Brand Finance Forum themes

Brand Strategy attended last week’s Brand Finance Forum which had some very interesting speakers from brands such as HSBC, Visa and Vodafone.

We have handpicked the top three themes under discussion at the event:

1. Nation branding. Simon Anholt, who runs his own index on national brand worth (and wrote a piece in last month’s Brand Strategy about the fallacy of ‘Brand Africa’) talked about how countries need to start thinking about their own brands. He talked about how running glossy advertising was often useless when people had outdated understanding of different countries (”oh yes, Rwanda = war, I suppose”) and didn’t have enough mindspace or knowledge about countries in depth to change their views. He called for countries to integrate brand strategy into their national strategy at all levels rather than seeing it as a communications issue.

2.  Geographical certification. There was much discussion about how rooting a brand to a particular region could add “authenticity” to its makeup and allow it to command a higher price. The Ethiopian Embassy discussed how best to protect your brand from becoming a commodity using the example of its recently trademarked coffee varieties.

3. How to take a brand from having local relevance to international scope. David Wheldon from Vodafone talked about how the brand is underpinned internally with certain values – ‘red, rock solid and restless’ that it uses to help business units that are acquired in other regions feel part of the company. He discussed how it was important to get the emotion behind ‘Vodafone behaviour’ across to people so they understood why they were expected to act in a certain way. The alliterative phrase is intended to make people remember to be passionate (red), reliably good (rock solid) and always aiming to do better (restless). Wheldon explained this was not an external branding campaign, but an internal motto designed to help people understand how the Vodafone brand ‘thinks’.

And this is just a taster…..over the next couple of months, we will be bringing more to you from the Brand Finance Forum in the shape of pieces from Keith Reinhard of DDB and John Elkins, global VP of brand and marketing at Visa in Brand Strategy magazine.

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