Is it time to rebrand New Zealand?

How do you know when it’s time to rebrand your business? For that matter, what is the purpose of a brand?

It is a historic time for New Zealanders as the country is in the process of rebranding itself for the first time in over a century.

When the government first brought the flag change proposal to the public’s attention in 2014, it was met with total apathy. It was almost embarrassing how unpatriotic and uninterested kiwis were in the initiative. The only time people started voicing their opinion on the issue was when the government announced that the exercise would cost a hefty $26m. Then New Zealanders were up in arms as lobby groups tried to prevent the expensive exercise from going ahead.

The rest of us hoped that the investment would at least result in a great new design. You might think that with a $26m budget, the government would have commissioned the world’s top branding designers and artists, but no, in typical democratic Kiwi fashion every Tom, Dick and Harry was invited to submit their designs and suggestions to the flag-change panel. Irrespective of your design knowledge or credentials, you had the opportunity to rebrand New Zealand if you were up for it. Unsurprisingly, when the top 40 designs were revealed in August, many Kiwis weren’t impressed. The new designs simply didn’t resonate with most New Zealanders. When we looked at the designs, we didn’t feel a natural affinity with them, they didn’t speak to us.

According to marketing theory, branding is considered to be the “face” of a company. A logo is meant to be memorable and easily recognisable, and most importantly, reflect a company’s principles and philosophy. This idea may provide insight into why the new flag designs have not been well received by the public. Two of the final four designs feature an intricate silver fern pattern, which if we’re honest has really just become a pretty picture. The silver fern and Southern Cross symbolism do not communicate kiwi values or kiwi philosophy whatsoever. Therefore, they are not really suitable to feature on our national flag.

One logo that is undeniably strong and effective is Apple’s logo. The symbolism is powerful primarily because it depicts the company’s core philosophy. In 1977, the US was experiencing a technological revolution. Computers were slowly becoming part of people’s everyday lives and consumers were curious about what the future of computers would hold. When brand designer Rob Janoff was tasked with creating a logo for what would become the largest computer company in the world, he sought a symbol that would ultimately represent curiosity. He took inspiration from the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge. In this story, Adam and Eve were forbidden from eating an apple hanging from the tree of knowledge. However, they were overcome by their curiosity and temptations and ate the apple anyway. Janoff believed that an apple with a bite out of the side represented boldness and curiosity. Janoff’s considered design would represent a computer company that was always curious and wasn’t afraid to pursue new knowledge and understanding. Rumour has it that when Janoff presented his logo to Steve Jobs, he didn’t need to explain what the symbolism meant, Jobs knew straight away.

Like Apple, many companies rebrand themselves as a way of informing the market that they’re aware of the times and are ready to evolve with them. The rebranding also serves as a symbol that the company is growing and seizing the opportunity to invigorate the brand for both external and internal audiences. Another reason you might consider rebranding is if you wish to appeal to a different audience. For example, Telecom changed its name to Spark in 2014 as market research suggested that younger customers would be more interested in doing business with Spark than with Telecom.

Small branding changes can really make a world of difference if they’re implemented for the right reasons. I suppose the best way to know whether to rebrand your business is if you can stare at your logo and still feel inspired and energised. If you feel that your company’s logo no longer makes a significant impression on you or your customers or you feel that it does not convey your company’s philosophy, it might be time to update it.

Advertising for charities

Last week as I left the supermarket, a young man in a sky blue uniform approached me.

Having just finished my weekly shopping, I was lugging a couple of full bags. It would have taken an absolute miracle for me to drop my bags, put my life on hold and listen to someone tell me about problems in a country he’s probably never visited. So I continued walking like the other shoppers before and after me.

It is rare to see a street-corner collector signing up a new donor. I once spoke with a UNICEF clipboard collector who explained that he’d been ignored for three days and could lose his job. The reality is most people just aren’t interested in conversing with a random stranger on the street, especially one who asks for money and professes to be morally superior. Surely the organisations that employ these people know this? Perhaps the street-corner clipboard collectors are on the street for advertising purposes? In their one-colour outfits, they stick out and for only $18 an hour, they're a highly economic advertisement in busy areas.

But let’s not pretend that social awkwardness is the only reason why people aren’t donating through street collectors. Humans are inherently selfish. Most of us need a good incentive to do something selfless, and the feel good factor isn’t enough of an incentive to be generous. Although this is an obvious insight, many charities continue to produce clichéd emotive advertising campaigns that ask us to dig deep and donate out of the goodness of our hearts. Time and time again we see television commercials depict scenes of suffering and a voice over telling us we can make the suffering stop by donating just a dollar a day. Eventually viewers become desensitised to the graphic pictures in these ads and the advertiser’s message completely loses its potency.

Charitable organisations are infinitely more successful when they offer a reward that mitigates the cost of the outlay and compensates the giver for not winning. If charities can offer some type of consolation prize, people have a stronger incentive to give and it’s a win-win for all parties concerned.

There are a number of major charitable organisations in New Zealand that operate this way, and it is no surprise that they’re among the most generous groups in this country. Pub Charity raises funds through gaming machines in hotels and taverns for distribution to grassroots community causes throughout New Zealand. Similarly, Lotto New Zealand donates its proceeds to a range of social, community, arts, heritage, sports, health and recreational activities as well as research programmes across New Zealand. Sanitarium, which is owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, donates all of its profits to charitable purposes.

When it comes to advertising a charity, the approach should be no different to advertising a commercial enterprise. The goal is the same - to engage the market and sell the product or service in the most compelling way possible. Banking on the public to find their altruistic self is usually not the best approach. It’s better by far to invent a clever win-win situation. Red Cross’ Charity Arcades are a perfect example of a win-win idea. The gaming machines currently stationed in Stockholm Airport accept coins of any currency and all the funds raised are used for charitable purposes.

The Children’s Museum in Holon Israel houses interactive and experiential exhibits such as Dialogue in the Dark (an interactive seminar on being blind) and Invitation to Silence (simulating the sensation of being deaf). All of the museum’s proceeds are donated to the Blind and Deaf Foundations in Israel.  The exhibits were opened in 2001 and have become internationally famous. The museum is now one of Holon’s major tourist spots and it’s all thanks to some clever interactive ideas.

Whether you’re involved with a local community group or an international charitable organisation, it’s important not to lose sight of your organisation’s main objectives. For most philanthropic groups, the main focus is fundraising and when pondering marketing ideas, this should really be at the fore. Producing emotive campaigns that hope to evoke guilt, sympathy and compassion is not a long-term marketing solution for any charity group.  Instead, the focus should be on innovative and effective fundraising ideas.

A change in perspective.

A few months ago I sent out an e-mail to promote my freelance advertising services. It was a quick way to reach out to business owners, so I cast my line literally hundreds of times and waited for bites.

The law of averages paid off and I attracted six potential clients. The first company to respond was an adult entertainment club. I met Steve, the middle-aged strip club owner who had a very common problem with slow weeknights. He explained that he’d worked in hospitality for sixteen years and that it makes no difference whether you’re the local fish and chip store or the trendiest university bar in town, the weeknights are always quiet. Having lived in the heart of the Auckland CBD I knew what he meant. Even Auckland’s most prominent bars, restaurants and clubs rely on a good All Blacks game to stay afloat.

Speaking with Steve, I quickly learned that the common marketing solution to the Monday - Friday drought is to come up with a big weekend idea and a plan to suck every cent out of anyone looking for a good time. Hopefully by the end of the night you’ll be counting the cash and the low weeknight turnaround will be insignificant.

We explored a number of ideas that would make weekends more exciting and eventful but we arrived at one conclusion: consumers are tired of clichéd advertising lines that promises an unforgettable weekend experience. Besides, it’s always risky to give customers great expectations because if you can’t deliver, they might not come back.

After mulling over the brief for a few days, I realised that Steve’s biggest challenge was one obvious solution: a quiet strip club has a higher ratio of dancers to customers, which of course means that one customer can enjoy the attention of more dancers. This would allow Steve to let in only a handful of customers at a time and thus make his club exclusive instead of quiet. Best of all, the idea wasn’t difficult or expensive to trial. We had simply turned a negative situation into a positive situation through a change in perspective.
 
Ogilvy Executive Creative Director Rory Sutherland suggests “advertising adds value to a product or service by changing our perception, rather than the product or service itself.”
 
In Steve’s case he had identified a problem, namely quiet weeknights, but he hadn’t asked why. As a strip club owner he initially struggled to come to terms with why a strip club would even need to advertise. Surely the lure of scantily clad women was enough? Tapping in to his customer’s mind-set, and changing his own perspective, proved to be the way Steve improved his business.
 
The next time you’re stumped for a good marketing solution, change the way you think about how your customers interact with your business. It worked for Steve, and more importantly, it worked for his customers.

Vodafone's advertising is wasted

Every company has some kind of advertising budget.

Even the smallest one-man bands have to set aside some money for marketing their business, whether that’s printing flyers, running a simple website or placing an ad in the Yellow Pages (when they actually were yellow and pages).

The big players on the other hand pour money into advertising and marketing the same way I pour money into food and travel. A quick look around town and a few hours spent listening to the radio, watching TV or browsing the Internet should give you an idea of the sheer reach and depth of pocket of the larger corporates. As an ex-advertising manager, I’ve had years of exposure to the thought processes of corporations and their ad agencies desperately trying to stand out from the herd. From innovative new campaigns to name changes and total shifts in direction, I’ve more or less seen it all.

And after my years in sales and marketing, I’ve come to a final conclusion re. advertising, and it’s one that should be obvious to everyone who’s in business but for some reason, it’s not.

It doesn’t matter how much you spend on advertising, if your products and or services aren’t up to speed, then you will never be as successful as you could be.

This brings me to Vodafone New Zealand as an example of rendering advertising worthless, or at least worth less than it should be. I’ve been a Vodafone mobile customer since I first arrived on these fair shores 15 years ago. The service has generally been okay, much of a muchness compared to all the other players… well, let’s make that the other player seeing as there was a duopoly in place for much of that time. Arguably, there still is but that’s a tale for another day.

I’ve never used Vodafone for home Internet or landline services, preferring to just stick with Spark but after being out of the country for the last year or so, I ended up encountering Vodafone landline-based Internet in a big way for the first time. I’ve been staying with family and friends for the month I’m in New Zealand, and all three of the places I’ve stayed have had the familiar white and red Vodafone router stashed in a room somewhere. The sight of that router has begun to fill me with intense trepidation.

You see, my partner runs an online business that needs to have decent Internet access. She doesn’t need mega speed or gamer-type pings, just enough to make international Skype video calls or VOIP calls. But we apparently can’t do that with any degree of certainty in any of the houses with a Vodafone fixed-line.

Funny that. We managed in Bali, and not just in Ubub and Denpasar. We coped in some far-flung towns on the north coast of the Island; areas where the Internet infrastructure isn’t exactly flash. But not in NZ. How’s that possible?

We were of course also fine in the USA, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. But in New Zealand, the calls drop out with unerring regularity, even in Auckland and Tauranga. This is when we need to fall back to the 3G or 4G on my iPhone (powered by Vodafone ironically enough). That connection is much more consistent, even if it’s not as quick but the price is just silly. I won’t grill Vodafone too much in that regard – the other players are pretty much just as bad in terms of their outrageous data pricing. I fondly remember getting 4.5Gb of mobile data (and 3G speeds close to 20Mb at times) on Thailand’s AIS mobile network for around $15, not the 1Gb for $29 that I get from Vodafone (and yes, I know about the unlimited texts and the 200 minutes). 

Anyway, back to the landlines – wondering if it was just our bad luck, I started asking around. I asked friends and family, and I asked on the social feed of a technology site I run. The verdict quickly became clear – almost overwhelmingly, Vodafone fixed line Internet access doesn’t seem to be highly regarded. The reason most people give for staying with Vodafone is that all the other ISPs are just as bad. So perhaps Vodafone is hanging onto some of its fixed line market share purely because of consumer apathy?

But this will eventually reflect on their bottom line. Sooner or later, one of the other players will start delivering measurably better service instead of something that resembles the bad days of early New Zealand ADSL when micro-outages were common. And they’ll find a compelling way to tell Kiwis about it, or just wait for word-of-mouth to make it plain. At that point, Vodafone can kiss a huge swathe of clients goodbye.

Which brings us to the moral of the story. How much money are you spending on advertising that’s being wasted because some part of your organisation isn’t quite running up to speed?

Is it your gruff-sounding, uninvolved receptionist who makes your customers want to call someone else? Eventually they will, and it’ll be your competition on the other end of the line. Or is it your call centre’s inability to think outside the box while rigidly adhering to their call scripts? Maybe a product with a lid that tends to spill liquid when the container is shaken? A rep in a branded company car that drives like a madman? Every one of these things can and will impact your company.

No business is perfect, which is why the people at the top need to be rigorously auditing every part of the machine to find and eliminate the weaknesses, whether that be product, people or processes. Find a way to improve your company in some small way every day and you’ll be stunned at what you end up with. Unless the rot does in fact come from the top, in which case, you might as well fire the marketing team and shut the doors because eventually, the competition will eat you alive.

Spend a dollar improving your company before you spend a dollar telling people about it. You’ll be far better off in the long run.