Päivi Koskinen: Why Brands Matter

This opportunity to work for three months for another company inside Bonnier Group has proven to be very important, especially as an opportunity to have some time off from my daily routines and look back and evaluate how I'll see everything. Too often, you get attached to one way of seeing things and can't see outside the box anymore.  But GROW has also proven to be valuable in fully understanding the operations of Bonnier and its numerous highly-valued brands. Branding is one of my passions.  Actually, I should say that it's marketing communications because it is the main tool in brand-building and brand management.

Every once in a while people decide that it's time to do some branding work. But for what reason? It is easily just a whim from marketing people and the reasons and objectives behind it aren't usually very clear to people involved or they are not communicated well. The first question that should be asked is how is the current brand experienced? The answer is not easy and it doesn't come from intuition. Even though I believe in a successfully-managed brand, intuition plays a certain role. Our brands' audiences are the only people able to evaluate the brand experience and only after understanding how they feel towards our brands can we analyze what is wrong with the current branding approach.

Corporated branding and brand hierarchy is another thing. After mergers, rechecking of existing companies and brands is a common practice. This is a slow process and from what I have understood, Bonnier has started the process some time ago in order to clarify the corporate name and its global usage. I read about this from local intranet and I was glad to see that the message was from CEO not "just" from marketing people. The current brand work is about corporate communications.  Individual brand titles live their own lives in the minds of the consumers. It is disturbing to me to see the tendency to try to unify brands and not let them live their own lives and see if they build up to something valuable. I believe that the portfolio of different brands is more than their sum in brand assessment.

Well, I'm hoping that we don't forget the values of brands, especially in the transition phase that faces magazines in digitalization or during this sour economic situation, where management is forced to make decisions to make cutbacks and organize operations to work more efficiently. As said, it is only in the long run when the benefits of uniquely built brands can be seen.

I'm looking forward to the next weeks here at Bonnier Corporation. I was asked to do some competitive analysis, which I find very interesting - not just for me to deepen my understanding of magazines, but also get better insights into what kind of competition Bonnier Corporation's brands are facing and what could be learned from them.