How Brand Consultant Misled GTB Into Plagiarism - 2008-09-08

Anthony Swart is the CEO of the Brand Union in South Africa, a firm that was formerly known as Enterprise IG. Mr. Swart, with a Bachelor of Arts in Industrial Psychology, a Masters in Management, and an MBA focusing on truth in brand promise, has led the brand consulting company on missions to re-brand a lot of companies in the Nigerian market. These include banks like GT Bank, First Bank, Wema Bank and a host of others . Oozing with the passion for developing the continent and its brands, the Brand Union boss dispassionately reveale for the first time that the GT Bank campaign was corrupted through unnecessary plagiarism. Who is the culprit? In this interview with O'Lekan Babatunde, Mr. Swart who was recently in the country for a training session organised by Servewell,also touches on several other knotty issues on branding and advertising in Nigeria on the one hand and his company's activities in the market on the other. Are culture nuances a deterrent for the South African company to effectively deliver on assignments in Nigeria? These and many other issues he tackles in this interview. Excerpts.  

Tell us about The Brand Union

The Brand Union is a global branding consultancy. We operate in 26 countries around the world. In Africa, we have our offices in Johannesburg and in Cairo. But in Nigeria, we do a huge amount of work. We do not have an office here simply because in Johannesburg we have seventy five professionals in the office and we find it more advantageous for our clients to deliver from our Johannesburg office into Lagos. We were trying to put in place about six to seven person-office here in Lagos but we found out that the skills usually are better, coming out of Johannesburg.

We have been operating in Nigeria now for about nine years, our first brand was Unipetrol. We re-branded Unipetrol to Oando, and we have done a lot of work in the banking industry and the energy industry. So our clients include Oando, Conoil, and basically with AP at the moment. In the banking sector, First bank, GT Bank, Intercontinental Bank, Skye Bank, UBA, Wema Bank, Diamond Bank to name but a few. So you see that we have done a lot of work in the banking sector. In the manufacturing sector, we have companies like Dangote.  In a nutshell we have been extensively busy in the Nigerian market; we have a lot of experience here.

As a specialist branding agency, what is branding?

People confuse branding a lot with advertising. Advertising is one portion of branding and advertising is taking the brand message to the consumers.  Branding is creating positive perception in the mind of the consumers. It is very broad such that the brand manager needs to think about what sort of perception do we want to create? What type of company are we? How are we going to differentiate our product from their product? What is the value set that we want to operate on? In Nigeria, we find that most companies are still operating at a very generic value set. They will say we want to be professional, we want to be quality, we want to be known for service; but those are very generic values, you need to do things that will give you differentiation form the competitors. So we help companies establish who they are as a brand, position them in the market place, visually identify them through new logos, new visual languages among others. This is extended to PR consultancy and other service providers so they continue to send that same message through the other agencies.

What are those processes involved before coming up with physical representation?  

Before visual aspects of the brand are conceptualized, a clear brand strategy needs to be established. This must have considered competitor positioning, international and local trends, as well as the internal capabilities of the company in question. Only then can concept design on the visual representations of the brand commence.

How about the brand architecture, how you arrive at this?

Brand architecture is the strategy which sets out the relationship between the Master Brand, the Sub Brands, and the Product Brands.  Sometimes these are the same core brand (monolithic structure), and sometimes they differ substantially (branded structure). Endorsed structures which vary between these two models are also very common.  The brand architecture expresses the brand equity transfer between brands within a group, and has implications for niche marketing and brand spend.

As Enterprise IG, your work attracted some flaks in the market. For instance the GTBank is far from being single-minded due to its numerous “Orange rules”. This is apart from the fact that it is said to have plagiarized on British Orange Telecoms company. What is your take?

Guaranty Trust Bank is a very strong brand in this market, and if you can remember back then Guaranty Trust Bank was spelt out fully in a strict typeface, and had an orange block in the beginning and at the end of the words.  One of the key works we did was to consolidate these properties to give the brand a stronger and finer identity. Colloquially, they were known as GTB, so we already know what they say about the brand, so we take the colloquial expression of GTB because we want it to be understood as a bank so we renamed it to “GT Bank”. Taking the orange blocks both in the front and at the end of the former name, we dropped one into the other and then put the name in there. So the elements are the entire elements they had before. We did not create anything into it, we rearranged the entire elements into a stronger and more realizable format.

People in the market always think you have to have a totally unique colour to be different. It is absolutely impossible for every company to have a unique colour, there are only five or six primary colours that you can use so there will absolutely be more duplication.  It depends on how you use the elements in your identity, where you put your emphasis. So name, logo, logo type, colour are the entire elements in your identity. I think where the GT Bank fell short here is that they appointed a local advertising agency who plagiarized the Orange Telecom campaign and put it into the GT Bank advert thereby posing a lot of confusion because Orange telecoms owns “We are orange, we are simple, we are…” GT Bank came up with a campaign exactly the same thing. So, it was really at the communication level that they started plagiarizing the global company's campaign and people felt “it looks like other people's campaign” which is quite correct.

You submitted the GT Bank campaign was corrupted through plagiarism, what are the obvious disadvantages of this bastardization?

The disadvantage is that conceptually, the campaign is Orange Telecoms. Branding is about differentiation, branding is about being unique and saying this is who we are. You cannot be unique if you do not have the ability to think about it and you decide to plagiarize on somebody else's unique point and try to make them yours. So in reality, those values are very good and they are working for Orange Telecoms. You cannot just “steal” it and think it is going to work for you. A brand needs to come up with its own unique preposition, and work hard at it before it can begin to leverage it.  

And what is the implication of this “stealing” on the brand?

Most consumers recognize it is plagiarized.  The way I understand GT Bank, it is a pioneering brand. It is really one of the second tier banks in this market that has redefined the banking industry. It does not feel to me like a player that should steal idea from anybody. So why should it “steal” ideas in a working environment? So it is one defective factor that will negatively impact on the people's perception of GT Bank. If they do the same in product development, people's opinion will change about them, they will not be that innovative bank that they know anymore.

You company also worked on First Bank, but nothing much was seen about that re-branding except of course changing the course of the Elephant. Why is this so, what with all your expertise?

There are many other visual aspects other than turning the elephant to face the other way. First thing was to begin with the project called Project 2000; they were changing a lot of system in the bank to become a lot more efficient service deliverer, so what I needed to do was to show this into an identity element. So we worked on aligning the brand positioning with a new internal system which was being put in place. In aligning these positions you create a new visual aspect. But with First Bank we did not invent anything new because we realized they had very strong but scattered identity. What I mean by this is that, in that identity there is an elephant in it, it has the name of the bank written as “F-i-r-s-t Bank” and it also had it as “1st Bank”. ‘They had truly the first’, and they had the little Indian Elephant in there, facing the left in a little white box. So they had seven different elements within their identity. It was difficult to visually recognize one element that was stronger and that is iconic here. So, yes what we did with the elephant, we turned it into a proud African Elephant, not a small Indian Elephant that it was because First Bank is an African company not an Indian company. Of course, we turned it to face forward, we gave it movement; if you look at the First Bank elephant you will see that it is an Elephant in motion. It is no longer the stationed elephant that it was before, and we created very strong colour identification because 1st Bank has already dominated the market using blue. We took away the “1st Bank” and concentrated on the “F-i-r-s-t Bank” and made it a simpler, much recognizable and more enviable element. So First Bank is now more easily applied to many more important elements that are immediately recognizable as first bank.  

Branding and strategy sounds like buzzwords, what is their relevance?

Branding and Strategy are the same thing. Branding starts out with brand strategy, and the implementation of brand strategy is all within branding. Branding and strategy are not separate topics; brand strategy must follow business strategy. So you need an organization to understand where one wants to go from the business point of view then the brand strategy can support that business strategy. So you always define what a brand strategy from what a business strategy is. Out of your brand strategy comes your visual identity strategy and your communication strategy. So branding and strategy are not different things, they are the same thing.

Though this is the era of global market, but there are a lot of peculiarities about the Nigerian market that make people feel the differences in culture and nuances makes it difficult for foreign operators to do branding for this market.  So what qualifies you?

There are a number of things that qualify us. Firstly I lived in Africa, I lived in the developing economy, and I understand the nature of the developing economy. The developing economy is very different from the developed economy but the similarities in the developed economy are huge. That is whether you are in Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Philippines, developing economies have massive similarities in economic terms. Also I am an African, I understand Africa, I traveled extensively in Africa and lived my whole life there. We have been operating in this market for nine years, I have been coming here and doing brand work for nine years and when I say coming here I spent half of my time here in Nigeria, at least two-third of my time here in Nigeria, so I have a very good understanding of what this market is and of what works in this market and I have good experience of the market having tried things and found out what works or does not work. So I think in every aspect we are well qualified to deliver in this market with nine years track record of people delivering successfully into this market and making a significant change. The secondary aspect to answer, how qualified we are in this market, is to go to and ask the big companies that we have done branding exercises, who really knows how to do branding  in Nigeria, who has delivered real result? You will find that they will say the Brand Union, because we understand the topic, we understand it pretty well.

If you say you are more qualified, how about branding agencies in Nigeria, how do you rate their works?

There are no branding consultants in Nigeria. There are two or three companies that purport to be branding consultants but in main they are advertising agencies. They have decided that branding looks like a lucrative field and they are now putting themselves forward as brand consultants. I speak with them, they all make the money from advertising but they do not properly understand how to apply branding. I am not being negative about the intellect in this country, they have a massive intellect in this country and there will be an indigenous branding consultancy that understand well how to do these things, and will grow into a good indigenous consultancy. Just right now they do not exist.  If it was what advertising was, looking back to 1950s and 60s, all the advertising companies in this market were big international companies that brought skills in, and so the skills developed in this market have local people with depth of knowledge. Remember that depth of knowledge and experience is important. You need depth of knowledge and experience and that skill will develop in this market. You cannot get real branding consultants just popping up just like that to do branding consultancy, you need depth of knowledge and experience and the attitude to develop real credible branding consultancies but they do not exist right now.

How about Leke Alder, you once worked together on the GTB project with numerous other branding consultants?

There are many good consultants in Nigeria, among whom Alder Consulting would count. However there are no true specialist Brand Consultants, who specialize and make their business only out of brand consulting and design. Most consultants in Nigeria are either advertising professionals, or research specialists, who are dabbling in the brand consulting area.  The solutions which they provide for clients are thus always skewed toward their “other” core competency, and are not properly considered brand strategy and design solutions.  This will inevitably change, as deeper skills in branding develop in indigenous businesses.

How do we develop the skills and what is Brand Union's position?

The Brand Union has had a very effective presence in Nigeria for a number of years already.  We have various partners with whom we work in this market, and we share skills with them, and assist in training their staff in brand consulting and design. Our clients regularly send staff to our offices on “internships”, and they return with far deeper understanding of the process methodologies and skills required to create and implement a brand development programme. These skills are thus developing in the Nigerian market, and we support this by running branding workshops for clients and general industry. The Brand Union's presence in Nigeria is thus long term, and in a partnership spirit, and building the competencies in the local industry.

And I think this is very important because the better understanding the people get, the better for the industry.

How do you relate branding as a factor in terms of building a political economy?

That is a very broad question. Political branding and economic branding, while they go hand in hand, totally mean different things. And if you are talking about the potential of building the brand Nigeria , that is very important in this environment. But you cannot build brand Nigeria by polishing and shining the logo and you say “look at brand Nigeria”. What you have to do is to really decide what the brand Nigeria will have to offer in different aspects, economically, from the tourism point of view and other socio-economic point of views and then key in on those and  put real effort (as a country) into developing those areas and then develop that brand.

Again, because branding is erroneously considered as a logo, we do a brand Nigeria logo and then begin to think or assume we have a Nigerian brand and we expect the other countries to look at the logo and have a different perception of the country, it does not work that way.  We have to put internal structures into changing into that old perception. A brand cannot be a plaster that you put a sore and you expect it to heal, you got to address the sore itself. The first thing is put the process that will heal the sore in place and then you can now get to say “yes we have the wherewithal to take it forward”.

You interact with the Nigerian business class. What is your rating of their average understanding of what branding is all about?

Branding in this market is still very much understood as advertising and a logo. At the seminar, one gentleman in particular came up to me and said, “you have just dispel the myth that branding is not a logo”. That generically is the best of the average understanding. That understanding is changing and people are getting to understanding branding is a much deeper science. There are a lot of strategies involved and if exploited, it can have massive commercial advantage. Most of the people we are working with have recognized that commercial advantage, and that is why they continue to look into branding to further  harness the  potential within their organizations to better exploit that commercial  advantage.

On a last note, some say the base line is advertising and that “branding” either as practiced by you or the local brand consultants is a ruse or buzzword, what is your reaction?

“Some” would generally be the advertising practitioners themselves!  Advertising is undoubtedly very important in the whole mix of building a strong and enduring brand.  It is however merely one component thereof, and the strategic element of defining a brand strategy and positioning, clearly articulating a brand architecture, and then creating an appropriate visual representation of the brand, through elements including the primary identity (logo), the visual language (look and feel of the brand), the application of the brand in retail space, and in electronic space, is of paramount importance.

In order to build strong, profitable and enduring brands for our clients, it is critical that the various professional disciplines stop arguing as to which is most relevant, and concentrate on their skills and deliverables; Brand Consultants, Advertising Agencies, PR professionals, and others, are all required to deliver a powerful holistic solution for the client. This should be our aim.