Maintaining momentum after the brand launch

In the run up to a launch organisations break out of the normal, they are forced to think more broadly about how their business is positioned and perceived from multiple stakeholder perspectives. Managers work more collaboratively as they are determining how the collective experience and organisation’s culture must reflect the new direction the leaders are setting. There is a level of anticipation, excitement and exhaustion as they plan the fundamental shifts in how they need to operate to deliver change. There is a strong sense of ‘everything is on the line’, which stirs up a multitude of emotions, it’s scary and risky but also exhilarating and liberating.

Post launch often when the problem or issue that drove the brand launch is dealt with, the implementation issues have been resolved and the challenge for the business has returned to delivery optimisation - it’s back to business as usual.  Many of our clients have asked us how to ensure their organisation keeps brand focused – and they recapture the sense of collective involvement that drove the business prior to launch day.  

A key issue our clients have asked is how to maintain the organisation’s brand momentum when the brand has been launched and implemented across the business.  We hosted an event to share experiences and learnings – which started with perspectives from:  

• Ryan O’Keeffe, Enel Group Director of Communication

• Spencer McHugh, EE Marketing Director

• Clare Gambardella, Virgin Active Marketing Director

Followed by challenges and alternative suggestions from the audience including companies such as Facebook, Virgin Media, Skyscanner, Wellcome Trust, Burberry, Discovery Networks and Pearson.

A few themes emerged from the session:

• Do not consider launching a brand as a one-off event but rather the start of a series of launches

• Brand isn’t just a marketing activity but it impacts the whole business so needs contribution from the whole business to succeed

• Brand is now increasingly in the hands of consumers so … let it go and let it evolve.

Overall, the audience walked away with five learnings:

1. Always in launch mode

When a brand is launched the organisation is preparing for massive transformation.  In the case of EE, which was a ‘succeed or die’ launch, it was found that in the 11 months prior to launch, productivity increased 8 times. With numerous constraints- resources, budgets, inflexible commitments etc., everyone was under pressure and so they were forced to resolve problems more creatively.

At the time of launch, employees from across the business are more focused and are all headed in the same direction. This collective, almost infectious, unity delivered transformation across their whole organisation.

Maintaining this collective spirit is a key business asset not just to optimise your productivity but also a sense of revolutionary excitement. To keep working in this way, you can look to see how to integrate launch as a part of business as usual rather than a one-off exercise.

EE does this by creating two launch windows in one year, aiming to create the same energy with teams pitching their products and offers to one and another.

2. The launch is step 0

Once the launch is over, people immediately expect to see varying results when in reality that can take time. It would be a misconception to look at the launch as an answer to a business problem but rather looking at it as a stepping-stone to creating change within the company and creating broader impact externally. By framing the launch only as a part of the bigger brand or business challenge, it acts as a vehicle for movement.

Enel took this approach to their launch, creating a catalyst to drive every aspect of the business. The vision of ‘Open Power’, which is a guiding principle, helps align behaviour, collaborations, products and services. The launch is only seen as a starting point of this journey and will be cascaded to 70,000 people over the span of four months.

3. Encourage ownership

When each project is seen as an individual launch, it helps the company keep momentum. Get a senior sponsor – a person with the ability to call on resources and to make decisions across functions. By putting a product owner in place, there is accountability and drive to see the project through.

Working collaboratively with cross-functional teams is painful but always beneficial. They don’t need to be big teams but sizeable enough to have traction to make things happen. Often after launch, these teams disband and tend to go their separate ways so it becomes critical to have the same level of governance pre launch as well as post launch; this way you’ve got a team that’s really living with the product and taking it forward.

Virgin Active appoints teams to take the ownership of the product through from conception to the end of its lifecycle. There are KPIs in place to ensure the team is always galvanised.

4. Constant evolution

When launch is only the beginning of the lifecycle of a product it is important to identify a winner and contribute to its growth. It’s important to keep a tab on customer metrics and allow them to influence the journey of the product. The launch marks the birth but in no way does it represent the final product will be. So a way to look at the launch is merely that, a birth. After which there needs to be constant adaptation based on what customers have to say. Often how you design a product is not the way the product ends up getting used. So it’s important to introduce the product and instil the spirit with teams to keep the product going and constantly iterate. Constant innovation for changing times, moving quickly.

5. Share the burden

Often companies are under the impression that their marketing teams are solely responsible for the marketing success of that company. That doesn’t always have to be the case. In fact, now marketers are not the primary owners of the brand, it’s created at the intersection of the consumers and marketers. Consumers are now increasingly able to express their opinions and expectations from brand so mobilising the consumers helps keep the momentum. Identify hooks to get the customers interested and build a pipeline of demand.

The Grid from Virgin Active is an example of a functional product. During the design of this the team made hand gestures that signified the grid. It became a favoured hashtag, poses after class completion and merchandise as well and a nice way for people to interact with the grid and share it with their friends, thus building talkability.

The launch is often looked at as the big bang or the result of a radical change. However, it is much more invigorating to flip it around and look at launch as the beginning of a transformation. In which case, you’ll be able to continue spotting the opportunities to bring more meaning and value to the company, long after launch.

Illustration by Oliver Thein.

Mallika Reddy is Insights Strategist at Wolff Olins London. Follow her@mallikareddyg

Congratulations to our client Orange!

Today I’ll be with them as they launch their new strategic plan and brand experience to the world at an event at the Grand Palais in Paris, twenty years on from when we created the brand in the first place. I know they’re as proud as we are of the success of our recent creative partnership in reinventing the phenomenon for a much more complex and demanding world.

We’re looking forward to telling you more about it but for now we’ll just say bonne chance as they connect their customers to what’s essential to them!

Update: The new strategy plan is all explained here.

Making brands stick

Once the critics lose interest in the comments section, the brand video stops getting hits and the all-agency briefings come to an end – this is when the challenging realities of getting a brand into the world begin.

Whether a charity, telco or banking institution, the following five post-launch considerations and actions can help make your new brand stick (and hopefully prosper).

1. Alignment between brand and propositions

No new news on this one, but if the business isn't organised to deal with a new brand, the road from here on in gets bumpy.

A big win is getting the propositions and brand teams in the same room to figure out if the stuff in the pipeline can deliver against the ambition. If the brand is geared to engage through amazing new services and products, but your customer offers and experiences reflect the old brand, then no amount of new wallpaper is going to distract customers from spotting it.

Action:

Consider updating the briefing tools. By putting the brand ambition front and centre in the briefs, planners and proposition mangers have tangible ways to judge new products, services and offers.

2. Consistency of quality

A common challenge when launching a new brand (and in fact, maintaining momentum with an older one) is ensuring the content is right. The natural inclination is to make sure the visual bits are all in the right places, and so they should be, but this won't make the brand connect with customers.

Action:

Invite staff from across the business to brand surgeries to teach them the role of the new brand. Help them understand how the brand must engage, what sort of offers it must create and why this brand is different from the old one. With this sense of understanding and empowerment, they can live the brand and ultimately drive up quality throughout the business.

3. Shift focus from visual and verbal to experience

If your new brand is focused on how it sounds and looks rather than how it feels, you'll end up with handsome posters, but little else.

In order to create a coherent story for customers and to deliver more engaging experiences beyond typical media touch points, brands must evolve to adopt high level experience principles. These philosophies not only inform the visual, but the behavioural, across both the physical and digital estate. And when partnered with a new proposition, should create an experience that starts to shift customers perceptions of the new brand.

Action:

Once the foundations of the brand experience are defined, workshop with product, technology, service and operational teams to develop and flex these principles, ensuring any channel specific challenges are considered. Ultimately it is these teams that create and deliver the experience, and engaging them in the process can be commercially smart and also personally rewarding.

4. A consistent team within all partner agencies

It's understandable that teams change and people move on. However, brands move so fast that the quality can suffer if the new team doesn't properly understand the ambition. Remember, people need more than to be shown the latest guidelines to 'get it'.

Action:

It's always a good idea to grab a coffee with the new team and speak openly and informally about targets for the brand, areas of weakness and what you need specifically from them. Everyone feels better when they know where they stand.

5. Digital doesn't end at .com

Once the new website has launched you have to consider the role your brand plays in the broader social conversation.

It's pretty well documented most brands aren't great at this. The all too familiar Twitter scenario plays out something like; customer needs help, brand doesn't answer but starts random # chat about something that happened two weeks ago, customer gets angry and tweets about rubbish company.

Action:

If you are going to enter the conversation, you must have a dedicated team readily available to engage with people. And as important as having the infrastructure in place – you need to have an opinion. If you're giving it the c-suite acceptable chat, you'll be found out very quickly and no one wants their Dad at the disco.

These are only five super top-line watch-outs to be aware of as you go into the post-launch phase and, as every brand is different, I'm certain there are hundreds more. If you would like to talk to us about some of the challenges you face, please get in touch, or you can critique this article in the comments section below ;)

Dan Greene is a design director at Wolff Olins London. 

Nile Project kicks off in Egypt!

The Nile Project officially launched this month with its inaugural Nile Gathering in Aswan, Egypt, kicking off a series of music residencies, workshops and conversations to lay the foundation for its future programs. 

The Nile Project is the brainchild of Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis and Ethiopian-American singer-songwriter Meklit Hadero, two friends who met in San Francisco. With a common background in African music and a common concern for the future of the Nile basin, Girgis and Hadero came together to start a new initiative with a mission to tackle the cultural and environmental issues surrounding the river. Using musical collaboration as the inspirational gateway, the Nile Project aims to increase awareness, educate, and empower Nile citizens to work together to foster the sustainability of their river ecosystem. 

Last year Wolff Olins helped bring the Nile Project to life, providing a brand that is completely unique, yet accessible, at the same time. We collaborated closely with Sadek Bazaraa of GHAVA, who is himself part Egyptian, to help develop the Nile Project identity. The identity draws from multiple aesthetic influences in the region. Establishing a versatile set of brand elements including symbols, color, pattern and typography style, the identity is adaptable in any environment and resilient in keeping with the Nile Project brand, regardless of where it is used or by whom. The result is a brand that is itself a celebration of all the peoples and cultures of the Nile region.  

With international partners like TED, Lincoln Center, and Ashoka, the Nile Project aims to cultivate cross-cultural collaborations and establish a platform for social enterprise for the region over the next few years. This will be a musical initiative with measurable impact, so keep your eye out as these exciting collaborations unfold.

Meet Pave

In a context of financial turmoil and a student debt crisis, Pave is a new business that believes that if ambitious young people have the right direction and resources behind them, they will be happier and more successful in life.

Founded this year by Sal Lahoud, Oren Bass and Justin Mitchell Pave's pilot launches today. Wolff Olins is thrilled to have been their partner in bringing the brand to life. 

The pilot program features 8 Prospects and 24 Backers.  Prospects get funding and support to help pursue their true calling. Backers, as they are called on the platform, pay forward their own success by super-powering a career and investing in the next generation of Americans. The prospects then share in their success by rewarding those who supported them early on in their careers with a small percentage of their earnings over the next ten years.

Pave came to us this fall with the ambition of creating a start-up brand that was both democratic and credible as a serious financial product. We worked together to focus their strategy of creating a community and product that is truly for everyone. We also developed their brand identity and logotype.

Together, we created a Pave brand that is democratic, open, optimistic and active. Since Pave is reacting to a major crisis of culture and presenting a new model, it was crucial that it didn't seem generic or too machine-like, which meant a focus on people, stories, photography, and narrative – more of an editorial paradigm than a web 2.0 one.

Pave is a start-up, but in the sense of a cultural movement--not in the sense of a new app. Letting the real people who make up the community and their individuality shine through was key to our strategy.

If you've got what it takes to be a backer or prospect or have someone in mind who might, visit their website to sign up for rolling applications to the pilot program. Pave plans to launch their fully functional public site in early 2013.

Beautiful, fast and fluid.

Times Square is always amazing; the lights, the motion, the vibrancy. Microsoft took it up another notch for the launch of Windows 8 last night, which coincided with the release of the Surface tablet. The team unveiled the holiday store and had an en plein air promenade where passers-by were able to experience the new Surface & Windows 8.

All of this while under the glow of Windows 8 adverts that dominated a majority of the larger screens in Times Square. Check out some photos from the launch below. Beautiful.

(Spencer Phillips)

Univision Launches New Brand Identity

What started out as KWEX-TV in San Antonio in the mid 1970s, the first ever full-time Spanish language station, has now evolved into the leading Hispanic media company in the United States: Univision. As their audience has evolved and as the industry has evolved, so has Univision. And in this morning’s Hollywood Reporter, Univision unveiled a new brand identity that communicates its transformation from a traditional broadcast network to an innovative multiplatform media company – still fueled by a mission to serve Hispanic America.

In August 2011, Ruth Gaviria, senior vice president of Corporate Marketing at Univision asked us to help focus their vision, pull together the different voices within their company and create an updated brand identity. For over nine months we worked together to create an identity that would modernize the brand and signal to the world that they meant business. 

Univision is a brand with a tremendous following. On the Burke Brand Equity score they broke the scale. Scoring the highest-ever-recorded scores for brand loyalty. Research among Hispanic Americans puts Univision as one of the most trusted institutions in America. And their share against other Spanish-language media is a whopping 73 percent. 

The refreshed version we created of their classic logo embodies their shift toward a more integrated 360-degree organization that better serves their evolving audiences and their emerging needs. It was designed to represent all that makes Univision the company they are: a dynamic, innovative multimedia company competing in a rapidly evolving industry.

During our work with Univision, we facilitated workshops to uncover characteristics that set them apart in their category. Working with our brand butterfly and quadrant tools, we helped Univision understand how to modernize and diversify the brand without sacrificing their heritage and powerful brand loyalty. 

The result was a brand story that focused on using their scale and influence to be the No. 1 brand representing and serving the full spectrum of what it means to be Hispanic in America today.

Univision’s new logo is a visible testament to its status as an integrated and ever-evolving brand, reflecting its commitment to Hispanics and their culture and its dedication to meeting their emerging needs.  The re-imagined brand shows they are not standing still, but evolving with the needs of audiences and advertisers.

And, in building their overall brand equity and strengthening Univision’s image as one company able to serve both audiences and partners, they’ve better positioned themselves toward something truly game changing: becoming the No. 1 media company regardless of language by 2016.

It’s been very exciting kicking off this new era at Univision! For more information on Univision, please visit www.univision.net.  

The Smithsonian is Seriously Amazing

This morning the Smithsonian Institution announced to press that they’ll be unveiling their first-ever national branding and awareness campaign next month.The goal of the campaign is to show young people how Seriously Amazing the Smithsonian is and to help them see what a great opportunity they have to learn with Smithsonian.  

Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, told press “We’re not just about our collection items but also the incredible discoveries, stories and learning opportunities they provide us all. This campaign offers us an historic moment to directly show the American people that we are much more than they ever thought.”

For more than a century and a half, the Smithsonian has been devoted to ‘the increase and diffusion of knowledge.’ In 2009, they began a strategic planning effort to remain vital in the 21st century. A year later, they approached Wolff Olins with the challenge of building a brand on that strategic foundation.

Some said the Smithsonian had become one of the world’s most beloved brands ‘by accident’— it was finally time to build a brand based on intent and ambition. The brief for Wolff Olins was to craft a brand strategy that would take the institution into the next decade: more modern, more relevant, more impactful, for more people, more often. 

We began with a hypothesis that while knowledge is the foundation of the Smithsonian’s mission, in order to be more contemporary and useful, they needed to connect their mission to the idea of learning, a much more dynamic and personal concept. 

    Since the Smithsonian is a complex organization, with 19 museums, 20 libraries and 9 research centers, we held multiple hands-on workshops with groups from across the institution to make our co-created ideas stronger and richer. We also did quantitative research to uncover current perceptions of the Smithsonian and ethnographic research to help us understand the different ways people learn.

The main result was a powerful brand idea that could be communicated consistently and concisely. Out of that came the Smithsonian's tagline and the foundation of their awareness campaign: “Seriously Amazing,” an idea designed to capture people’s attention and invite them to take another look. 

“Seriously Amazing” evokes both the Smithsonian’s important scholarship and the “wow moments” it delivers every day. The campaign centers on the theme Questions Alive, using vibrant colors and photography, copy that sparks your curiosity, and a question mark that’s literally made up of young explorers, learning about the world Smithsonian-style.

The campaign’s accompanying website – seriouslyamazing.com – is designed to share the Smithsonian’s knowledge in a fun way that reflects the learning styles of the digital generation.

The ads feature the seven characters who make up the question mark, each representing an area of Smithsonian expertise:

•          The Discoverer explores the world and the universe.

•          The Storyteller is about America, its people and the tales they can tell.

•          The New is where technology and creativity collide.

•          The Wild represents the diversity of the animal kingdom.

•          The Green reflects the wonder of the natural landscape.

•          The Masterpiece embodies artistic expression.

•          The Mash-up stands for the ways people share culture.

You’ll be able to spot the campaign on websites, in magazines and in outdoor venues in DC, NYC, LA, SF and Chicago throughout the month of October.

We are delighted to have been a part of this project, which invites people to take a new look at the Smithsonian and reinforces their role as a vital resource for learning and discovery. Learn more at seriouslyamazing.com or follow the conversation with #seriouslyamazing.