Stamp of approval

The high profile rebranding exercises implemented by leading telecoms providers such as Zain and Etisalat in the Middle East region in recent years has given rise to a closer evaluation of what the value of a brand actually is. Michelle Mills investigates how brands have evolved to become the most valuable intangible asset of an organisation, and what mistakes are sometimes made in pursuit of brand building.

Richard Branson is the ultimate brand champion for Virgin, espousing the company’s values and aspirations.

According to Millward Brown, a UK-based market research and brand consulting company, brands account for almost one third of the value of today’s Fortune 500 companies. Given the importance of these assets, leading companies all over the world have been taking active steps to maximise the value of their brands, though this has not always been successfully undertaken.

The significance of branding has risen from being just a name or label identifying an organisation, product or service, to encompassing an entire corporate identity. As competition grows in the telecoms space in the Middle East and penetration levels rise, the challenge faced by operators is how best to differentiate themselves from competitors while creating a level of brand loyalty.

Earlier this year, the local branch of the Superbrands Council bestowed UAE telco Etisalat with ‘superbrand’ status. The council assessed more than 800 brands based on whether they offered consumers significant emotional and/or physical advantages over their competitors, and which (consciously or subconsciously) consumers desired, recognised and were willing to pay a premium for.

“A brand exists only in the mind of its consumers,” comments Mike English, director of Superbrands Middle East. “So what we say to our council members is look at a brand and judge it emotionally. We’re looking for an emotional reaction … the most important element in branding is that nebulous brand equity, which in other words is saying ‘trust’.”

 
Superbrand’s English awarded Etisalat ‘superbrand’ status in April.

Etisalat rose to superbrand status as a result of successfully delivering on its promises. “Even from the days when it was called Emirtel, it has always promised no more than it was sure it could deliver and that really is the secret of branding of any product or any service,” suggests English. “Delivering on your promise consistently and not promising what you are not able to deliver.”

English believes that second UAE entrant du is still in the process of establishing trust with end-users given its relatively short lifespan, having only launched operations at the beginning of 2006. “Du has got a long way to go to engender that type of trust. There have been many instances where companies have spent a huge amount of money on advertising but have still not managed to generate brand loyalty and it is something that takes a long time to do.”

According to English it is rare for a brand that is less than five years old to become a superbrand anywhere in the world. Not all branding experts are in agreement that Etisalat’s latest rebranding programme, which was launched in May 2006, is a runaway success. According to Marouane Trimeche, branding consultant and professor at Middlesex University Dubai, while Etisalat does indeed possess the potential to become a superbrand, he does not believe it is at that stage yet.

“Etisalat developed the [latest] brand first and then it improved the service,” Trimeche contends. “It should have been done the opposite way. The telco should have worked on the service, trained its employees on the new brand and the difference with the old one, and then communicated the brand.”

Trimeche believes that while Etisalat is expanding regionally it needs to re- focus on the core of its brand, understand what the brand represents and attempt to transfer that meaning to the wider market.

“If I asked you what the Vodafone brand represented – you would say something along the lines of ‘fun-loving’, ‘friendly’, this kind of thing. That is because it is a clear and consistent brand and it has been communicated that way all over.”

Trimeche of Middlesex University says
branding drives a corporate identity.

In terms of domestic brand awareness, Trimeche goes as far as suggesting that Etisalat has been unable to achieve the levels that du has, despite the latter’s presence in the market for just a fraction of the time. “The reason why du went for simplicity is because it works. The name is simple and pronunciation is applicable across all different languages,” Trimeche states.

While many people perceive a brand through a logo or in association with certain colours, Trimeche suggests this represents just five per cent of what a brand actually is. The other 95 per cent is represented by what the company stands for in terms of its values, architecture of the brand, as well as its look and feel.

When developing a brand, a requirement is to ascertain its meaning, as this guides the core corporate strategy, Trimeche explains. Companies then need to explore the emotions they want customers to experience when interacting with the brand, and have this message reinforced as part of the overall corporate identity.

A transition from two- to three-dimensional branding incorporates the recognition of the role of the emotional reaction in brand equity and positioning. Trimeche thus argues a brand’s unique selling proposition is not enough and companies now need to build loyalty through utilising emotional selling propositions.

Companies in the Middle East have also been guilty of being unclear whether to brand at the core of their business strategy or just at the visual level. “When you tell a company to invest in building a brand, it will interpret this as a cost and will try to minimise it because it doesn’t see the importance,” Trimeche says.

“That is why they want to cut down the cost on branding but advertise more – it should be the other way around. If you have a good brand, you do not need to advertise, so basically that investment you made upfront in your brand will enable you to cut down the cost later on in communications,” Trimeche advises.

A common problem identified by experts is that often-time brands are developed by an external agency, as opposed to being developed from the heart of a company’s core vision and values. “A brand needs to be something started from within an organisation. It is actually part of what the company does that needs to be projected as its personality through the brand,” says Fadi Khater, branding specialist at Delta Partners, a Dubai-based telecoms consultancy.

Javier Alvarez, a partner at Delta Partners, believes telecoms companies in particular need to become more aware of the importance of their brand names as a lever to deliver financial results. “Leveraging on a brand name, having the right positioning, actually being able to engage in this dialogue with the consumer will help to deliver financial results, tangible results,” asserts Alvarez.

“You need to make sure that branding or rebranding a company is simply not hiring a creative, media or advertising agency. It has to be a change project in the organisation and companies need to make sure that all the key executives including the CEO are involved, following the right process to actually deliver a complete and holistic brand identity for the company.”

Thus the lack of emphasis on the internal communication of a brand’s meaning to staff is viewed as a continuing area of weakness in the development of strong brands. Middlesex University’s Trimeche says many companies fail in their branding strategies because they treat it as an external facelift where the external messages change, but the core of the business remains the same because companies do not attach importance to internal branding.

“It makes your brand less credible. Before launching the brand, before launching any new communications strategy, you need to have a number of sessions for your own employees to understand the meanings of the brand,” Trimeche advises.

“Last year for example, we had a company that was embarking on an interesting exercise of helping its salespeople come up with a single definition of its brand. So at the first exercise I asked the salespeople what the company brand stood for, and each one had his interpretation. This is harmful to a brand.”

Service industry companies in particular need to internalise their brand first as Trimeche believes customers do not only judge the service, but also the person delivering it.

Kuwait operator MTC rebranded to Zain last September, and from being a completely new brand, has gained what surveys show is close to 100 per cent brand awareness in a very short period of time. In less than a year of existence the Zain brand currently competes head-to-head and in some cases actually surpasses established brands in certain geographies in which it operates.

“Because what companies do when they launch a new brand name is basically raise high expectations in the market, they launch with a new brand promise, which they then need to deliver on,” Alvarez explains.

Zain is credited with introducing the new brand name and raising expectations through developing the right value proposition immediately after in order for consumers to make the connection between the brand and what it represented.

Branding experts note that it is essential to measure the impact of a brand through market research and a proper tracking system in order to understand its level of awareness in the market. “In order to do this properly a company needs to have done it previously,” Alvarez suggests. “We help telcos to actually measure the financial impact of their new brand name in their profit and loss, and there are ways to do precisely this,” Alvarez says.

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Engaging the customer

With respect to measuring the value of a brand, Delta Partner’s Khater suggests that in addition to bottom line measures and public awareness gauges, brand association needs to also be measured.

“A typical example would be a brand with very high awareness that may associate with something negative,” says Khater. “Unless this brand is strongly associated with a company’s values or personality attributes or the messages the company wants to communicate, then it would not be a very successful case even if the company had 100 per cent awareness.”

In many cases, it is the leader of an organisation that has to be its biggest champion, a key example being Zain’s Saad Al Barrak or Virgin Group’s Richard Branson.

Measuring brand awareness is vital says Delta Partners’ Khater.

“Richard Branson is actually the brand ambassador if not the brand itself,” asserts Khater. “It is truly reflected in the way he walks, the way he looks, the way he talks.”

It appears that an increasing number of companies are realising the importance of gauging customers’ awareness, brand association and feedback on products and services, and Delta Partners encourages telcos to adopt an interactive process in order to increase consumer engagement.

“What we are trying to do is make it more of an interactive process where customers have more of a chance to interact with the brand, comment on the advertising campaign, comment on the actual product development and be more intricately involved in developing the brand, which is actually a company interface,” comments Khater.

This can be achieved on several levels, particularly in light of the growing trend towards user-generated content in a Web 2.0 environment and the many interactive channels available on the Internet.

With the understanding now that the equity of a brand exists in consumers’ perceptions, gaining their insights is acknowledged as essential in establishing a dialogue of trust and loyalty, which helps build and maintain the products and services that are delivered under a specific brand label.

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Source: Millward Brown Optimor (including data from Brandz, Datamonitor, and Bloomberg)