Johnnie Moore is a marketing consultant and facilitator based in London. As well as 20 years of marketing experience he's trained in psychotherapy, NLP and Improv. Find out more at his blog.
Andrew Lark's more than 18 years experience of all facets of marketing, branding, sales and communications spans technology, Internet, telecommunications and consumer sectors. There he has led award-winning programs and teams for brands such as Dell, Sony, SBC, IDSoftware, Nortel, Microsoft and Sun. He is a thought leader and innovator on the convergence of brands, communications and social networking technologies. Find out more at his blog.
Jennifer Rice is a strategist and evangelist for relationship-centric brands. She brings 15 years experience in brand strategy, customer insight and marketing communications, and has worked with companies such as Microsoft, Verizon, Alcatel and Corning. Her current passion is exploring how brands are being impacted by blogs and other social technologies. Her company blog is What's Your Brand Mantra?
John Winsor is the author of Beyond the Brand: Why Listening to the Right Customers is Essential to Winning in Business and the Founder/CEO of Radar Communications, a consumer-centric consultancy. You can find out more about him at Beyond the Brand.
About this Insider
BrandShift explores key trends in branding such as customer
experiences, market conversations and social technologies. Our goal is to
help executives and brand managers evolve their brands to thrive in the new
customer-driven marketplace.
Just Released the 2008 Tribalization of Business study - an in-depth look at how 140+ organizations are managing and measuring online communities
IT may go down as one of the biggest rebranding disasters in corporate history.
When, in September 2003, Luqman Arnold, then chief executive of Abbey National, declared the institution was “turning banking on its head” by shortening its name to Abbey and slapping a lower-case logo in pastel shades on its branches and product literature, there were a few raised eyebrows. In Scotland there was much gnashing of teeth as it emerged insurance brands Scottish Provident and Scottish Mutual were for the chop.
The exercise – which brought an end to Abbey’s famous “couple under an umbrella” logo – was overseen by brand agency Wolf Ollins at a cost of some £11 million. It was led by former Abbey director Angus Porter, who when at Mars rebranded Opal Fruits as Starbursts, and recently left the bank with a near £1m pay-off.
In marketing terms, however, the rebrand was a clear disaster. Last year, pre-tax profits in Abbey’s core retail business shrank by 20% to £814m compared with 2003 and there was another big slump in market share. New mortgage lending is also down year on year from 9.9% to 3.1%, reducing its overall mortgage share from 10.7% to 8.6%.
£11m is a lot of money to waste on wishful thinking.
Jennifer Rice
Andy Lark
Johnnie Moore
John Winsor
