Whatever happened to the multi-million pound rebrand

MARKETING - 23 October 2003

This is an extract from the article published on the branding page of Marketing magazine.
Andrew Pinkess, strategy and business development director at design agency Rufus Leonard, believes there is a more grown-up approach to corporate identity and rebranding. 

“There was a lot of voodoo economics and branding going on two or three years ago,” he says.  “Markets were growing rapidly, people were creating brands out of thin air, and people were reluctant to question things because shares were going up and value seemed to be being created for shareholders. In the current market, everyone is trying to run a tight ship and can’t be seen to be spending a huge amount of money on something as frivolous as visual identity and positioning.”

There are rebranding projects out there, argues Pinkess; they are just being handled in a different way.  He cites work his company handled for BT last year, when it replaced the piper image with the ‘Connected World’ globe logo. BT consulted staff, partners and agencies to understand what people thought about the brand, and that led to a thorough collaborative exploration between the brand team, Rufus Leonard and other agencies.

“In the past,” says Pinkess, “it would have called in one of the top three brand consultants and asked it to come up with the big idea on which the business proposition would be founded.  This would be imported in and rolled out to create a vision that people could buy into, even though the staff would often not buy into it, as they could not identify with it.”

Another significant factor, says Pinkess, was the choice of the Connected World logo as the replacement for the piper.  This was an existing BT property, so it did not involve the expense of designing something new.  Furthermore, says Pinkess, BT has taken a more pragmatic and flexible approach to the implementation of the rebrand.

“It is not changing all the pipers on the boxes in Cornwall on a given date,” he points out.  “Instead, there is a planned replacement cycle.  It used to be thought that you had to have 100% consistency across all touchpoints, but these days, there’s a realisation that this is not realistic, nor financially viable,” he says.

If the money is not being spent on designing logos, where is it being spent?  Budgets are undoubtedly smaller now than a few years ago, but there does seem to be a consensus that good branding and corporate identity begins at home.