Just a quickie with a comment on brand, as I'm fascinated by the rumours that are circulating amongst marketing folk this morning that 'Everything Everywhere', the company that owns both the T-Mobile and Orange mobile networks is set to ditch both of them in order to launch an umbrella brand linked to the Everything Everywhere company name...
Since the rumours started the company has attempted to clarify by suggesting that rather than ditch orange and T-mobile they are planning to launch a third brand based on a '4G proposition' which will operate alongside their two existing mobile brands. We don't really know what this means, although some reports suggest that Everything Everywhere recently put in a number of trademark applications for names which link 4G with the Everything Everywhere company name (Brand Republic, 2012).
Why would they do this? Well, the mobile phone market is essentially operating under oligopolistic market conditions with a few key players dominating the space and in some markets like this there are considerable benefits in carrying several brands within the same product category. The first and most obvious is that this enables you to target specific groups with messages and product offerings tailored to them. However there is a secondary benefit and one which we may see becoming more and more important in this market in future years. That benefit is flooding...
No, not literally flooding (although I know it's probably on your mind after the summer we've had...), but flooding in relation to search results. Multiple brands offer companies the ability to flood out their competitors when they are searching for a provider. What does this mean? Well, let's take an example from the insurance sector....
If you're looking for car insurance and you go to a price comparison web site, you might do a search and find yourself faced with a long list of quotes which appear to be from a range of different providers. In truth, they may all be brands owned by one parent company, but because they have so many different products on offer they push their competitors down the search results. We're less and less likely to look beyond the first few providers when we do a search, so whichever brand you choose from those at the top of the list, the same insurance company wins your business.
Insurance companies deliberately create some brands just to do this job for them - they don't promote them heavily anywhere else (no big budget advertising campaigns with nodding dogs or comedians here) - they are purely functional in flooding out search results.
It seems to me that as we become more and more likely to search for competitive deals on mobiles and mobile contracts that mobile networks and providers will adopt similar strategies. This could be what we're seeing here from Everything Everywhere.
If the rumours that they may ditch T-Mobile and Orange are true I'd say they would be foolish to do so - not so much in the case of T-Mobile, which for me has always been a very weak brand - but in the case of Orange which has such strength and clarity of positioning in the market, throwing all that equity away would seem to be a big mistake.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see whether Everything Everywhere are as bold as their company name suggests...
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