Name of the game

/ 24 July 2009

Called after Hollywood pin-up Rita Hayworth, Rita Clifton once longed to change her ‘awful’ name. But she stuck with it and forged a successful career masterminding new identities and name changes for blue-chip companies. Now chairman of Interbrand, she tells Jane Lewis why a powerful brand is about more than a fresh moniker and a fancy logo

Rita Clifton is not a woman to mince her words. Asked once why brands were so valuable in competitive markets, she replied, ‘because shit will happen’, adding: ‘All you can hope is that having a strong brand means that less shit will happen to you.’

Well, shit certainly happened; or, at least, the greatest destruction of financial value in decades. And, in the wake of that, I wonder if Clifton sticks to her view. Absolutely, she says: ‘People die, buildings fall down, but what lives on are the brands.’ You might call them the corporate equivalent of cockroaches in nuclear winter. Clifton prefers to say, in rather precise technocratic language, that ‘the brand is the thing that generates sustainable value’. It seems to be the key expression in any brand consultant’s lexicon these days, even superseding ‘identity’.

Certainly, the first impression you form of Interbrand’s HQ on the Strand in London is one of calm continuity. In the stylish reception area, a gas fire burns in a modernist grate (the eternal flame of the great brand?) and a Gaggia coffee machine displays its timeless credentials behind the receptionist’s desk. But what really grabs my eye is the large chart of Interbrand’s ‘Best Global Brands 2008’ which, I think, should make interesting reading.

Yet scanning down the list of familiar names, you could be forgiven for wondering if the great financial cataclysm had happened at all. All the usual suspects – Coca-Cola, IBM, Microsoft, General Electric et al – are still up there at the top. And even Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and AIG remain respectably placed, although in its accompanying report Interbrand lambasts all three for failing to live up to their brand values. It notes, for example, that Merrill Lynch, ‘a brand which has traditionally thrived on a reputation for not being a risk-taker, has seen its involvement in packaging sub-prime US homeowner securities spectacularly backfire’. Meanwhile, AIG (which has so far cost the US taxpayer $30bn and counting) has a ‘diminished image and a renewed focus on its balance sheet’. You can say that again.

Still, there’s something reassuring about the solidity of the overall line-up, I suggest, and Clifton agrees. ‘Half of the top 50 most valuable brands in the world have been around for 50 years or more, and that’s heartening,’ she says, ‘What really strong brands have got is real substance. They’ve got longevity because people trust them to deliver consistently good quality and good value.’

You could easily say the same of Rita Clifton. As UK chairman of Interbrand, which bills itself as the world’s leading branding consultancy, she is a woman in demand, routinely wheeled out by the media to comment on everything from corporate name changes to nation-branding, and author of several books on this strand of management science. Clifton describes herself as a ‘brand evangelist’: she sees them as crucial building blocks, vital for generating ‘the long term wealth that we all need if we’re going to pay for a civil society’. But she’s also a long-time environmental campaigner and much in demand from other companies as a non-executive director. I switch on the radio while I am writing this article and there she is on Radio 4 championing the role of management consultants with Evan Davis on The Bottom Line. 

Indeed, Clifton tells me that she much prefers the job of chairman to chief executive because it gives her time to do what she really enjoys. ‘I’m a brand consultancy practitioner at heart and I also enjoy mentoring and coaching people and being an ambassador.’

Though she does admit that when she first became chairman of Interbrand in 2002, after four years in the executive role, ‘it was difficult in the first year to really let go’. Even on first impressions you can see how that might be the case – she comes across as something of a perfectionist.

Trim and elegant in black, with immaculate hair and make-up, Clifton has a reputation for not suffering fools gladly and it has to be said that I don’t get our interview off to the best possible start. My sin is to suggest that you could perhaps chart the top of the boom by the ubiquity of bling brands: the £1,000 handbags, the obsession with designer labels, the prevalence of rapper hits along the lines of ‘Pass the Courvoisier’. Do rising sales of supermarket own label goods suggest that established brands are in retreat in a newly austere age?
She’s clearly exasperated by the question. ‘It comes down to what we all mean by branding and brand,’ she says. ‘To some people – even now – brands mean flashy logos epitomising the spend, spend, spend consumer culture’. The reality, however, is much more fundamental. ‘First of all, some of the world’s most powerful brands, Oxfam say or the Red Cross, are in the not-for-profit sector. Second, a brand is just an organising idea that a company uses and trademarks in some way to make itself different from the competition.’ Good branding is just as important in the discount sector as anywhere else. ‘People expect a certain brand experience from Aldi, which frankly is a bit cheap and cheerful, but nevertheless it’s still a brand and it creates expectations.

‘You don’t have to like a brand for it to be successful,’ she adds. ‘You can just respect it. Some brands are very functional in what they deliver. People often talk in terms of emotional connection, but that’s often the thing that people feel on top of what the brand does in terms of benefit and practical application.’

As she told a former interviewer, ‘Saying brands are just the logo and the name is just like saying people are the sum of their face and their make-up and their clothes.’ Visual branding is worthless unless it symbolises substance underneath.

In fact, the fastest route to disaster is when there’s a mismatch between the outward face of a company and what’s going on behind the scenes. ‘There’s a whole range of ways in which you can wreck a great brand: being lazy, complacent, not looking after people, cheapening your product...’ says Clifton. ‘But the most fundamental thing you can ruin in a brand is the trust that your customers have got in you. If you don’t have trust, then you can’t have a brand.’ Think Enron.

Innate identity

The centrepiece of Interbrand’s philosophy is what it calls the ‘red thread’ of a company’s identity, or the unique set of values which, in healthy organisations, runs through the whole operation like the writing on a stick of rock. The German philosopher and poet Goethe outlined the concept in a rather more literary style back in 1809, in an essay called Elective Affinities.

‘The ropes of the royal fleet, from the largest to the smallest, are braided so that a red thread runs through them from end to end which cannot be extracted without undoing the whole. Even the smallest fragment may be recognised as belonging to the crown.’

What this means in practice, says Clifton, is that brand values should encompass everything that companies do: ‘from the way they answer the phone, to the way they train people, to the way they develop products and services’. It should, in other words, be part of a company’s DNA.

As well as the more analytical side of its business (calculating brand valuations, analysing what drives value, advising on how to reap maximum return on the investment etc), Interbrand is well known for its work in renaming companies. Examples include formulating Centrica for the holding company behind British Gas; restyling a Bass shorn of its breweries, Six Continents; and devising the moniker PricewaterhouseCoopers.

‘We do a lot of creative development, new names and new IDs,’ says Clifton – particularly in the wake of mergers and other corporate shake-ups. Diageo, formed from the merger of Guinness and Grand Met, was an especial success story. A new ID was crucial because ‘even though Guinness was a very strong brand name, it had very strong associations with that one drink. So Diageo created a new story and a new angle for that holding company – and frankly just signalled a fresh start in that company’s development’.

But the outward manifestations of a brand – like the name or the advertising strategy – are only half the story. ‘We do a lot of organisational stuff: how should the brand affect the culture of the organisation, and so on... The proof of the pudding at Diageo, the reason the brand was accepted, was because the company was successful. No new name is going to make a bad or confused company any better. No one should pretend that.’ 

In light of the above, the results of a recent Interbrand survey of UK staff attitudes make for worrying reading. It found that less than half (47%) of the working population feel proud to work for their employer – and that the larger the company, the less proud they feel. When asked what makes them feel proud of their company, two-thirds said: ‘having a positive impact on people’s lives’; and almost as many cited ‘setting high standards for quality of work’ and ‘looking after their customers’. As Clifton noted in an article for Management Today, only 44% said they are proud when their firms ‘consistently produce great financial results’. And yet what do company leaders talk most about?

At the very least, she wrote, the survey shows that ‘most businesses have some way to go in identifying and living up to distinct values – the kind of brand values, in fact, that make their own people really care about what they do and become advocates for the companies that employ them...

‘In the end, in an all-seeing digital world where the ghosts of corporate misdemeanours never get laid to rest, there is simply no substitute for developing strong values and ethics and living up to them.’

Siren calling

Clifton, 51, has been preoccupied with names, and the nuances attached to them, for almost as long as she can remember. One reason is her own name. ‘My father called me Rita because he had a crush on Rita Hayworth – he wasn’t to know the connotations that “Rita” would have many years from that time. There was a stage in my life when I thought: “God, I must change my name because it’s just so awful”. But, on the other hand, like most names, people just get used to it.’ The qualities you associate with a particular person will, in the end, trump any baggage inherent in the name itself.

The same, she points out, is true of companies. ‘If you came up with a corporate name like Unilever now, it would get lampooned in the press: “Ha, ha, it’s only got one lever, it’s not going to get very far.”’ But, in fact, ‘Unilever’ sums up a unified powerhouse behind lots of separate brands very well.

Clifton’s father, a Buckinghamshire shopkeeper, was her early inspiration: ‘My father always told me that with brains and personality you could achieve anything,’ she once wrote. Yet he died when she was 12 and she believes the trauma of that – and of the family’s subsequent money troubles – accounted for a good deal of her early drive. She won a place at Cambridge to read classics and found the experience ‘transforming’; it also provided a springboard into the heart of the London advertising scene. ‘It all seemed, wow, a glamorous business,’ though her first accounts were Harpic  and Steradent. ‘I think that was bloody good for me. I was thinking, here I am in London, working for an advertising agency. It’s got smart offices, all these glamorous people – and by the way you’re working on a loo cleaner and denture cleaner.’

Clifton was at Saatchi & Saatchi during the agency’s 1980s heyday and worked on such era-defining advertisements as the British Airways ‘World’ campaign. Saatchis, though, was a political minefield even before its famous split, and hardly the most female-friendly of organisations. Clifton was back at work 10 weeks after having her first baby. ‘I remember for a couple of years at Saatchi & Saatchi I was the only woman on the executive board of blokes, many of whom used to smoke cigars,’ she says. In typically pragmatic style, she found the most effective way of dealing with sexism – whether casual or overt – was humour. ‘Because otherwise the behaviour and attitudes go under the waterline where they’re more difficult to deal with... And, of course, there’s no substitute for doing a good job.’

Clifton expects the inevitable shake-up following the financial crisis to yield a shed-load of opportunities for Interbrand. ‘A lot of companies that have maybe got too fat will crumble, break up or implode – and that always creates dynamism in markets. It’s what makes markets so fascinating and also so effective.’ Ultimately, she sees the market as a voting machine. ‘People “vote” for brands with their purchases and their support.’ And although it takes a cock-up on a monumental scale to derail a long-nurtured and well-managed brand (she cites the speed with which Cadbury recovered from its salmonella scare), complacency is the enemy. ‘If you’re not great, in product terms, or you’re too expensive or you’re rubbish at looking after the environment, people will find out about it. And the Darwinism in markets will crush you.’