Matthew Revell

Morrisons - the UK’s fourth largest supermarket chain - is an odd one.

Reports in the media have long suggested that Ken Morrison - who recently stepped down as Chairman - believed in the supremacy of all things Yorkshire. From the sounds of it, he knew what he liked and liked what he knew. Fair enough.

Perhaps that’s why Morrisons mostly sells pies and really fresh veg. Love the veg, hate the pies and the poor quality own brand range. It probably also explains why the standard format for a Morrisons store features fake market stalls, Oh, and the miserable staff (ha, joke - I’m half Yorkshire and Yorkshire people are proud of how blunt they are, so I’m only living up to my heritage, or something).

So, along with the pies, the crap own brand stuff and the weird Disneyland-style grocery section, Morrisons has a pretty naff logo. Big black typewriter-font M on a yellow oval, on a black square. Nice.

With the announcement of the new chairman came the promise of a new brand identity. The years-old slogan “More reasons to shop at Morrisons” - genius - was out, so was the Tyne and Wear Metro tribute logo.

Well, it seems that the new logo and slogan are creeping into use. In true Yorkshire-fashion, they’re not making a fuss; instead, they’re just gonna pop the new logo on anything they print from now on.

I had high hopes for the new logo. I love to watch a new brand take shape. According to a Morrisons press release the new slogan is:

Fresh for you every day.

To use a chic term: meh. It could be worse but it’s certainly no equivalent to “More reasons to…”

But it’s the logo where Morrisons have really pulled one out of the bag, to use another cliche. Look:

Patrick Finch - OpenSolaris marketing chap - has an interesting post about why open source companies need to protect their trademarks.

He touches on something that annoys me almost every day: that a vocal minority of, often ill-informed, people think commercial == bad. I think Patrick has a point in laying part of the blame at Naomi Klein’s door.

Patrick’s main point is that trademarks are an important way for people to know what to expect. He quotes Richard Stallman:

“Trademark law … was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying.”

As an aside, Stallman’s next sentence, in the source article, doesn’t make so much sense, to me at least:

“Legislators under the influence of “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.”

I’d like to add one thing to Patrick’s post: a trademark can be revoked if the holder doesn’t defend it (yeah, I’m not a lawyer, etc).

We should expect to see open source companies defending their trademarks. We should judge them on how they defend their trademarks. Linden Labs showed sense of humour when they granted permission to use their Second Life trademarks on the Get a First Life parody site.

As Patrick sums it up:

“Open source is not a free-for-all: it is fair-for-all”.

I moaned, a couple of days ago, about how the NTL:Telewest to Virgin Media rebrand seems to be less about the substance of the brand and more a quick paintjob.

Virgin Enterprises is famous for successfully applying its brand to disparate products and services. While not every product is a roaring success - e.g. Virgin Cola - Branson’s team has previously molded the brand to the relevant segments’ needs and expectations. While Virgin Money is clearly targeted at above average earners 25 - 45, Virgin Trains and Virgin Atlantic are sufficiently broad not to alienate any of their massive potential customer-bases.

So, it’s a surprise that the Virgin Media brand is so poorly targeted. Visit the website. It’s all 19 year old models in heavy eye make-up, with ridiculous hair-dos and a “look more weird than handsome/pretty” smugness. Since launch, they have thrown in a couple of stock photos of perfect families staring glibly at laptops, but their jarring presence only highlights how poorly the Virgin Media marcomms reflect the incredibly broad range of people whose house is passed by cable.

The worst offences lie in the copy: it patronises the hell out of the reader, its saccharine chumminess is likely to alienate rather than make people think they’ve found a friend and, oddly for a company so keen on ramping up average revenue per customer, it relentlessly makes references that would have been embarrassing in student-targeted ads.

“Hello you…” is how the rebrand announcement greeted existing NTL:Telewest customers. Phone deals talk about calling Aunty Doris in Australia. The website offers to help you “tell your ADSL from your ELBO”; every copywriter has come up with something equally as ridiculous, spent ten minutes trying to convince themselves that it can work, then given up and got back to work.

The problems, I think, are that Virgin Mobile people have no doubt been heavily involved in the rebrand. Virgin Mobile has always been about teenagers, and as a MVNO with no network investment and a saturated market, it’s okay to be that specific. Virgin Media, though, has to squeeze every last penny out of the network that costs billions of pounds to build and resulted in previous incarnations going down the pan.

But this clearly is just old NTL, with some Telewest influence, cracking through a Virgin gloss. The Virgin brand doesn’t yet fit and it shows.

The logo, the copy, the colours are all meant to be evidence of the true brand - i.e. the philosophy that informs everything the company does. Once the NTL:Telewest people start living the Virgin brand (sorry, horrible phrase), then perhaps it’ll come together a little more and, instead of appearing like Virgin by numbers, the company will work out who it’s talking to and what it’s trying to do for them.

Dad’s pants in the middle of his roll, dad’s pants in the middle of his roll.

www.dadspants.com

Vimto rocks.

I’d hate to work for Abbey. Eighteen months ago, they made a bold step in differentiating themselves from the other high street banks.

The agency they employed to carry out the reband said of it:

Wolff Olins has helped Abbey National reinvent itself. From now on, Abbey is no longer just another of the big six British banks - it’s something different: a company whose purpose is to help everyone get on top of money. The new Abbey was launched on 24 September [2003], with the message that “Abbey is turning banking on its head”.

Agency fluff aside, the new Abbey was about making money less scarey, without the faux-chumminess and slight smugness of Egg. This wasn’t just a name/logo change but was carried through in the language the staff used and the products on offer.

Although the “Me and my money” ads were a little creepy - people going about their lives with a miniature version of themselves, which represented their money - the advertising was creative and instantly recognisable. It was fresh, optimistic and rooted in situations that ordinary people could identify with.

Sadly, in the past week or so, Abbey’s controversial new Spanish owner - Banco Santander Centro Hispano (BSCH) - has thrown all of that out. A £3 million advertising campaign has been launched to support possibly the worst re-branding decision I’ve seen by a household name. Forget the Post Office’s change to Consignia, then to Royal Mail, as that had no effect on the bulk of the service’s users; it was a corporate, mainly overseas thing.

This is a move that replaces a contemporary, relevant and differentiating brand with one that makes the old Lloyds Bank look dynamic. Take a look at the Abbey website, you’ll see what I mean. There are no prizes for guessing that both the colourscheme and logo are in fact that of BCSH. The colours, logo and typeface are from another era and, in the words of one of my colleagues, “look like something a small town accountant might think was really groovy in about 1970″.

It all puts me in my place. The Abbey of recent times was about breaking down barriers; the new Abbey branding tells me to think I need them more than they need me. BCSH’s slogan is “Value from ideas” but the only idea I see in this reband is corporate egotism.

The billboard ads that have been designed to launch the rebrand show all the creativity of a bored teenager who’s rushed their GCSE Business Studies homework. Picture it: photo of woman with pensive look, thought bubbles coming out of her head, main bubble reads, “Are you thinking about changing your mortgage?”, or something similar. Man, if I’d suggested that at work I’d be laughed out of the place.

Lord knows how the BCSH branding will be expressed throughout the rest of the bank. If it’s consistent with the logo etc, I really can’t see it working in the UK.