The Business Case for Brand Building
Most of what we see and hear is forgotten almost instantly. One widely-cited estimate is that as little as 4% of advertising is remembered positively. So why do some of the world’s biggest, most data-driven brands keep investing in it, and what is a brand actually worth to the bottom line of a business?
This conversation covers the real difference between brand and marketing, why a strong brand can be worth up to a quarter of a company’s total value, the risks of building a business around a single founder’s personal profile, and the eighteen-month journey behind Kinore’s own rebrand from Accountant Online.
Joining Larissa is Ray Sheerin, former founder and Managing Director of Chemistry, one of Dublin’s best-known creative agencies, who also worked with global agencies Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi earlier in his career. A highly respected brand and marketing strategist, Ray guided Kinore through its own rebrand from Accountant Online, helping to define the company’s tone of voice, core values and overall marketing strategy.
Things We Spoke About
- The real difference between brand and marketing
- Why a strong brand can be worth up to a quarter of a company’s value
- The risk of building a business around a founder’s personal brand
- Inside the eighteen-month journey behind Kinore’s rebrand
- Weaning the business off paid Google Ads in favour of organic content
Guest Details
Ray Sheerin is a highly respected brand and marketing strategist with decades of experience helping businesses define their identity, sharpen their positioning, and drive long-term growth.
Ray is the former founder and Managing Director of Chemistry, a very well-known Dublin creative agency which he led for 21 years until 2020. Earlier in his career he worked with global marketing giants Ogilvy and Saatchi & Saatchi. As the former founder and Managing Director of leading creative agencies, Ray has guided countless leadership teams through pivotal transformations, helping them articulate who they are, what they stand for, and how to connect meaningfully with their target audience. In 2023 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship, the highest honour of the Institute of Advertising Practitioners in Ireland (IAPI), and he is a Chartered Director with the Institute of Directors.
Ray played an instrumental role in shaping the identity of Kinore, guiding the team through their rebrand from Accountant Online. Over several months of strategic workshops, Ray helped define Kinore’s tone of voice, core values, and overall marketing strategy. He brings invaluable expertise on the true power of brand building and why investing in brand identity is critical for long-term business success.
Transcription
For your convenience, we include a 95% accurate machine transcription of the conversation. The transcript reflects the video podcast and may differ slightly in the audio version.
Ray Sheerin
Befriend somebody who is a creative thinker. Businesses are full of people who are very logical, very rational. Therefore, what’s needed is somebody who has a different point of view.
Voiceover
No unicorns, no brands, just hardworking people who built their business from the ground up, sharing their experience so others can learn.
Presented by Larissa Feeney from Kinore, this is Real Business Conversations.
Larissa Feeney
Ray, to start with, what I’d love to understand is the difference between brand and marketing. Business owners sometimes use the terms interchangeably. How do you define the difference between the two?
Ray Sheerin
A brand is really what exists in the head of an individual, usually a consumer or somebody in the target audience. It’s essentially all of the perceptions they have about that. The best definition I’ve heard is that a brand is the promise of an experience.
If you think of any brand, whether well known or not, that you have familiarity with, knowing that brand creates certain expectations on your part. It could be its look, its feel, how you experience it, what it tastes like if it’s something consumable – all of those different things.
Marketing, on the other hand, is the means by which you bring that brand to the attention of the target audience and existing consumers. It’s all of the strategies and tactics that marketers use to try to make that brand compete in its particular category.
Larissa Feeney
So for a business owner, why should we prioritise brand building if marketing is the activity that brings the sale? We talk all the time, actually – I think more about marketing than we do about brand building, which is interesting. Why should a business owner invest in brand building over marketing?
Ray Sheerin
Because sometimes a business won’t be doing marketing very actively. Depending on what the business is and what the category is, it could be seasonal – there’s a greater requirement to do work at a particular time of year than another.
A lot of brands these days, as an extreme example, put their entire budget into the Super Bowl in the US – they’ll run a single ad in a single commercial break and blow their whole budget. But that’s the only time they’re advertising or doing any marketing at all. A brand will exist independent of marketing once it has been built.
A brand that has been built up over a good period of time can do all sorts of things even when it’s not being actively marketed, because it has strength in the mind of the consumer – they’re already aware of it. There’s now a great deal of academic work that’s been done over the past ten or fifteen years, probably more than at any point in history, so we now have a much greater understanding of what makes marketing work and what makes brands successful against their competitors, far greater than ever before. Because of that, I think people are understanding the real benefits of investing in a brand.
A couple of good examples of when things go right, or when things go wrong: there was an amazing case in the Netherlands about twenty to twenty-five years ago involving a cat food brand. The production line got contaminated, and people’s cats started dying. Now, for a pet owner of any sort, that is devastating. The company behind it owned up, was absolutely upfront with their target audience about it, and was very apologetic. They set out to put it right, and did so very quickly. The result was no loss of market share, because they were honest about it and true to what their brand stood for in the minds of consumers – the experience was entirely consistent. I think when a brand goes into hiding when something goes wrong, that’s much more serious, and people will be a lot less forgiving.
To take a slightly different example, there’s a great campaign at the moment for Guinness, done by an agency called AMV BBDO in London, using the harp – the Guinness symbol – in the word ‘lovely’. It’s this beautiful campaign that shows people with the product in some way, and only the word ‘lovely’ appears, but the V has been replaced by the harp. Really clever piece of work.
Guinness can do that because they’ve had the harp as a brand icon for centuries. It harks back to a very famous line, ‘a lovely day for a Guinness’, which has been around since the company started advertising, back in the 1920s if memory serves. That’s a great example of a brand that has permission to do something like that without tinkering with its logo at all. Because the brand is so meaningful to people, it can depict people enjoying the product without having to try very hard.
Larissa Feeney
I understand your point that if people are aware of the brand, marketing activity can supplement it, but doesn’t have to happen all the time if the brand is already familiar to the consumer. And in order for the consumer to be aware of it in the first place, are there stats on how many times a consumer has to see or hear about a brand – eight times, six times, something like that – before it sticks? Is that right?
Ray Sheerin
It’s very difficult to be hard and fast about that, because it depends on the manner in which someone has experienced the brand – whether they’ve seen it or heard it, the amount of impact that had on them, and, not least, whether it’s relevant to them at that particular time.
Take insurance, for instance – car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance – you’re only going to be in the market for that once a year. In the month you’re due to renew, or maybe the month before, you’ll start looking around. The rest of the time, that brand is less relevant to you, or at least the opportunity to purchase is less relevant. So it’s very hard to be definitive and say ‘here’s the number of times you’ve got to see it’. What is an absolute truth is that humans are cognitively lazy – we don’t like to have to think too much.
Sticking with insurance, there’s a thing called the rule of three: what most of us will do if we’re shopping around is look at three different companies, and then consider that we’ve done our due diligence and leave it at that. So the considered set is just three different brands, three different organisations that we look at. Part of being cognitively lazy means that if we recognise a brand, if it’s familiar to us, and if we have an overall positive impression of that organisation, we’re far more highly disposed to buying it than if it’s a brand we don’t know. That said, it depends on the category too – how much trust is involved. If it’s something like health insurance, just to pick an example, you’re far less likely to go with a completely unknown brand from the internet than with one of the well-known brands in that category.
There’s all sorts of stuff that gets talked about, which is kind of marketing jargon. I’m not really sure how much I believe in all of it, but there’s a lot of talk about ‘mental availability’ – creating mental availability in people’s heads so that they’re amenable to brands. I’m a little bit sceptical about that, because I think that if a brand does a good enough series of communications, it’s going to create that mental availability anyway – it will force its way into people’s minds. So one of the key tactics in any marketing campaign is to find some way of disrupting the target audience.
The numbers vary widely, but it could be anywhere between ten and two thousand different messages that we see every day as consumers. If our brains weren’t capable of filtering out the vast majority of those, we’d go into utter meltdown. So it’s very difficult for a brand to get cut through or stand out. There are some great statistics on this from the UK. There’s a very famous ad man called Dave Trott, who was creative principal at a number of really good agencies through the eighties, nineties and, to a lesser extent, the noughties. He now works mostly as a commentator on advertising, but one of the things he said is that advertising is ‘the last legal unfair advantage we have over the competition’ – which I think is a great piece of thinking. He’s included some research on what is and isn’t effective in one of the books he wrote. He looks at the UK communications market overall and says it’s worth about £21 billion a year in terms of spend. And of that £21 billion, only 4% of communications are remembered positively – something like 89%, or around £18 billion a year, isn’t remembered at all.
Larissa Feeney
God, that’s depressing, isn’t it?
Ray Sheerin
It is, but I actually regard that as very motivating, because what it says is that if you’re going to do this, you need to do work that’s going to stand out. You’ve got to be different, or at least appear to be different, even if it only means communicating in a different way.
There used to be something that appeared on creative briefs, twenty or thirty years ago, called the USP – the unique selling proposition. You don’t really see that anymore, because in very few categories does any organisation or brand have something unique – we’re in an era of product and service homogeneity to a large extent. If a brand does have something unique, within twenty-four hours the competition will be claiming to have equalled or bettered it. So it puts the onus on how you communicate, probably more so now than what you communicate, to get that standout and ideally be in the 4% that gets noticed and remembered positively. But even if not, at least make sure you’re in the 7%, because people might remember you negatively, but at least they remember you.
Larissa Feeney
I’ve given this a lot of thought over the years, because obviously we’ve invested massively in this area as a business. It’s an area I wasn’t familiar with or comfortable with, especially as an accountant – I found it very difficult.
I know that if we think of the larger brands in the market – Disney, Aer Lingus, any well-known brand – the question you have to ask yourself is: why are they well known? And they’re well known because they’re very good at telling us how good they are. They always put themselves front and centre in various different ways, whether that’s through radio, TV, online, or wherever – and they all have different methods of doing so.
If I apply that to my business, or to other businesses, how do you measure the effectiveness of investment in brand? I understand why a founder or business owner would be happy to invest in, say, Google Ads, because Google provides the analytics – you can see exactly what works, what doesn’t, how expensive it is, and you can see the results very clearly. They may not be long-lasting or effective, but nevertheless you can see them, good or bad. With brand, it’s harder to measure. How do you talk to business owners about the importance of brand building, and give them comfort that it actually works?
Ray Sheerin
It needs to work in the long term. Some marketing can be very effective in the short term – Google Ads being a very good example of that – but you need to make a longer-term investment in the brand in order to create real value.
There are organisations now, and I’m sure you’re familiar with some of them, that measure this type of thing. It used to be that the value of intangibles – the brand and so on – didn’t appear on the balance sheet, so a company had no way of saying how valuable it was. There’s been a lot of recent work done in this area across some of the biggest brands in the world. I do a presentation that looks at about twelve of the major global brands, in different markets and categories, and the value of the brand as a percentage of the market capitalisation of those organisations is anywhere between 15% and about 25% of the total value of the business. Generally, the bigger the organisation and the bigger the brand – take the likes of Apple and Coca-Cola – the more phenomenal the brand value. Generally, the bigger and better known the brand, the higher that percentage is. So that’s one very good measure, I suppose, to give a business reassurance that if they do work on brand, it’s going to pay dividends.
The other way to look at it is almost in reverse. You’re talking about doing things like Google Ads, which can be very effective for short-term gain, and the beauty of it is that you can turn the tap on and off as you need to – I know you’ve done that very successfully in the past. The theory is that at any point in time there’s an available market, and you’ll be able to get a percentage of that if you’re in the marketplace. When that available market starts to diminish, you should get out and wait to come back in again – there’s no point hanging around.
But looking at it in reverse, one of the interesting things is that if you look at all of the digital-native brands – Google being one of them – given their incredible brand awareness, you’d think they wouldn’t need to. But the fascinating thing is that they do traditional above-the-line advertising, which is extraordinary. They’re investing in their brands, using channels like TV, even though they have a huge online presence and more data than you could shake a stick at.
Larissa Feeney
They’re obviously doing it for a reason, but you’d think, given how well known and successful they are, that they wouldn’t need to do what you call above-the-line advertising and marketing – or essentially sales activation, as opposed to brand building. You’d imagine they don’t have to do either, but they actively continue to invest in it.
Ray Sheerin
I’d say it’s a bit simplistic to say above-the-line is just sales activation or marketing – a huge amount of above-the-line is actually about brand building. It’s about creating memory structures for people, coming up with distinctive brand assets and lodging those in people’s minds, so that when they’re shopping the category and they experience your particular brand, they’re far more predisposed to buy it.
So some of the best communications don’t have a sales agenda at all. Going back a while, but still one of the most famous adverts of all time, is the ‘1984’ ad, directed by Ridley Scott, based on George Orwell’s book. In the advert, a woman comes running into an auditorium filled with men in grey suits, all looking completely grey, being spoken to like Big Brother, and she runs up and launches a sledgehammer into the screen. It was Apple announcing their arrival, saying that they were going to be very disruptive. ‘Think Different’ was the line they were using. It didn’t have any sales message, and it didn’t feature any product. All it did, in one fell swoop, was get enormous brand awareness and position the brand as being very different – a real challenger to Big Blue and all the others in the space at that time. That’s when brand works best.
Coming back to Guinness again, you’ll be very familiar with their Christmas ad – even in the home of the black stuff, they were wishing for a white Christmas. Again, there’s no product. It’s just brand building. It’s goodwill, it’s building awareness, but positioning the brand in a way that’s going to gain them great goodwill among consumers. So a lot of above-the-line media works best at brand building, at the longer-term stuff.
There’s a huge amount of work been done by the likes of Les Binet and Peter Field, who wrote a paper back in about 2008 called ‘The Long and the Short of It’, which is the biggest study into effectiveness award-winning case studies ever undertaken – something like three thousand case studies, all over the world, in every category. ‘The long and the short of it’ refers to trying to understand the difference between long-term and short-term effects.
It’s very tempting for organisations to say, ‘let’s just go for a pulsing media strategy – we’ll get into the market, mop up whatever business is available, and then get out’. That will work for a period of time, but only while you’re doing it, so there’s no aggregate increase, no cumulative benefit from it. Whereas what Binet and Field discovered was that when you combine the two intelligently – in whatever ratio between brand building and short-term sales activation is appropriate for your category and where you are in the business growth curve – they work even better together. The long-term brand building work will have a short-term sales effect, so it shouldn’t be excluded when you’re doing the short-term work.
Larissa Feeney
Okay, so the two work in tandem with each other. And whenever you stop doing the short-term work – say you do short-term marketing sales activation coming into Q4, if you’re a retail-type online product for Christmas – the brand building throughout the rest of the year means your brand won’t be a surprise when the advertising hits on the first of September or first of October for Christmas sales.
Ray Sheerin
Yes, and people will already be well disposed towards the brand, so it makes the work the sales activation has to do a bit easier for it to be successful.
Larissa Feeney
And I’m sure there are guidelines or benchmarks out there for how much money a company should invest in marketing or brand building, across industries or sectors.
Ray Sheerin
There’s a lot of work being done on this by an educational institution in Australia called the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Most people involved in marketing in any way would be familiar with the likes of Byron Sharp and Jenny Romaniuk, who are some of the serious academics at that organisation. They’ve got a lot of different benchmarks for what percentage different sectors invest – what percentage of turnover or income should be invested in brand building. It differs by sector, and it also differs by the maturity of the business, and by whether you’re starting from a low base or a higher one.
There’s something very interesting called ESOV, excess share of voice, which essentially states that for a brand or business to grow, its share of voice needs to exceed its market share. In a way, that’s actually very encouraging for smaller businesses, because it doesn’t mean you need to outspend your competition or outspend the biggest players in the market. What you’ve got to do is spend on marketing more than your market share – so if your market share is, say, 3%, you need to be spending 4%, 5% or 6% in terms of share of voice. That’s what you need to be getting as a share of the total spend within that category.
Larissa Feeney
You mentioned earlier the USP, and that it’s 4% of advertising that we actually remember. So I want to ask you about the personal brand of the business owner, and how that can impact the brand building activities of the company.
What I have in mind in particular is smaller businesses who don’t have the resources to invest in traditional marketing or brand building – sometimes they only have themselves, or a small team. Because of the availability of online marketing now, and the accessibility we have to putting ourselves online and building our business ourselves, we have a unique opportunity to build our brand around ourselves. Do you see that as a long-term brand building strategy, or do you think it works at all?
Ray Sheerin
I think it’s not a long-term brand building strategy, because it will only survive the lifespan of the founder – I don’t mean for as long as they’re alive, I mean for as long as they’re involved in the business. It can be very successful, and it can certainly get you cut through. A good example that springs to mind would be Mattress Mick, for instance.
Larissa Feeney
Yes, great example, just sold.
Ray Sheerin
There you are. Love it or hate it – and I suspect most people are in the latter category – there’s no doubting he certainly got cut through, and that appears to have been successful. There are all sorts of other examples too, like Bill Cullen, back in the Renault days.
Plenty of those things. What I’d say is that it’s a little bit short-term, because it’s only going to last as far as that individual’s involvement – that’s its lifespan, its duration. It’s also somewhat risky, because when you associate a business with any individual, if anything happens to or with that individual, it can have a domino effect on the business. This is very true, for instance, where you’ve got businesses using various spokespeople or sponsorship deals – they’ve got maybe some famous sports star. If that sports star misbehaves in some way, or there’s any type of scandal involving them, the contagion effect for the business is phenomenal. That’s really risky.
Now, a founder of a business will obviously be less likely to do something to damage their own business, but there was the very famous case, a number of years ago, of Ratner’s jewellers.
Larissa Feeney
Oh my goodness, yes – Gerald Ratner, Gerald Ratner.
Ray Sheerin
It’s a long time ago now, but in a live television interview, he described what they made as tat – actually used the word ‘tat’. Ratner’s jewellers was, I think, essentially the family business, and he was whatever he was – second or third generation. Maybe a funny thing to say to his pals in the golf club, but on national television, not so smart. That’s the risk of doing something so linked to an individual – you’re basically personifying the business, and if that person behaves in a humanly frail way, as most people do on occasion, then there can be contagion.
Larissa Feeney
In that case, I read his book – it was a matter of days before the whole business was completely and utterly gone. He was talking in particular about some specific products they made, and you’re right, he described it as tat. I don’t think he initially said it on national television – I think he said it at a conference. But in a matter of days, a multi-generational business that had been incredibly successful just completely failed. So you’re absolutely right.
And of course, as humans, that happens sometimes. So building your personal brand can be a way – like in the case of Mattress Mick – of cutting through the noise of other brands, making yourself well known, and building the business initially. However, long term there has to be a more sustainable, long-term, viable marketing and brand building strategy.
Ray Sheerin
Yes, and ideally the business will be independent of its founders – independent of its board, and pretty much independent of everybody. It should have a personality of its own. You’ll be familiar with this, Larissa, from the work we did together working out a tone of voice for Kinore, where the tone of voice for the business differs somewhat from your own tone of voice, or that of any of your other senior colleagues. It needs to be something independent, something that’s understood and can be communicated, essentially by anybody working on marketing for the business, in a way that’s totally consistent – so that wherever it appears, it’s the same brand speaking, no matter where you come across it.
Larissa Feeney
I was actually going to move on to our own rebrand as an example, so thank you for bringing it up. You helped guide Kinore through our rebrand from Accountant Online, and that was – I’m going to say, Ray – it was definitely eighteen months. It could have been a twenty-four month process. It was quite a long time, from when you and I first talked, where I said to you, ‘Look, I don’t know what I need to do here. I don’t know whether it’s a complete rebrand or a brand refresh’ – and actually you didn’t have an answer. We didn’t have an answer. We had to go through a process to figure that out. Accountant Online was growing very strongly.
When should a growing company consider a rebrand, or even a strategic repositioning? From your conversations with me – and I’m just one business owner you’ve worked with over many years – what’s the trigger for businesses to do what we did, going from Accountant Online to Kinore?
Ray Sheerin
I suppose it’s either of two things: one is if there’s an opportunity, and two is if there’s a threat. In the case of Accountant Online, I think it was an opportunity, more than a threat. It’s not as if others were moving into your space at speed and threatening your existence. But in developing the business, you had a sense of: okay, we’ve been doing this for going on twenty years – what’s going to happen next, what’s the vision for the future? Interestingly, when I first got involved, I did have a strong idea about whether you should rebrand or not.
Larissa Feeney
Okay.
Ray Sheerin
Yes, but I would also say there’s no point in my coming in and saying, ‘look, this is what you should do’. What you have to do, particularly in a founder-established business, is go through a stakeholder management process, so that you’re bringing everybody with you. A colleague of mine used to use an awful expression for this – ‘killing your own babies’. Not very nice, but Accountant Online was your baby, you’d set it up, and here’s an external person coming in and saying, ‘no, that’s not good’.
My view, when I first got involved with the brand, was that the two words were probably doing a disservice to where the business had grown to, and certainly weren’t fit for purpose for where you wanted it to get to. First, the word ‘accountant’, which was only reflective of a part of the services you provide, because there’s a much bigger set of services available. And then the second part, ‘online’ – that word had become quite dated, because pretty much every business is online these days.
So that was my initial thought on it, but what we needed to do was make sure we worked through that properly, and it was a great process – I’m not just saying that because I’m talking to you, I say this behind your back as well. It was a great process because everybody got involved, and your team were immensely hands-on in the whole thing. In fact, the name itself wasn’t chosen by me – I had a whole bunch of suggestions, but it was one of your team, Kelly, who came up with that name, and I think it’s a brilliant example of really good collaboration, where everybody is on the same side. That’s what stakeholder management is about.
Very often, in my part of the business, what happens is you can sometimes feel like you’re in opposition to the client you’re working with, or trying to get them to do something they don’t want to do. The trick is to make sure everybody understands that you’re working towards a common goal, and some good, robust stakeholder management will ensure the outcome is what it needs to be.
Larissa Feeney
I think what I should say is that, at the start of that process, and even right at the end of it, when we announced the rebrand, the overwhelming external view was: why are you doing this? From an external perspective looking into the business, we were very well known in the market. We’d invested massively in Accountant Online, in terms of brand and marketing, over several years. We were very well positioned, very well known. And the overwhelming question was why – why would you take something as easy to market as Accountant Online and move to something completely unknown in the market, like Kinore?
So for anybody listening, if you’re considering a rebrand, don’t necessarily listen to the people telling you not to do it, because if I’d listened to them at the time, I wouldn’t have done anything, I wouldn’t have made any change whatsoever.
Now, what you did, Ray, was – as you said – you didn’t tell us what to do, but we very much went on a journey together. Maybe you can talk a little about that, because you brought the team – representatives from across the entire team – on a journey where we looked at our core values, our tone of voice, and the current brand as it was. We asked questions of our clients, of the wider team, of the board, about what the brand represented and what they saw when they saw it. Then we compared that to what we wanted them to experience, see and feel when they saw the brand, and we ended up in a place where a rebrand was likely. Then we had to work out what that would actually look like. So maybe talk us through the journey you brought us on – I didn’t even know, really, that I was going on a journey.
Ray Sheerin
The stages would obviously depend on the particular project – it’ll vary by geography, category, age of business, size of business, and so on. But there are certain principles that hold. The first is the discovery process. Generally, when I, or anybody else who does what I do, gets involved with a business, what we try to do is get ourselves up to speed very quickly. The goal is to have almost as much knowledge about the business and its category, in terms of brand and marketing, as anybody in the organisation has – so there’s a very steep learning curve.
What we do to inform that is depth interviews with key stakeholders inside and outside the business, working from a structured questionnaire. The information that comes back is incredibly useful, because what it does is put ink on paper, as I like to say. Once you have that, people can agree or disagree with things, and that moves you towards an output or conclusion much more quickly than everybody sitting in a room doing a brainstorm.
Following that, what I’d generally do is come up with a whole series of hypotheses – different positionings, different propositions – expressed almost like a tagline with a piece of copy, and work through those with the stakeholders, normally in a workshop, to get to an output where you’re starting to get some sort of agreement. Quite often there are a couple of stages involved in that, and by the time you get to the end of it, that’s the point at which you’ve got the cornerstone for pretty much anything the business or the brand says about itself beyond that point. That’s where you get into all of the deliverables – brand guidelines, tone of voice guidelines, any comms, any marketing strategy – all of that falls out of it.
What I’d always say to people is that it’s really worth going through the process, even if you don’t end up doing anything. I have one example recently – I won’t name them, for obvious reasons – where I worked for about a year, on a pretty intensive basis, with a big international consultancy. We had a great engagement, all very interesting, super smart people who really kept me on my toes. But at the end of it, they decided they weren’t going to make the changes the process had recommended. Even though they’d been with it the whole way through the journey, when they sat down and considered it, they said, ‘we’re actually not going to do this’ – and they had good reasons for not doing it.
Now, to me that feels disappointing, because I know the effort that went in, and I know the thinking that came out the other end was really good. But they have a completely different viewpoint on it. What they’re saying is that it was a brilliant engagement, because going through it gave them much more confidence about what they’re saying about themselves and how they’re saying it. And what I’ve seen from them since, in terms of their communications, is that they’ve gone into overdrive on it – it’s almost as if they’ve resold themselves, they’ve really fallen in love with their own business. So their view is that it was immensely productive. Just because you start the process doesn’t necessarily mean you’re committing to changing anything – what you’re doing is just considering it.
Larissa Feeney
And can you give us a sense, in that case, of why the organisation made the decision not to make changes?
Ray Sheerin
Overall, I think they probably felt that where we’d got to was a little bit aspirational for them – it would have been a big leap, a very brave strategic move. The space they’re in is quite crowded, but what’s interesting is that there are parts of that space that aren’t crowded, and that maps directly onto the key skill set of the organisation I worked with. So what we found was real white space for them to go after. But they were reluctant to break that free from the rest of the market, because they thought, ‘are we really going to have to work much harder now to persuade people about what we do?’
I think it’s something they’ll end up doing. I suspect that in a year or two, they’ll come back to this and say, ‘okay, now we’re ready’ – because I’ve had that before, where you talk to an organisation and they decide they’re not going to do something, and then a couple of years later they come back and say, ‘okay, our circumstances, or the market, have changed, now we’d like to revisit this with a view to proceeding’.
Larissa Feeney
I do think there has to be an element of bravery involved in any rebrand. I definitely did not understand the impact a rebrand would have, and the sheer hard work it would take across loads of different areas of the business. Marketing is just one, brand building is just one – there was huge impact right across the business. At the heart of it, though, I fundamentally knew it was the right thing to do, and I never had a doubt about that, not once. But there were still a lot of challenges and changes we had to go through, not to mention the investment involved. It was a huge change.
I can understand why a brand would decide to go from, say in my case, Accountant Online to something like AOL, because that’s a change but not really a change. But what we did was a complete flip, which was 100% the right thing to do, but absolutely not the easiest thing to do.
Ray Sheerin
It’s interesting, talking about how much is involved, because in a way it was actually easier for your business than for a lot of organisations. Organisations with a physical presence – a high street presence, with signage, livery, that sort of thing – the costs of changing all of that can be very extensive. So it’s absolutely not to be underestimated, what’s involved, particularly in terms of the organisation and the time connected to it. The costs are a separate part of it, but all of that can be determined in advance. In your case, you could see, module by module, exactly what was involved, and you could have opted out at any stage and said, ‘let’s stop here’.
But it wasn’t just the rebrand – I’d call out that the marketing strategy we developed out of it as well was really very powerful. In fact, I use you as a bit of a poster child for the recommendations, because one of the things we talked about was relying less on paid-for online advertising and doing much more organic stuff. So I was encouraging you, and some of the other senior people in your organisation, to blog on a regular basis. What I now do when I’m talking to clients is say, ‘have a look at Kinore.com, follow them, see what’s going on’ – you’ll see all the various people blogging regularly, posting on LinkedIn and so on. I know that’s been very successful for you.
Larissa Feeney
It has, and it was a bit of a journey for us. Coming from Accountant Online, you’re absolutely right, our spend was massively focused on sales activation. In those days it was predominantly online advertising, predominantly through Google. I remember you said to me at some point, ‘I don’t think you’re best served by paying Google all of this money’. It was almost like a lightbulb moment in one way, and like a knife to the heart in another, because – what do you do if you don’t invest in Google? Google gives you the analytics, as I said earlier, exactly where you stand. It gave us a certain number of leads on a monthly basis, and that was great.
At its height, I think we were up around two hundred inbound leads a week. One of the reasons we rebranded was to intentionally decrease those leads, because it was too much, and the quality wasn’t where we needed it to be. So we completely reduced the leads by doing this. I think you had a vision for that a lot quicker than I did – I was definitely scared of making that move.
We successfully transitioned from that, and in the marketing strategy you prepared, Ray, I think you advised around 70% of spend going into brand activation, certainly within the first year or twenty-four months after the rebrand. That was about 100% more than we had spent in the past on brand activation, so we completely flipped it. And you’re right, we had to develop strategies around webinars, education, LinkedIn, storytelling really. That means we’re a lot more confident telling our story, and we don’t have to spend as much on Google. It doesn’t mean we’re spending much less overall from a marketing perspective, but the money’s going elsewhere, and it’s resulting in a very different type of client being attracted to Kinore, as a result of the messaging and our tone of voice, I think. That all comes from the rebrand process.
Ray Sheerin
In the 1990s, I ran a direct marketing agency. One of the things about direct marketing, which is actually incredibly useful in the whole world of digital and social, is that it’s very, very analytics-based. There were two things we used to measure very carefully whenever we ran a campaign, especially lead generation, which is essentially what direct marketing is all about. One was cost per lead. You get a certain number of leads, and then the second, more important, measure was cost per conversion. What we used to say to clients at the time was that a lead is great, but it’s a cost to your business, because you’re going to have to service that lead, and if you don’t convert it, that’s a lost cost – you’re not going to recover it. Whereas the devil in the detail of the cost per conversion is really where it’s at. That’s really key to bear in mind, as far as the quality and quantity of leads goes. If you’ve got a couple of hundred a week, there’s the cost to your organisation of fulfilling them, of responding to them.
Larissa Feeney
That’s exactly it – the team was so busy dealing with inbound leads we’d paid a lot for. It almost goes against everything you’d think is right, in terms of building a business, to actually try to reduce the number of leads coming in. Most businesses are trying to increase them, and we were actively trying to reduce them. We massively reduced the leads coming in, which was difficult in one way, because the team was used to dealing with a large volume of leads. That’s what I meant earlier when I said it impacted right across the business in ways I’d never have foreseen. But it was really important, because you’re right – you’re paying for every one of those, and they may not be the right fit for the business.
Ray Sheerin
Yes, I’ve seen this before, where an organisation’s got so many leads to contend with that they’re not doing a good enough job converting them. You think, what a waste of effort – whereas really focusing in, on fewer leads of much higher quality, is absolute sanity.
Larissa Feeney
It took us several months, probably more than a year, to get there. We’re now, I think, two years out from the rebrand, and it’s probably taken us until now – I don’t think I’m wrong in saying – to get comfortable with understanding what the new world looked like. I don’t think anybody could have foreseen it or planned for it better than we did. We put a lot of work into the planning, but that’s definitely one area we’ve had to learn as we’ve gone through the last couple of years.
Ray Sheerin
One of the things is that everybody’s learning all of the time. Everything is changing at such a rapid pace. I’m by no means an expert in AI, but that’s also going to fundamentally change everything – how it gets done, how business comes in, all of that. So I think businesses just need to be ready for the fact that it’s going to be a continuous learning process. The beauty of it, again, is that you’ve got the data, you’ve got the analytics, so with anything you do, you’ll be able to see what’s working and what’s not, pretty much instantly, within about twenty-four hours. You know where to pull back on resource, where to increase it. But you have to keep an open mind to continuous learning.
Larissa Feeney
And Ray, just a last question for you. If you were to give a single piece of advice to an ambitious business owner trying to build a memorable brand today, what would that be?
Ray Sheerin
I would say befriend somebody who is a creative thinker. I don’t necessarily mean somebody working in an ad agency as a creative, although there are plenty of those who’d be very useful. One of the things about a lot of businesses is that they tend to be very logical, very business-focused. Sometimes lateral thinking can change the dynamic utterly. There’s a great case – I worked with an agency in San Francisco where Steve Jobs essentially used one of their people as his right-hand man, just to have a creative brain working alongside him.
Businesses are full of people who are very logical, very rational, very financially based – needing to predetermine outcomes and measure everything in advance. What’s needed, therefore, is somebody with a different point of view, who can see the wood for the trees and make the leaps. There’s a great ad man in the UK called Rory Sutherland, who has a lovely expression: logic never solved a persistent problem, because if it could have, it would already have done so. So that’s permission to start thinking illogically. That’s where all the great breakthroughs take place – all the great inventions have come about not by people following one logical step after another, but by intuiting something and then figuring out whether it actually works. It’s a much more iterative process.
So what I’d say is, anybody in business, just befriend somebody – go for a pint or a cup of coffee with them, somebody you can just chat to and bounce stuff off. There was a guy I worked with over many years who put a team of people together, because he was working in innovation for a big global business at the time, and one of the team members was a Catholic priest. I remember thinking at the time that that was pretty bonkers, but he got a different perspective from each person in the room. Instead of groupthink, which I think happens so often in organisations, having people with that different mindset and different worldview is just enormously beneficial.
Larissa Feeney
I think that’s really great advice, and a great place to end the podcast. Logic never solved a persistent problem – is that right? That’s fantastic. Ray, thank you so much for sharing your strategic expertise, and for helping us shape the Kinore brand. Thank you very much, Ray.
Ray Sheerin
Total pleasure. Thanks again for asking me, Larissa.
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