Is our national airline going off brand?
Chances are, if you work in marketing and especially if you own, manage or promote a brand, you spend your life obsessing about whether a particular initiative, strategy or concept is on brand.
Friday, July 16 2010 || Comment || BY Julian Smith
The idea being that everything an organisation engages in which a customer may experience, impacts on that customer’s perception of the company’s brand. Essentially, on-brand is activity that helps maintain and build your brand equity and intellectual property. Off-brand activities don’t actively support your brand promise – at best they can be benign, at worst they can damage your brand and dramatically impact revenues. A great example of off-brand activity can be seen in the media and PR strategy BP has implemented in the USA around the tragic oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. You started with a company working very hard to tie its brand to environmental responsibility (green, sunflower icons, solar panels in service stations) and end up with a highly defensive organisation in lock down mode, trying to control media exposure, hiding information and coming across very much as an organisation which doesn’t even remotely care about the environment.
Speak to any senior marketing professional in New Zealand and time and time again they will use Air New Zealand as an organisation that gets brand. The airline’s online and digital strategy is heralded as world class, and is certainly delivering impressive business results. International awards are flowing in thick and fast. They know the Air New Zealand brand intimately and ensure as many client touch points as possible support the brand promise. As a very frequent flyer, I see it everywhere: online, at check-in (they even made the self-service kiosk seem friendly), the Koru lounge, on the air bridge and of course on the actual planes themselves.
But I fear they are about to go massively off-brand with their latest initiative - updating the somewhat controversial Zambezi staff uniforms with a new livery designed by fashion icon Trelise Cooper. Trelise Cooper is a seriously impressive businesswoman who has built a fantastic brand herself – personally I’m not a fan of the look (but then again I’m a bloke), but thousands of fashionable women are.
So why is this change at Air New Zealand so off-brand? Firstly, Air New Zealand is a less is more brand when it comes to design; it’s presenting itself as modern, simple, uncomplicated and distinctively New Zealand – so Zambesi was a natural fit (but possibly not for the larger-figured Air New Zealand staff). But think about Trelise Cooper, she’s a more is more kind of gal – the curls, the layers, the detailing, the patterns, the fabrics. It’s just not a natural fit with the clever but casual Kiwi image which Air NZ has been so successfully developing.
As a loyal Kiwi, I thought I’d reserve judgment until I had actually seen the new uniform, which I have now, twice! My suspicions were right…lots of detail, layers, fluorescent colours (on black), outrageous patterns and, oh my God, pin striped suits and skirts – seriously, how can our national carrier be supporting the New Zealand brand in pin stripes?
But here is the good news. The new uniforms are being introduced onboard as prototypes and passengers are invited to provide feedback. The designs may be off brand, but the communications and client engagement techniques are very much on-brand.
So, to the fine Air New Zealand marketing team who will no doubt have excellent Google keyword searches that will uncover this blog post: everyone has a bad day – you can still fix it.
Julian Smith (@JulianTSmith) is the general manager for MYOB in New Zealand. A frequent keynote speaker and business commentator, he blogs on key issues and trends, providing advice on how to make business life easier
Wayne - you've hit the nail on the head, it's all about consistency! Air NZ must have a huge catalogue of "branded" goods to worry about when it comes to logos, colours and fonts. For the most part, I reckon they do they manage that well. Any experience a customer has with a company will inform their perception of the "brand", so in addition to physical logos and brand visuals, savvy marketers consider every "experience" and try to have it match their brand. Air NZ have been unusually good at this - hence my surprise with their proposed uniform changes.
Posted by Julian Smith at 11:52 on July 20, 2010
I was at Wellington airport a few weeks back and I noticed that the Air New Zealand Koru branding on the tails of several aircraft was embarrassingly inconsistent.
Considering that most large corporates have brand guides that match the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it amazed me that a key brand element such as aircraft tails had been so carelessly executed.
Check out this link - http://bit.ly/aJmvrO
Posted by Wayne Attwell at 11:03 on July 20, 2010
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