Standard Bank of South Africa announced the launch of their new vision and what they refer to as a brand strategy. However, based on news reports, Standard Bank instead created for itself an advertising campaign. The implications to their brand reputation and bottom line are significant.

Designed to “bond with its essence” and truly define what the Bank stands for, the group’s new strategy replaces the hugely successful “Simpler, better, faster.” payoff line with the slightly more verbose “Inspired, Motivated, Involved.”

According to…Standard Bank’s group marketing director: “Simpler. Better. Faster. served us extremely well for many years and is a strong slogan, but it must be remembered that in an environment where customers’ needs are continuously changing, Standard Bank as an organisation needs to consistently evolve.”

Standard’s marketing director continues in this press release:

Our new pay-off line - Inspired. Motivated. Involved. - encapsulates the essence of what we are and what we would like to be for our customers, our people and our stakeholders. We are striving to make a real difference.”

Says [the marketing director]: “We have carried out extensive research to develop a greater understanding of attitudes, beliefs and expectations of Standard Bank and the way in which these could best be met. Based on this research, it became apparent that a revised brand promise and pay-off line needed to be developed to align with the group vision and values. The intrinsic value of the brand has also been maximised by aligning a core set of brand characteristics and principles to assist in providing a consistent brand experience.”

These are rationalizations that sound good inside a corporate boardroom, but which are of little relevance to the audience Standard Bank seeks to influence. And, rationalizations like these institutionalize the need for large advertising spends to have any hope of creating consumer awareness of the message.

As poor as the Simpler, Better, Faster tagline was, it at least offered a benefit, a promise to consumers. In contrast, Inspired, Motivated, Involved is all about a Me, Me, Me exercise in self-adulation; evidence that Standard Bank skipped the hard part of branding.

This company would have been better served listening to the brand wisdom of Coco Chanel, by pointing to an authentic, compelling difference in answer to the question implicitly asked by most any banking consumer: Why should I care about you?

In contrast to Standard Bank’s campaign, this example of another South African company with a clear idea of what branding is all about.

[More posts about Advertising Campaigns | More posts about Brand Promise | More posts about Standard Bank | More posts about Bank Branding | More posts about Standard Bank Brand Image | More posts about Brand Strategy | More posts about Standard Bank Advertising | More posts about Savanna Dry | More blogs about Bank Branding]

We talk.

Earlier this year we called out Visa for their new Life Takes Visa campaign.

OMMA Magazine noticed.

[More posts about Brand Management | More posts about Brand As Asset | More posts about Brand Success Stories | More blogs about Brand Management]

Donald Trump is starting a mortgage business. As the Orange County Register reports, Trump Mortgage is out to develop a national brand within the highly fragmented real estate lending industry:

The world seems pretty full of mortgage companies.

Donald Trump disagrees.

The real estate mogul turned name brand, turned TV star, officially rolls out Trump Mortgage…in New York. The purported goal of the business is to provide luxury-style service to both residential and commercial borrowers.

“Donald Trump is putting the suit and tie back in the mortgage business,” says a press release announcing today’s kickoff.

…Trump, always master of spin, dropped enough hints…on the mortgage company’s Web site, to guess at his assumptions:

People will pay up for a smooth sail through mortgage application hell.

And they’ll brag about the brand name tied to the loan.

[One] Orange County mortgage broker…thinks Trump might be on to something: “How many people want to boast that they have a Trump mortgage?”

We suggest, “Not enough.”

Trump is banking the success of this venture largely on the perceived value of an affiliation benefit, revolving around how a customer wants others to see them due to their affiliation with Donald Trump.

This brand extension has an all too familiar smell.

Arab Financial Services Co. offers bank card processing management services to banks throughout the Middle East. The company, based in Bahrain, announced a brand initiative by launching its new logo, in this report from the Gulf Daily News:

AFS chief executive officer Rasool Hujair said the initials of AFS have been transformed into a monogram, and the letter spacing closed to create a pictogram.

“This speaks of our solid infrastructure and our confidence,” he said.

“The concept was born out of our core values of innovative, skilful, enabling and transparent that translates to our core customer promise of our passion enabling their success.

“The royal blue reflects not only our pioneering heritage and leadership, it represents skill and enablement.

“The lighter blue connotes the organisation that is built on innovation and transparency.

“The logo is therefore a perfect balance of an organisations values and their commercial implementation.”

Adulatory explanations such as this one are relevant only to those inside an organization. Those outside the organization, including the all important customer, could care less.

Get out from behind the desk and see yourself as others see you. It’s the essence of effective brand strategy. Without it, rather than a brand what is left is a news photo of corporate officers congratulating themselves:

This example of a CEO explaining his organization’s brand, in this example from the Daily Times of Pakistan:

Pakistan’s premier investment group BMA has announced the launch of its new corporate brand identity, replacing its existing brand of the past 15 years for the Group’s businesses, including BMA Capital, BMA Asset Management and BMA Trade.

“The BMA’s name is derived from `Bismillah’,” said Farrukh H. Khan, Chief Executive of the BMA Capital, at the unveiling of the new logo. “The ‘bey’ in ‘Bismillah’ is the centre of BMA’s new logo. It represents BMA’s core value of integrity, in the best interest of all our stakeholders. The new brand identity is a perfect combination of bringing together the BMA’s heritage of the past 15 years with the exceptional growth in BMA’s businesses moving forward. The new logo retains the red colour symbolizing continuity and passion with the previous logo and incorporates silver, which is traditionally associated with currency and coinage. The final result is both modern and unique.”

You know where we stand about such brand explanations. So tell us what you think.

In the financial services industry, the rebrand of Íslandsbanki to Glitner is informative due to the brand focus of Glitner’s CEO. From the organization’s press release:

Íslandsbanki has changed its brand name to Glitnir, at the same time adopting a new logo and appearance…

[Glitner] has evolved from an Icelandic bank into an international financial company operating in five countries. The Bank defines Iceland and Norway as its domestic market; …it [also] has operations in London, Luxembourg and Copenhagen, and later this year…will be opening offices in Halifax in Canada and Shanghai in China.

Bjarni Ármannsson, CEO, says… “We now work in the international financial market, and this means certain changes had to be made,” he says “Brands must reflect the environment in which they operate, and in our case we need a name that can be used all over the world. …Glitnir…has positive connotations for Icelanders, contains a historical reference, is both Icelandic and Nordic, is easy to pronounce in all the main languages involved and also contains no unusual letters or accents.” [Emphasis ours.]

As further stated in the release: “The new name comes from Norse mythology: Glitnir was the home of Forseti, son of the divine pair Baldur and Nanna. Those who came there received a pardon of their misdeeds and all quarrels were settled.”

Forseti is further described in other sources:

Forseti was considered the wisest and most eloquent of gods of [Norse mythology]. …Forseti presided over disputes resolved by mediation. He sat in his hall, dispensing justice to those who sought it, and was said to be able to always provide a solution that all parties considered fair. Like his father Balder, he was a gentle god and favored peace so all judged by him could live in safety as long as they upheld his sentence. Forseti was so respected that only the most solemn oaths were uttered in his name.

The new brand draws upon a deep well of existing imagery, meaningful to the markets in which it operates. This new name further draws upon a compelling story that evokes fairness, justice, and safety - benefits any bank would wish to be associated - and accomplishes this in an unexpected way. The name moves easily across borders in markets served by Glitner.

Glitner’s CEO is spot on; brands must reflect the environment in which they operate, and thereby become relevant and authentic to audiences they seek to influence.

Makes us want to consider changing banking relationships.

How much would it cost a company to rent their trademarks, logos and other brand-related assets from a third party?

The answer is one way to calculate the value of a brand as balance sheet asset. It points to how effective brand strategy is the business of creating a balance sheet asset to drive sales and margin.

Investors thumbing through the Royal Bank of Canada’s financial filings will find an impressive array of assets. Right there in black and white are notations for $304 billion in total deposits, $187 billion in outstanding loans, and other hard assets that make the Royal Bank one of Canada’s largest and most successful companies. But nowhere will you find a value for one of its most precious assets–its brand. That’s too bad. That line would add another $4.5 billion to the company’s bottom line, according to a new study of Canada’s most valuable brands–which Royal tops for the second year in a row

Read on, in this report from Canadian Business.

Visa USA announced a new rebrand. The question is, Why?

Jettisoning a brand positioning that for 20 years included the tagline Everywhere You Want To Be, Visa launched a new campaign attempting to stake out the central to life position, Life Takes Visa, to differentiate Visa from, for example, Mastercard’s evocative and effective Priceless.

In this release Visa USA explains:

Employing the theme of empowerment, the new campaign reflects Visa’s evolution from a top credit card company to the leader in electronic payments, combining worldwide acceptance with a full suite of products that empower cardholders to do what they need to do, want to do and never thought possible.

Brand strategy’s raison d’etre is to provide competitive separation through an easily understood point of difference. If compelling and authentic, a brand creates for itself the opportunity to be remembered by the very audiences it seeks to influence.

What Visa USA offers as a new brand is instead a new, and costly, advertising strategy. It fails as brand strategy on two levels. Life Takes Visa is inauthentic, as life clearly does not require Visa as it does practice, talent, confidence, luck, ambition, or guts, irrespective how often Visa may shout otherwise. And, Life Takes Visa does not separate Visa from one obvious competitor, American Express. The American Express brand position? My Life, My Card.