The choice of a new generation

Your brand isn't what you say it is; it's what your customers feel about you.

Andrew Carrier

Apr 02, 2023

📸 First, flashback to October 2021 when actor Matt Damon called you a coward. This week, he wants to apologise.

👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:

① Your logo is not your brand; it’s a visual reminder of how your customers feel.

② CMOs should be responsible for every single client touchpoint.

③ Communications, both internal and external, can make or break a CEO.

④ I joined Quant to be part of the future of finance.

⑤ Social media is the most powerful amplifier. For good and for bad.

⑥ The UK capital needs a long-term plan to stimulate growth.

⑦ There is no poetic licence in corporate communications.

What's new

Pepsi unveiled a new logo this week, Inc. columnist Jason Aten reports.

In short:

“This week, Pepsi unveiled a new logo. Not a new flavor, or a new version of its famous soda–just a new logo. In general, I’m not a proponent of redesigning your logo to stay relevant. Once your logo has any amount of brand equity, there are very few reasons you should mess with it. If you’re going to change the most public representation of your brand, it should be because something important has changed.”
“According to Mauro Porcini, Pepsi’s chief design officer, Pepsi would regularly ask people to draw its logo. When they did, people almost always got it wrong. It wasn’t the shape of the red and blue wave or the white space they got wrong. Instead, they would try to put the word ‘Pepsi’ inside the logo mark. The problem is, for the past 14 years, the word mark and logo have been separate. Pepsi’s logo redesign wasn’t so much about changing how people see it, but aligning it with what people already ‘see.’ That’s brilliant.”
“The lesson is simple: There is a difference between the way you think about your brand and the way your customers think about your brand. It’s easy for marketing people to think about a company’s logo or ad campaign as the brand, because companies spend a lot of time and money making those things a perfect reflection of how they feel about their product. Neither of those, however, is your brand. Your brand is simply the way your customers feel about your company.”

Why it matters

① Most CEOs equate their brand with their logo. That’s wrong. Your logo is just a visual cue that gets your customers to recall how they feel about your brand. I’m going to steal from Aten again because he puts it well:

“The job of your logo is to remind people of all of the experiences they’ve had with your product. It’s the outward expression of what people think about your product.”

The story of sugar water’s new logo matters because it reminds us to think much more broadly about brand. Indeed, the lesson we should draw from Aten (and from Jeff Bezos before him, who famously suggested that “your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”) is that the way to protect your brand isn’t making your logo pretty but rather ensuring that every interaction people have with your company is consistent with what you want to convey to them.

Call them values, principles, brand tenets. Call them what you want. The important thing is that you are clear about what you stand for and infuse that into everything your brand does.

What to do about it

Take action

② If there’s one tangible action to take this week it’s this: add to your chief marketing officer’s workload. Being head of brand should, by definition, mean being involved in every interaction your customers have with your company. This is fundamental yet often missed. Perhaps that’s why it’s one of the very first topics we talked about. I’ll offer you the same advice this week as I did back in 2020:

Your head of marketing should be responsible for - or, at the very least, consulted about - every single client touchpoint.

Get help

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Top stories

The other articles that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Why UBS brought Ermotti back as chief executive

③ Communications, both internal and external, can make or break a CEO.

Source: The Financial Times, 29 March 2023

“The day after agreeing to rescue Credit Suisse in the most significant banking deal since the financial crisis, UBS chair Colm Kelleher called Sergio Ermotti to see if he wanted his old job back. Kelleher had watched Ralph Hamers, who had succeeded Ermotti as UBS chief executive, fumbling questions from analysts at a hastily arranged call the night before. The performance had underscored concerns the board had over the Dutchman’s ability to oversee such a huge and complicated transaction.”
“Hamers lack of experience in UBS’s two main business lines, investment banking and wealth management, was criticised by analysts and UBS staff. His plan, which was focused on developing UBS’s wealth management business in the US and Asia, was laden with references to tech initiatives. Much of the communication around the strategy was muddled by explanations of how the business would adapt to an ‘agile working’ model. Critics derided Hamers’ strategy and his description of UBS as a ‘Netflix for wealth’ in media interviews.”
“During his time at UBS, Ermotti had drawn up plans to acquire Credit Suisse ‘three or four times’ but discussions with the Credit Suisse board never progressed because they were not interested in a deal."

TECHNOLOGY

Citi expects $4 trillion in value of tokenised assets by 2030

④ I joined Quant to be part of the future of finance.

“Citi just released a comprehensive 161-page report outlining a highly promising future for asset tokenization and the token economy. It states that: ‘We believe we are approaching an inflection point, where the promised potential of blockchain will be realized and be measured in billions of users and trillions of dollars in value’.”
“Citi sees tokenization as the main driver in the blockchain space to finally accelerate the entire industry to a critical point of mass adoption: ‘Tokenization of financial and real-world assets could be the killer use case driving blockchain breakthrough with tokenization expected to grow by a factor of 80x in private markets and reach up to almost $4 trillion in value by 2030’.”
“‘We forecast $4 trillion to $5 trillion of tokenized digital securities and $1 trillion of distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based trade finance volumes by 2030,’ the firm's analysts said. Of the up to $5 trillion tokenized, the bank estimates $1.9 trillion will come in the form of debt, $1.5 trillion from real estate, $0.7 trillion from private equity and venture capital and between $0.5-1 trillion from securities.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Did social media cause the banking panic?

⑤ Social media is the most powerful amplifier. For good and for bad.

“Innovations initially help facilitate a boom, contributing to exuberance based on a sense of futuristic possibility, before speeding up and magnifying the eventual bust. History also suggests that recent technological changes may have a deeper impact, reshaping markets in the long run, too.”
“The effect that technological breakthroughs have on banking crises is just one way they transform financial markets, however. John Handel, an economic historian at the University of Virginia, notes that increasingly widespread use of ticker tape in late-19th-century finance enhanced the power of the institutions that monopolised it. The London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company, which was licensed to transmit data from the exchange, were beneficiaries. This helped formalise the role of the stock exchanges in global financial markets.”
“Innovation has sped up sudden market wobbles, truncating panics that would have taken months in the 19th century to weeks. In the modern era, timelines have contracted further, from weeks to days or even hours. Yet this may turn out to be just one of the ways in which frictionless trading and freely available information, of varying quality, affect finance in years to come. The profits banks have enjoyed for decades—or centuries—thanks to high transactions costs and low financial literacy might also become harder to sustain.”

WILDCARD

London’s loses sole lead as world’s top financial centre

⑥ The capital needs a long-term plan to stimulate growth.

Source: The Financial Times, 30 March 2023

“London and New York have tied for the top spot, according to benchmarking data by the City’s governing body. This marks the first year that the UK capital has not been the clear leader as other financial centres have grown faster.”
“Financial services executives have warned that the UK is at risk of losing its place as a top financial centre after Brexit, which forced some companies to move operations to the EU. There are also concerns that the US is a more attractive place to list and grow businesses, given the prospect of higher valuations and a less restrictive business culture.”
“The survey found that London continued to perform well across factors such as innovation, reach of financial activity, resilience and business infrastructure, talent and skills, as well as regulation. But New York’s score increased through high growth in tech investment, deal making and increased levels of sustainable finance issuance.”

Off cuts

The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.

The last word

⑦ Michael Power, professor of accounting at the London School of Economics, on Revolut’s statement - the one that so frustrated its own board - that portrayed a critical audit report as a clean bill of health:

“Bizarre.”

Don’t settle for marketing.

Strive for InMarketing: innovate, interact, influence.

Wishing you a productive week,

P.S. Whether they’re your Polaris or, like me, you actively avoid them, you might like to know that this year’s Michelin Stars were announced this week.