations.

HP are in the second year of a five year business revival plan, implemented by Meg Whitman, chief executive.  When asked in an interview last year, “Does the HP brand need major rehabilitation and repair or more of a polishing?”, she replied:

“I think we need to tell people what we do, so I think that’s more of a polishing… In my view we just need to tell people who we are, what we do and the value that we bring.”

I would argue that, more than a polishing, the brand needs a thorough spring clean.  Consider what you can find when you look at how they define what the organization stands for.  A vision; corporate objectives; purpose; brand story; brand essence; character differentiators; shared values (employees); shared values (brand); behaviors: cultural behaviors, communications behaviors, and  design behaviors.   That’s twelve categories.

The rest of the top 33 brands use an average of three.

Perhaps HP went too far in their ‘branding’ efforts, or perhaps different parts of the business ‘owned’ different articulations of the brand.  It is not unusual, even among the leading brands of the world, to see cases where a previous CEO may implement a vision, a new one defines a purpose, the marketing department want a brand positioning, no-one wants to change the founder’s values, so they add behaviours instead…  It’s all too easy to add new definitions, but unless you clear out the old, you can be left with confused employees, inconsistent stories and a disconnected brand and customer experience.

In June last year, HP launched another articulation of what they stand for, “Make it Matter.”  Meg Whitman explains,

“As I began to understand HP, I said that it hasn’t been very good at telling its own story…So I thought we needed to tell our story better. … So we got the 50 marketing executives in a room and started to think through what is unique and different about the company and we came very quickly to “Make it Matter.” Because in fact what we do makes it matter. It matters to the International Space Station or the Department of Works and Pensions or the U.S. Navy or Alianz or Deutsche Bank or Facebook. It matters what we do.”

She goes on to say that all business units, and corporate wide, everyone will “tuck under that messaging”.  At the same time as tucking in, I hope they are wiping out the legacy elements, to create a simpler, linear story to help HP to return to brand value growth.