Just in time to cure lingering New Year’s hang-overs, Starbucks announced a change to its logo:  no longer will “Starbucks” and “coffee” appear on its products. Just a tailed siren will stay put, coloured in white and green. Pundits, journalists and coffee lovers each have a view. While reaction has been mixed, on key criticism is being voiced: that the logo change may limit Starbucks’ capacity to deliver on its ‘core’ product; coffee.

Yet in my view, these concerns are misguided. The logo change reflects a broader business and brand strategy.

New joiners at The Value Engineers receive weekly training on all areas of branding in a course called ‘The University of Gav’ – named after one of our experienced Engineers. A core lesson of our Uni is that brands must deliver through its products. Richard Brandson, the serial entrepreneur, said as much: “The brand is only as good as your product”.

So, where does this fit into Starbucks? Three years ago, it was down in the dumps – Frappachinos did not taste as sweet in the context of the global recession. Its CEO battled back: closing stores, but also diversifying products: in addition to coffee, it expanded into icecream, music, and tasty in-store snacks. Since 2009, it has run a series of unbranded stores that serve as ‘laboratories’ for new in-stores concepts, such as ‘open mic’ nights – a favourite of poets everywhere.

Moreover, as international sales become more important to Starbucks, a broader sense of its brand becomes important. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Taiwan may already have local coffee favourites, but what they get with the new Starbucks logo is something bigger: a unique in-store experience that delivers beyond coffee.

In sum, it is not all about coffee anymore. To be successful as a business, Starbucks needed to be something bigger – and that’s what the logo represents. It is a source of entrainment: a brand that represents quality across its products and does so while being a responsible corporate citizen. The new logo isn’t just a visual gimmick – it represents Starbucks’ broadening ambition.

If you asked a cowboy what a brand was, he would talk about the permanent marks made on his cow hides by a hot iron shaped in a particular way to denote  his ownership of those cows.

In short, for him a brand would be a mark of ownership.

Indeed this definition goes back to the earliest known incidence of branding I am aware of. It comes from over 2,000 years ago, when one oil lamp maker in Rome started stamping the word ‘Fortis’ onto his lamps. It showed that he had made them and they were his lamps, well at least until he sold them in the market.

Which raises some interesting questions about this definition in relation to marketing. Is a brand a mark of ownership or a mark of manufacturing or creation? And who does own a brand?
 
On the ownership of brands my personal opinion is that an abdication has taken place. “The company brand owner is dead, and the consumer is the new king.” Over the last few years, many marketing people have handed over ‘ownership’ of their brand to their consumers. It is now increasingly accepted that  as consumers have their own ‘perceptions’ of the brand and can shape its future, they are the ‘owners’.

Without trying to dispute either the importance of consumers, the notion that an individual’s perception of brand is personal, or indeed the inability of companies to control every aspect of what will shape brand perceptions, I would like to state the case for the old kings – the brand owners – to reclaim ownership of their brands

Firstly, I am no lawyer, but the notion that a (marketing) director of a company which legally ‘owns’ a brand – and that is in turn valued highly on the company’s balance sheet – can publicly proclaim that they do not really ‘own’ that brand, seems patently dangerous to me.

If companies do not ‘own’ their brands, how can they expect to defend their rights over them? Giving up ownership could have unwanted consequences. Is it giving a green light to counterfeiters to reproduce, replicate and trade-off brands? If challenged, the counterfeiters can simply refute any claims of damages. You don’t own the brand, they do.

Secondarily, it is undoubtedly true that we all have individual perceptions and experiences of the brands we know, and we can even feel like we ‘own’ at least a part of those brands. But do we really own the object, the brand in question?

As consumers, they may be able to influence the brand, and even control it to some extent. They are perhaps the most powerful influencing force or pressure group. But they are not, and never will be, the owners. We can stop buying a brand, we can ignore it, we can suggest and influence alterations, but we do not enact change or final control.

I would draw a parallel with the Mona Lisa, which enjoys ‘awareness’ or fame in the way a brand does, and which engenders a wide range of different perceptions. In other words, everyone has a perception of the painting in our mind, but it would seem foolish for me to suggest that any or all of us actually own the Mona Lisa.

Thirdly I believe it is vital that marketers continue to recognise the importance of their role as brand owners. Individual perceptions are crucial, but branding is all about the creation and management of meaning en masse. Branding is a social phenomenon. Brands – particularly the ‘big’ national and global brands – are fundamentally ‘mass’ tools. Brands aren’t about single transactions: they work in multiplicity, with many people, and on many occasions. Brands are a means by which their owners do their best to manage multiple relationships simultaneously.

It is the role of the brand owner, through their brand and all its points of interface, to try to create and then manage the best perceptions of that brand.

Finally I would suggest we should be deeply concerned if  consumers were completely in charge. Sometimes consumers don’t know what they want, or at last don’t know until they are offered it. Brand ownership and creation is often about innovation, changing what already exists and creating new things. If the consumers owned the brand and their word was final, then many, many brand innovations would be killed before they started. As Henry Ford said, “If I had asked the consumer what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse”.
 
A brand owner should have ‘that vision thing’. That is, the belief that what you are doing is right, and that it should be done even if those around you don’t always agree. Walt Disney, W.K. Kellogg, Richard Branson, Phil Knight (the founder of Nike) and Anita Roddick (the founder of The Body Shop) believed in what they were doing. They believed in creating something that existed in their minds long before it existed in the minds of what were often, at first, very dubious consumers.

So I believe that there has been a significant shift of power in the relationship between brand owners and consumers and that we have now reached a position where branding is an organic and ‘negotiated’ unit of social and economic currency. However I would still argue that companies own their brands and so brands can and should still be defined as a mark of ownership.

• “The customer is the appreciating asset” – Federal Express
• “Every company’s greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company” – Michael LeBoeuf
• “Expensive, well-executed, and familiar ads convince the investors, as nothing in the black and white tables of assets and debits can, that the company is important and prosperous” – Michael Schudson
• “The music industry is a strange combination of having real and intangible assets: pop bands are brand names in themselves, and at a given stage in their careers their name alone can practically gaurantee hit records” – Richard Branson
• “If this business were split, I would give away all the assets to keep the Brand; and I’d fare better” – John Stewart

He’s known as the Ronald McDonald of Apple by industry bods. Steve Jobs, Apple’s enigmatic boss and co-founder, made his long awaited public return on Tuesday, following a six-month break recovering from a liver transplant. His appearance on stage at last week’s new product launch provoked rapturous applause and a standing ovation from those present. Away from the clamour, however, we should not forget the nasty Apple truth that has been exposed by Jobs’ recent ill health; over-reliance.

There exists a fusion between Apple’s brand and its co-founder. Steve Jobs is now an inherent part of the software company’s appeal. It has been his ideas, his innovation, and his vision that have driven the company forward since its inception in 1976. The question his recent health scare posed, therefore, was how would Apple cope without him? The immediate response was not encouraging; the morning Jobs announced his planned six-month break Apple stocks fell a whopping 4.8%.

Ultimately, Apple will outlast Steve Jobs. The spreading of power that will inevitably follow in the next decade, Microsoft style, will help ensure this happens. What is so interesting about this case in point, however, is its relevance to the world of branding. There are a host of examples where the individual behind a business has become central to its brand image. Richard Branson, popping up everywhere from James Bond films to in flight adverts to promote Virgin, and Dyson, whose recent ads simply feature designer James Dyson talking to the camera, are two that spring to mind. Here the business brand’s core values have been so heavily personified that it’s hard to imagine success without each inspired individual.

There appears to be a rising trend in willingness to employ this ‘maker marketing’. Perhaps it is an offshoot of the emerging ‘Age of Celebrity’, where being known takes priority above all else. Or maybe it’s a reflection of the post-Blair British political scene, where the appeal of a leader is increasingly more important to voters than the policies they hold. Whatever the cause, we are at a stage where Reggae-Reggae Sauce can woo the Dragons Den and take the supermarkets by storm not for its taste per se but thanks to the saleability of its guitar-strumming Jamaican creator Levi Roots. If the Steve Jobs episode highlights anything then it is the importance of widening a brand’s appeal beyond this one-man marketing if it is to achieve long term success.