Branding and PR Strategies: A Case Study of the Three Orange Men
By Chuddy Odueniyi
Prologue
I am glad to be a part of today’s event and I thank Mr. Ishola Ayodele for inviting me. My assigned topic is Branding And Public Relations Strategies: A Case Study Of The Three Orange Men. But I have slightly altered the Case Study part to mere Reminiscences and I crave your indulgence for this impudence. Indeed, I am thrilled to be availed a platform to, more or less, reminisce on The Three Orange Men campaign more than twenty-four years after its conception and execution on this shore.
Branding, Image, and Reputation
Public Relations strategies in an uncanny manner encapsulate Branding, Image, and Reputation. Branding is somewhat interwoven with the image of an organization, which is in its immediate external perception, a snapshot frozen in time. The reputation of an organization is the historic and cultural dimension of that image, the social memory of the stakeholders that acts as a platform for expectation.
A reputation is created by stakeholders and attributed to an organization (person or place), in response to their expectations of it. Reputation dictates how people behave and in whom they place their trust.
Once trust is gone, it is very difficult to regain and in some cases its loss is irredeemable. As the CEO of a leading advertising agency said reputation has never been as important as it is today to reassure the world that you are safe to talk to, deal with or rely on, there can be no complacency.
The world-renowned investor, Warren Buffett noted that It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. Reputation is ultimately a measure of trust.
By contrast, a brand is manufactured by an organization to sell to one stakeholder group, consumers. In essence, brands are more controllable than reputations. According to Richard Carpenter of Radley Yeldar, brands can have a reputation, and leading consumer or high street brands are more vulnerable to reputation damage because the general public at large represents a key stakeholder group of potential customers.
Invariably, PR pivots on image enhancement. PR in the 21st century has entered a new vista that confers on its practice a commanding presence. Public Relations (PR) according to the famous Mexican Statement is the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organization leaders, and implementing planned programmes of action which will serve both the organization and the public interest
To Jethwaney and Sarkar (2002), Public Relations is a discipline with functions aimed at neutralizing or changing hostile public opinion, maintaining positive public opinion, crystallizing informed opinion. In essence, Public Relations is a management function that ensures positive response and emphasizes planning, needs for research, advisory services, and public good/interest. Public relations messages must be authentic, truthful, and credible.
Strategy
Strategy is a deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business competitive advantage and compound it. For any company, the search is an iterative process that begins with the recognition of where you are and what you have now.
Strategic competition compresses time. It is not new as its elements have been recognized and used ever since humans combined intelligence, imagination, accumulated resources, and coordinated behavior to wage war.
But strategic competition in business is a relatively recent phenomenon. It may well have as profound an impact on business productivity as the industrial revolution had on individual productivity.
The basic elements of strategic competition are these:
(1) Ability to understand competitive behavior as a system in which competitors, customers, money, people, and resources continually interact.
(2) Ability to use this understanding to predict how a given strategic move will rebalance the competitive equilibrium.
(3) Resources that can be permanently committed to new uses even though the benefits will be deferred.
(4) Ability to predict risk and return with enough accuracy and confidence to justify that commitment.
(5) Willingness to act.
Invariably, Strategy is all-encompassing, calling on the commitment and dedication of the whole organization.
Branding:
Dr. Roger Sinclair (1999), a leading expert on brand valuation and brand equity practice stated, A brand is a resource acquired by an enterprise that generates future economic benefits. Once a brand has negative connotations associated with it, it can only lead to decreased profitability and possibly complete corporate failure.
The definition of a brand as a promise that lives in the mind of the customer means that we have moved well beyond Philip Kotler’s definition of a brand as, a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or any combination of them which is intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.
We have also moved beyond the more current definitions of a brand as the reputation that a brand builds over time (its Trustmark), culture, corporate identity.
Rebranding:
In its simplest meaning, Rebranding is changing a brand’s identity; typically it includes changing most or all of the brand identity elements such as the name, icon, colors, type font, and tagline. The identity change may also be accompanied by brand repositioning. However, a brand can be repositioned without changing its identity.
Summarily, rebranding is an identity change, while repositioning is a change in the brand’s promise, personality, or other associations. From the submission above, it is my candid view that the rebranding of Mirinda in 1996 using the Three Orange Men tactic was memorable and fruitful.
As a means of turning things around, and enhancing the image of an organization or a product as was the case in Seven-Ups, Mirinda, rebranding must be implemented as a core strategy, with a clear framework to drive the repositioning agenda of the product to its core stakeholders, by creating a new, differentiated identity in the minds of other stakeholders.
Repositioning:
On its part, Repositioning focuses on changing what customers associate with the brand and sometimes-competing brands. This usually entails a change in the brand’s promise and its personality. Sometimes, rebranding itself is undertaken to reinforce the change in the brand’s positioning. However, most brand repositioning plans do not result in completely changed identities. That is, usually, the brand name does not change, and frequently, neither do the identity elements of the brand other than the tagline/payoff.
A practical way to visualize this is to think of a brand as a person. If a person rebrands (himself), he gains or loses weight, changes his hairstyle and color and wardrobe, and perhaps changes his name. However, if the person repositions himself, he changes his values, attitude, personality, or behavior. In the particular case of brand Mirinda, it challenged its handlers and brand custodians to be adept; forward-looking, astute, visionary, creative, versatile, dynamic, resilient, hands-on, redoubtable, suave, assiduous, and dependable.
Branding as a Strategic Imperative
In his forward to the book The Infinite Asset: Managing Brands To Build New Value authored by Sam Hill with Chris Lederer as co-author, Kevin Lane Keller, the E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and the author of the award-winning book, Strategic Brand Management, noted that branding has become a strategic imperative, and we can often trace success or failure of firms back to their ability or inability to build, sustain, and enhance value in their brands. He noted that the need to improve visibility and profitability requires greater insight into five areas of brand management. These five areas are bound to be vital in any meaningful effort to rebrand the Knighthood. The prescribed five steps are:
First, marketers and in this instance Brand custodians, must blend top-down and bottom-up brand management activities more effectively. Top-down or more macro perspectives involve such big picture activities as defining brand hierarchies, assembling brand portfolios, and providing brand leadership within the firm. Bottom-up or more micro perspectives include such activities as achieving deep understanding with consumers or organizations, building resonance with customers, and promoting brand innovation.
Second, Brand custodians and organizations must develop and embrace brand manifestos that inform and rally the entire organizations around one of their most valuable assets: their brands. For example, companies can formulate brand charters essentially, short documents that summarize critical brand-related information such as the history and importance of the brand to the firm, the values and essence of the brand and its positioning, and general guidelines for how marketers and Brand custodians should treat the brand. Brand charters help organizations to codify brand philosophy, capture brand learnings from brand audits and other research projects, provide long-term strategic brand direction, and supply short-term tactical brand guidelines.
Third, Brand custodians must shrewdly leverage the brand partnership and appropriately borrow equity from other entities other brands, well-known people, knowing when the brand needs its image reinforced rather than augmented, and how equity transfers from these various other types of entities to the brand.
Fourth, Brand custodians must integrate their brand marketing to create bountiful synergies: by mixing and matching various brand communication and distribution options. To do so, Brand custodians must balance considerations such as coverage and cost, uniformity and personalization, commonality and complementarity, to maximize the collective contribution of their marketing programs.
Finally, Brand custodians must develop brand metrics that can put all of these activities in context and most important- allow brand handlers to trace how their marketing investments directly create brand value.
Chuddy Oduenyi, a PR Scholar, is the Chief Executive Officer of Compact Communication Limited
