1. ‘Can brands unlock potential?’
A speech to the Tetra Pak ‘MixCo’, Miami, December 2007.
Good morning. I’m the second Scotsman you’re going to hear from this morning. The first
one was talking about a subject which as you know is close to every Scotsman’s heart,
and every Scotsman’s sporran: money. Obviously you can’t make hiring decisions based
on nationality, but having a Scottish finance director has a nice ring to it.
I don’t think Scotland has quite the same natural association with brands. The country
doesn’t seem to have branded itself quite as well as some other Celtic countries, Ireland
for example, (although probably better than Wales.) When you think of Scotland, what do
you think of? For many people, it’s this: the Tartan Army, a fine body of men but not what
exactly you would call premium.
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2. So you may be more likely to associate Scotland with great finance than great branding.
But there has been at least one very famous Scottish branding expert: David Ogilvy, who
led the company for which I now work, and the company which is responsible for the
branding work you are about to see for Tetra Pak. Ogilvy was one of the greatest experts
on branding, and like me he was a Scot by birth who subsequently went to work in the
United States. There unfortunately the similarity ends, because he went on to make a
handsome amount of money and retired to this unpretentious little home in France, which
is a little grander than where I’m likely to end up.
My own journey has taken me from Scotland to London, to the west coast of the United
States, and from there to Hong Kong where I had a regional job and travelled over much of
Asia Pacific. On the way I acquired an American wife, a Filipino nanny, a couple of
multinational children and a very British dog, so although my branding qualifications may
be questionable, my global ones are fairly robust.
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3. During my career I have been associated, in some way, with all of these brands and a few
more besides.
That’s an awful lot of brands. I’d never even thought about it that much before, but having
to write this speech made me think about how much of my time I’ve spent working with
brands. All my working life has been connected with brands in some way or other, so even
allowing for coffee breaks and a few lunchtimes where I wasn’t thinking about brands,
(although rather sadly I’ve frequently thought about brands when I’ve been out for a run, or
even woken up thinking about them), when I do the sums it seems like I’ve spent very
nearly 50,000 hours thinking about brands in some way or other. This calculation leads me
to two inescapable conclusions:
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4. 1. I am boring.
2. I like brands.
And actually when I think about it, I really do like brands, which is a relief. Actually I
confess that I wasn’t initially drawn to brands for noble reasons. I had a vacation job in an
advertising agency where I encountered some really intelligent and well-written research
reports. Clearly the people involved could have made major contributions to politics or
medicine, but instead they had devoted their powerful intellects to the study of gravy
thickeners and cake mixes. This I found absolutely fascinating. And in my early years
working with brands, I loved the fact that brilliant minds could be deployed on subjects like
the lettering style on a bar of chocolate or whether the Rice Krispies gnomes should talk or
remain silent. But I don’t think that would have lasted me for 50,000 hours, and counting, if
I hadn’t come to believe that not only do brands help many businesses became more
profitable, but also that they have some practical value to all sorts of people, and ultimately
that that the whole system of branding makes it easier, in any given market, for good
companies to increase their lead over bad companies, which is ultimately beneficial. So for
the next half hour – which is only .001% of my branding career, although it’ll feel a bit
longer than that to me – I’m going to talk about some of these benefits.
#1 Branding is practical.
First, the history of brands is extremely practical. The practice of using a hot piece of metal
to make an identifying mark on a cow or a sheep has been around for about 350 years.
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5. It’s practical in that it helps you identify your animal if it’s mixed up with other animals. It
has something in common with modern branding in that the identifying mark was intended
to trigger certain associations in the person that saw it. Generally speaking, the mark was
supposed to produce an association of fear: if you steal this cow, someone will hunt you
down and kill you. Literally. Of course, the same brand mark can produce different
associations depending on who sees it. If you are the owner of the cow, seeing your brand
mark might make you think about how much money you will earn at the market.
In any case the value of the brand mark is quite practical. It helps people to make informed
choices about how to behave towards some very valuable livestock. Of course brands as
we know them today developed later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when
producers saw the value of packaging commodities with their "mark". The first soap to be
cut up, wrapped and named was Sunlight soap: the foundation of Unilever, one of the
world's most successful multinationals today.
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6. In part, the success of Sunlight was built on the fact that it was a good quality product in an
era where soaps were not of reliably good quality. Sunlight had a memorable name and
packaging, which helped you remember that if you wanted a good quality soap experience
again, just ask for Sunlight. But there’s a bit more to it than that. The Sunlight name, and
the natural scenes depicted on the packaging, start suggesting a bundle of associations.
Sun, nature, warmth, health, optimism. The opposite of darkness. Light versus darkness.
Good versus evil. The brand owners might not have described it that way in the 19th
century, but by associating the brand with sun, they were imbuing it with positive
associations and with the forces of good. This illustrates one of the fundamental points of
branding, that what really makes something a brand, rather than just a physical product, is
the associations that exist in people’s minds. The very erudite Paul Feldwick defined a
brand as ‘a collection of perceptions in the mind of a consumer.’ As manufacturers and
marketers, we do what we can to make sure those perceptions are positive, and
specifically linked to our own recognisable identity – not just in the minds of consumers
actually, but also in the minds of trade customers, of business partners, of influencers and
the media. The brand system depends on good associations and a recognisable identity,
and when these things are working properly lots of people like it because it simplifies
choice and makes their buying decisions more efficient and potentially more rewarding.
6

7. I have a personal story about the practical value of branding. When I first started work in
advertising, in the mid 80’s, I worked at a big London agency where everyone was very
sophisticated and well-groomed, and most of the management seemed to have been at
Eton followed by a spell in a smart cavalry regiment in the British Army. I was very keen to
do well and after a few months I asked my superior for some kind of appraisal. It took a
week or two to pin him down – I think he felt appraisals were some kind of new-fangled
management technique imported from America – but eventually I cornered him and he
grudgingly said ‘oh, you’re doing very well, just get some new suits.’ This was probably
good advice but I didn’t have a private income, unlike many of the employees, and couldn’t
pop round the corner to Savile Row for some new threads. Still, I thought at least
something about me should be stylish, so I decided to get a new briefcase, this briefcase
in fact. As you can see it’s stood the test of time. But back then it was very distinctive, as
everyone else was carrying their documents round in very nice pieces of the finest pigskin.
What then happened was quite interesting, because although hardly anyone knew my
name, I became known as the guy – ‘that chap,’ probably – with the metal briefcase. And
actually it was quite helpful in distinguishing me from my peers in the account
management aristocracy, and it helped everyone else as well because they knew that if
they needed to know something about the toilet tissue market, they just had to ask the guy
with the metal briefcase. The briefcase became my brand identity within the organisation.
So that’s the first reason I like branding: it’s practical.
The second reason I like brands is this:
#2 Brands add value to businesses.
Well-managed brands add direct, quantifiable value to businesses and improve
profitability. I’m not going to try to convince you of this rationally in half an hour, because
it’s a big topic, and it’s been covered exhaustively by much finer minds than mine,
including those of a couple of colleagues of mine, David Muir and Jon Miller, who wrote
this fine book while they were at Ogilvy in London.
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8. They made the observation in 2004 that when you type the word ‘brand’ into Amazon, you
get a list of 56,636 books. Why, therefore would you need another one? Their answer was
that none of these books, and I guarantee they read every single one, provided an overall
picture of how a strong brand can create value across a business. So they wrote The
Business of Brands, and very convincing it is too. These are the chapter headings in Part
2:
PART II: SOURCES OF BUSINESS VALUE.
4. Strong Brands can Command Market Share.
5. Strong Brands Create Barriers to Entry for Competitors.
6. Strong Brands can Launch Successful Extensions.
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9. 7. Strong, Well-Defined Brands Find it Easier to Enter New Markets.
8. Strong Brands can Attract and Retain Talent.
9. Strong Brands have Lower Price Elasticity.
10. Strong Brands can Command a Premium.
11. Strong Brands can Deal with Market Disruption.
12. Strong Brands have More Loyalty.
13. Strong Brands are a Store of Trust.
14. Strong Brands Stimulate Innovation.
I hope that included in this list are some of the issues that TetraPak might face, such as
creating barriers for competition and defending against market disruption. And I’d be
surprised if there were many companies that weren’t interested in at least a few of these
benefits. So I’d certainly recommend this book for a highly scientific and eloquent
argument for the value of branding. Although I have to say that when I typed the word
‘brand’ into Amazon, I got nearly 238,000 books. Somebody’s clearly been busy, or maybe
Amazon has taken the shackles off its stocking policy. That’s a hell of a lot of books about
branding though: one for every fifteen minutes of my branding career. Maybe that explains
why I have so many sitting unread on my bookshelves.
Recently I received graphic personal evidence of the business value of branding. A few
years ago one of my clients at the Coca-Cola Company was a feisty young guy called
Rohan Oza. In 2002 he left to become the marketing director of Glaceau, a company I had
barely heard of which had been founded in 1996.
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10. The company’s main product was something called ‘vitamin water’, a ‘nutrient-enhanced
water beverage.’ Just add vitamins – a fairly old trick well known to the manufacturers of
breakfast cereals. But the brand has been very well managed, right down to packaging
that gives an impression of pharmaceutical potency, which could get pretentious were it
not for a tone of voice in communications that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The company grew fast based on the power of its brand, and using such innovative
techniques as giving celebrities like rapper 50-cent a small stake in the company in return
for promoting the product.
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11. The company was recently sold to Coca-Cola for an astonishing $4.2 billion, and I suspect
my former client now drives a much nicer car than I do. Not bad for a nutrient-enhanced
water beverage – I suspect it had something to do with the power of the brand. It shows
what degree of value can be developed in a relatively short space of time: value that
depends on the fact that when people see a pack of Glaceau Dragonfruit vitamin water,
some positive associations are triggered in their minds (and tongues.) Over a longer time a
brand symbol can become imbued with an incredibly powerful set of associations which
exists powerfully in people’s hearts and minds, associations which trigger good memories,
warm feelings, and a strong desire for the product carrying that particular identity. Products
exist in shops: brands exist in humans. You can tell this for yourselves by asking yourself
what associations you have in your minds for each of these logos:
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12. A Mercedes is not just a car, it is a symbol of engineering reliability, and the appreciation
of quality.
Coke is not just a soft drink, it is a happy feeling of collective optimism.
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13. Starbuck’s is not just a cup of coffee, it’s a rewarding experience that’s all about you, not
your employers or your family.
These brands are built on many individual relationships between products and consumers.
Like all relationships, these need to be owned. They need to be managed. They need to
be nourished. And they need a little love. It’s a funny time and place to be talking about
love. But love is magical and powerful and emotional, and so are the relationships
between strong brands and their consumers. Really strong brands generate a little bit of
love.
Love is magical, and there is as much magic to branding as there is logic. This is
something which some CEO's and other members of the so-called C-suite often find
difficult to embrace. This is not surprising since their whole training has been grounded in
the rational, in the use of what in neuro-linguistic terminology used to be called the "left-
brain".
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14. If you can bear looking at a brain at this time of the morning, please note that the left brain
is incredibly important. We use it to deal with accounting issues and distribution pipelines
and machinery specifications. In many parts of the world, huge structural change is taking
place which creates enormous demand for ‘left-brain’ thinking. For those of us involved in
global branding, this creates a double challenge: not only to get the attention of the global
CEO, but also the involvement of his or her "right brain". While logic organizes branding,
it’s magic which brings it to life and touches the hearts and minds of global consumers.
Let’s think about the top ten global brands. There are various classifications of brand
value, but the two most influential ones are those of Optimor and Interbrand. They rank the
top brands as follows:
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15. M valuable brands 2007.
ost
OPTIMOR INTERBRAND
• Google • Coca-Cola
• GE • M icrosoft
• M icrosoft • IBM
• Coca-Cola • GE
• China M obile • Nokia
• M arlboro • Toyota
• Wal-M art • Intel
• Citi • M cDonalds
• IBM • Disney
• Toyota • M ercedes
These are brands that are certainly not just built on logic: they have quite a bit of magic
around them as well. And interestingly, while some of these brands are classic consumer
brands, not all of them are. Which leads to my third point:
#3 Branding extends far beyond the consumer.
At least one of the brands on the most valued list, IBM, is primarily a business-to-business
brand, and all of them are brands for whom partnerships, dealerships, bottlers, developers,
or intermediaries are important in one way or another. You might say that selling flavoured
water or Japanese automobiles are very different businesses to the business of TetraPak.
And yes, they are, but please do not think of branding as the exclusive or even the primary
domain of consumers. Branding has a much bigger footprint and a much wider range than
that, and increasingly so. Business people are human too, they have emotions, they do
want their choices to be simplified, and improved, not made more complex. I’ll talk later
about how the business world and the consumer world are converging, but even in the
straightforward old business-to-business world, the role of emotions, trust, and
relationships has been recognised for years. This famous ad by McGraw Hill, the B2B
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16. publisher, made the argument the benefits of business to business advertising very
eloquently in a famous ad.
McGraw-Hill were selling advertising, but substitute the word branding for advertising and
the argument still applies. A strong brand can be a symbol and reminder of all the things
referred to here, shorthanding huge amounts of accrued information.
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17. In the case of IBM, the ‘consumers’ who encounter the brand are often making highly
technical purchasing decisions over months or years. Massive decisions may apparently
be concentrated into the hands of small numbers of people. Huge sums of money are at
stake. This is a very different world from that of soap powder or nutrient-enhanced water
beverages. But the strength of the brand has been fundamental to IBM’s fortunes in recent
years. It is possibly the most dramatic case of brand transformation in marketing history,
and really merits a two hour presentation all of its own. But the absolute summary is that in
1994 IBM was in a very bad place. Its stock price was at an all time low, the New York
Times declared the IBM era to be over, and the fractured, decentralised IBM brand was
valued at NEGATIVE $50 m. Books and articles like these appeared regularly:
At this point, Lou Gerstner decided that it was time to unite IBM into one company under a
single brand. As a major part of this process, he fired the 40 different advertising agencies
that worked for IBM around the world and hired one single global agency – Ogilvy. It was
the biggest advertising account win in history.
Today, IBM is ranked the third most valuable brand in the world at over $50 billion. The
company’s stock price is over $100, around 7 times that of 1994, and USA Today
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18. described the IBM case as the most impressive business turnaround of the last 50 years.
Over the years global ideas, such as e-business, have put IBM at the heart of business
culture and played a major part in the revitalization of the brand and company. IBM was
transformed from Big Blue to Bright Blue, and even in such an apparently dry sector has
successfully touched people’s emotions and used a little bit of magic as well as logical
argument to win people over, right from the early days of the brand revitalization. I’m not
planning to show you a lot of ads today because my subject is branding, not advertising,
but the reason I’m going to show you this rather old commercial is not just because I like it,
but because it illustrates how right from the start of its resurgence, IBM has been prepared
to imbue its brand with magic as well as logic.
(Nuns TVC.)
As you can imagine, managing a global brand like IBM involves some interesting trade-offs
and organizational challenges. It’s not just a simple question of deciding between a ‘one
size fits all’ approach, or alternatively allowing a great deal of local freedom. Some aspects
of the IBM brand, such as the visual identity, are managed centrally and with a great deal
of global consistency, whereas others, such as some parts of the communications, have a
certain amount of local variation to allow for the magic that comes from showing deep
insights into local business cultures. Overall, though, the unification of IBM into one
powerful brand was a giant decision that paid off handsomely, as Lou Gerstner attested in
his book.
"(uniting IBM under one brand was)….the first strategic decision, and, I believe, the most
important decision I ever made - not just at IBM, but in my entire business career."
Since the global unification of the IBM brand in 1994, the world has of course become ever
more globally connected. It’s an obvious cliché. It’s also not 100% true, because back then
many of the leading globalists would probably have assumed that English would become
the dominant language of global communication. But Mandarin still looks pretty healthy:
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19. the Chinese-speaking internet population is now almost half that of the English-speaking
one, and growing three times as fast.
That aside, it’s certainly true that news travels incredibly fast round the world now. This
creates both opportunities and potential drawbacks for branding. If a piece of news or
communication about a brand is sufficiently engaging, it can reach an awful lot of people
very quickly, and for very little cost. Ogilvy’s viral film for Dove, Evolution, has been viewed
on YouTube by around ten million people according to my rough calculations, and its
associated parody by about two million. Just search YouTube for Dove Evolution and Slob
Evolution respectively.
dove evolution 10m+ slob evolution 2m+
And if you search for Cadbury Gorilla, you’ll find a Phil-Collins playing gorilla that’s been
voluntarily experienced by about 5 million on YouTube alone.
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20. cadbury gorilla 5m+
These aren’t bad numbers, although of course only the absolutely most attractive pieces of
branded activity are actively consumed by such large numbers of people.
The corollary of this, of course, is that bad news about well-recognised brands, and the
companies behind them, can travel as well. Brands make companies accountable and
visible, and as we already observed, brands really exist in people’s minds, not in our own
hands. Jeremy Bullmore is one of the great brand thinkers of all time, and he famously
observed that “people build brands as birds build nests, from sticks and straws they
chance upon.” What this means is that people don’t just build their impressions of our
brands from our latest TV campaign, they build them in all sorts of ways, from who else
uses them to where they experience them to whether they are mentioned in movies or
music, to what they read about them in the papers or online. And so, if the actions of a
company don’t appear to live up to the promise of the brand, that will have an effect on
people’s impressions of the brand. Famous brands are held up to high standards. I think
that’s a good thing, but if you’re Nike or Coke or Google then people may look a bit more
closely at you than they would at a company they’d never heard of. In the long run I think
that helps the companies concerned, because it makes them better companies. When
Nike’s reputation was questioned in 1997 over the labour practices of its suppliers, it made
for some uncomfortable times, but eventually it made Nike look very hard at the issues and
introduce changes ahead of its competition. It’s not been an easy issue to solve but Nike
continues to invest considerable of resource in getting to the root of the problem, and that
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21. can’t be a bad thing either for Nike or the world in general. I would sum this up as the
fourth thing I like about branding:
#4 Branding works particularly well for good companies.
This is truer than ever before, but it isn’t just because information spreads so fast. It’s also
because consumer choices have become more sophisticated and layered. A good
example of this can be found in one of my favourite products, chocolate. I don’t have the
exact pack reference, but the chocolate my dad used to buy when I was a kid looked
something like this.
It had a manufacturer brand name (Cadbury), a product brand name, Bournville, a minimal
product description and that quaint little seal reminding people that Bournville was enjoyed
by the royal family, a sort of on-pack celebrity endorsement. That’s it though: four
elements.
The chocolate I buy now looks something like this.
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22. It has about eleven elements:
- Retailer brand
- Sub-brand (SO)
- The magic word ‘organic’
- The other magic word ‘Fairtrade’
- Place of origin
- Basic product descriptor
- More detailed product descriptor
- Visual of cocoa plant
- Detailed copy on beans etc.
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23. - Fairtrade logo
- Fairtrade descriptor
And if I’d bought the plain chocolate version, which I actually still prefer probably as a
result of eating my dad’s Bournville when he wasn’t looking, then there would have been
an additional line telling me what the cocoa percentage was. What’s extraordinary to me is
that this doesn’t really feel like a lot of information when I’m actually staring at the
chocolate on shelf. I still the think the pack is well-designed and highly appetising, yet even
my ageing mind is quite willing, keen even, to consume all this information about the
chocolate before I consume the chocolate itself. I’m not a particularly ethical consumer but
I’m quite happy to have the ethical and organic boxes ticked, and it’s also somehow
reassuring and positive for me to know a bit about the origins of the cocoa. (It’s almost as
if I was being sold fine wine, not chocolate.) And although I can’t claim to have studied the
back of this pack before preparing for this talk, if I had I’d have been able to find further
information about recycling, freshness, nutrition, nut presence, and several other things
including the exact date when cocoa began to be produced in Santo Domingo. (1665, if
you’re interested. At least you can say you learnt something today.)
So the speed of information flow and the demands of consumers for reassurance on
multiple dimensions mean that 21st century branding is incredibly accountable. It’s harder
than ever before for ‘bad’ companies to make money out of strong brands. Developing a
brand is a statement of confidence and a willingness to stand up and be counted: if you
like, it demands everyday excellence from brand owners. I like that, and it makes me feel
better about working in the branding industry.
From a business point of view, although this makes branding a slightly more complex and
multi-dimensional process than it may once have been, it also makes the potential rewards
that much greater. Really good branding can have all sorts of benefits that go well beyond
maintaining a healthy consumer demand. In fact, it can galvanize entire companies.
#5 Brands can galvanize companies.
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24. I believe that strong and intelligent branding can stimulate companies and get the absolute
best out of the latent resources that lie within companies and the people who work for
them. There’s considerable evidence for this.
For example, in the UK in 2001, unlike some other countries, Honda was considered a
very boring car brand. It did have a sort of slogan ‘The Power of Dreams,’ that was really
more of an internal mantra based on the visionary idealism of the company’s founder, but
which seemed a long way from the reality of the cars in the UK. However, in 2002 the
company launched a whole raft of communications and brand activities that successfully
repositioned the brand around ‘The Power of Dreams’, including this ad written on a
banana.
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25. The campaign was shown (in the very well respected IPA Effectiveness Awards) to have
quickly generated nearly £400m in direct extra revenue for Honda in the UK alone, with a
reduced communication budget. But this brand revitalization was shown to have other
benefits too that were very significant. Attitudes of existing Honda customers towards
Honda improved. Attitudes of Honda dealers towards Honda improved dramatically. And
most interestingly, staff satisfaction climbed, so that in 2003 Honda was voted one of
Britain’s Top 20 companies to work for, for the first time, and by the following year 89% of
staff were saying they were proud to work for Honda, with commensurate reductions in
staff turnover. Anecdotally, this was all strongly related to the general feel-good factor
around the Honda brand: and if people in general start thinking that Honda seems like it
would be a nice sort of company to work for, it’s reasonable to think that’s going to rub off
on the employees themselves. Finally, job applications were extremely healthy and of
course one bright spark sent in his resume written on a banana. The revitalized brand was
generating a whole range of benefits that affected the company in myriad ways.
In many of the most successful companies, the brand is not just a symbol to consumers
but an embodiment of the attitudes of all the people who support it in various ways,
whether by manufacturing, selling, endorsing or whatever. Everything just seems to line
up.
25

26. M ichael Johnson and his
shoes at Nike’ on-site track.
s
In 1996 I moved to Portland, Oregon, the home of Nike and eventually ended up working
closely with the company. But it never felt to me like the swoosh was just a brand in the
traditional sense. It was a symbol of athletic performance, of design excellence, of
competitive spirit, of human inspiration, which was just as true of the Nike employees, or
how the Nike campus was designed, as it was of the products themselves. That was why
some Nike employees tattooed themselves with swooshes. Of course, Nike wasn’t perfect,
as subsequent events showed, and its cult-like nature was not for everyone. But at least
you got what Nike was about and you weren’t going to go and work there if you weren’t
signed up for the mission embodied in the swoosh. And the Nike corporate mission (to
bring innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world) is beautifully clear and still
seems very baked-in to the organisation in everything it does: it’s not some dry thing that
seems to have been drafted by a team of lawyers, like some corporate mission
statements.
Finally, Google. I don’t know as much about Google, but since it’s the world’s most
valuable brand I guess it deserves a mention. Google’s mission is “to organize the world's
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27. information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Not quite as snappy, but pretty
clear. How nice it is, then, that its chief brand symbol, the front page of Google.com,
seems completely in tune with that – accessible, well-organised.
We have to remember that this identity was launched at a time when most web ‘portals’
(remember that term?) were really messy and dense. Google was a complete contrast, a
triumph of brand design that zagged against the prevailing zig. The other nice thing about
Google is that despite its size, there’s always been a nice element of not appearing to take
itself too seriously. On that uncluttered front page there’s still plenty room for a nice fat
whimsical ‘I feel lucky’ button which may not be super-useful, (it is only used by 1% of
users) but is certainly accessible. And this tone is taken through to the ‘Ten things Goggle
has found to be true’ in its corporate philosophy section.
27

28. “ things Google has found to be true.”
Ten
Fo c us o n the us e r and all e ls e will follow .
It's be s t to do o ne thing re ally, re ally we ll.
Fas t is be tte r than s low .
De mo c rac y o n the we b wo rks .
Yo u do n 't ne e d to be at yo ur de s k to ne e d an ans we r.
Yo u c an make mo ne y witho ut doing e vil.
The re 's always mo re info rmatio n o ut the re .
The ne e d fo r info rmatio n c ro s s e s all bo rde rs .
Yo u c an be s e rio us witho ut a s uit.
Gre at jus t is n 't g o o d e no ug h .
It’s nice when a section on corporate philosophy includes the fact (under one of these
headings) that the company’s chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead: it makes the
behemoth seem less forbidding, even though it could consume WPP, my parent company,
as a light snack before bedtime. And Google’s brand spirit is so pervasive in the company
that its employees talk about being amazed how many people wear Google T-shirts to
work. It’s like the swoosh tattoo at Nike, but less painful.
So, to sum up, I still like brands and branding. like what they can do for companies in
many ways. The key thing today though, is not whether I like it in general, but whether I
like what it can do for Tetra Pak. I don’t know you very well, but just in the conversations
I’ve had about Tetra Pak with people in the company and the people who work closely with
you at Ogilvy, I can sense that the benefits of a greater focus on branding can be
absolutely relevant to Tetra Pak. I think good branding can help you defend your margins
against competitive pressure and make the most of your heritage as the leaders in your
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29. sector. I think you have an opportunity to build a brand that will work with all the audiences
that matter to you. I think you can live up to the responsibilities go with having a visible
brand, and use that to your advantage in distancing yourselves from your less good
competitors. Finally, I think you can use a strong brand to unlock the latent potential that
exists within a very successful organisation, and use it to take the company to the next
level. It’s the start of an exciting journey for Tetra Pak and I’m privileged that you’ve asked
me here on such a momentous day: thank you very much.
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