Innovate and renovate to create vibrant brands: Roger Neill

THE PHILIPPINES, NOVEMBER 9, 2011: Brand innovation and renovation can unlock new markets and opportunities while ensuring a brand’s vitality and longevity, according to Roger Neill, a leading authority on innovation, creativity and communication.

 

Headlining adobo magazine’s first CEO Masterclass series before a packed room of senior marketers and advertising agency practitioners in Manila, Neill underscored the critical importance of innovating and renovating brands.

 

Drawing on his wealth of branding and marketing experience, he cited brands such as Pears, a soap brand first sold in 1789 and with innovations such as a relaunch as a shampoo brand, Skoda and British Airways to demonstrate the benefits that could be achieved when product led marketing.

 

“Skoda was such a radical renovation. It was extraordinary to see what happened to that company, which went from death trap to top class brand,” said Neill.

He credited new owner Volkswagen’s belief in Skoda coupled with its heavy investment in product, factory and marketing and its culturally sensitive approach in engineering the “standing joke’s” dramatic turnaround.

 

Leveraging the country’s pre-communism engineering heritage, the new owner retained Skoda’s development and design base in the Czech republic but built state-of-the-art production lines and a common engineering platform. It also invested in a buddy system, pairing local engineers with Volkswagen staff, to ease the process of raising Skoda’s standards to Volkswagen’s level.

 

Within about eight years, Skoda successfully chipped away at its brand negatives, achieving a reputation for quality and standards and delivering repeat purchase rates of more than 80 per cent in the UK, one of its key export markets. As Volkswagen’s brand moved up the price range, Skoda’s turnaround delivered a new cheaper market segment to the company.

 

British Airways counter-intuitively developed a herringbone seating arrangement, with forward and backward facing seats, in business class in order to provide flat beds without eroding seating density. It was a brave move since research had shown passengers generally disliked backward facing seats. However, passengers’ desire for a restful sleep on a flat bed won out, giving British Airways a sustainable advantage for about eight years when rivals declined to copy this innovative move.

 

Neill also led an brainstorming session on the relaunch of Manila as a tourism destination, a timely exercise as the country’s advertising tourism account is due to go to a pitch later this month.

 

Suggestions included basic fixes such as better pavements, cleanliness, transportation and security to pave the way for new products such as walking circuits and river cruises to more ambitious efforts such as relaunching Manila as an exciting boxing capital in the same vein as Las Vegas while leveraging Manny Pacquaio’s global recognition, creating a Fringe Festival to tap the country’s vibrant creative and artistic talent base, and drawing major events such as Formula One races to the capital.

 

 

See more photos from the event here.