CANADIAN ICONS The best (and worst) managed brands in the country. John Gray – Canadian Business Effective brand management is supposed to give businesses an edge in the increasingly competitive marketplace. A good brand should set your business apart, convince consumers to seek out your product or service and help inoculate you from upstarts that haven't established their own recognizable brands. But it is the relatively new brands--such as Tim Hortons, President's Choice, Cirque du Soleil and WestJet--that Canadians believe are the best managed. Indeed, for the second year in a row, Tim Hortons topped the list of Canada's best-managed brands, with 52% of respondents choosing the purveyor of coffee and doughnuts--up from 42% last year, according to a national survey of readers of Canadian Business and Marketing magazines.
Tim Hortons, founded 40 years ago by Ron Joyce and hockey legend Tim Horton, beat out Canada's banks, insurance firms and retailers--many of whose brands have been around for more than a century. "In a lot of ways, Canada has been a bit of a sheltered market, where managers didn't have to learn to compete against more aggressive brands," says Tim Woolstencroft, managing partner of the Strategic Counsel, a Toronto-based market research firm. "In a relatively short period of time, Tim Hortons has managed to become Canada's most venerable brand."
The Strategic Counsel, along with Toronto-based branding agency Spencer Francey Peters, conducted the survey in March and April. Nearly 1,000 readers responded to an Internet-based questionnaire that asked them to rank Canada's best- and worst-managed brands, as well as the best-managed brands in more than a dozen separate categories. The margin of error for this survey is ±3.14%, 19 times out of 20. The full results of the survey will be available on our website, canadianbusiness.com.
Other top-performing brands are even younger than Tim Hortons. The President's Choice brand of premium products, as well as the exotic performing troupe Cirque du Soleil, were both founded in the early '80s. WestJet, the Calgary-based airline, has been flying for less than a decade--a blink of an eye in the world of branding, where most global powerhouse brands like Coca-Cola, Disney and Ford go back generations. But many of Canada's historic brands have faltered recently. The 335-year-old Hudson's Bay Co. continues to lose money and customers, while Canada's banks didn't even make the Top 10 list.
Molson Canadian was one of the few historic brands to rank highly, with 14% of the votes. And the 219-year-old brewer is no longer even purely Canadian: it's now part of the Coors beer empire, after a long and nasty shareholder battle to approve a merger with the Colorado-based company. But Molson has the dubious distinction of appearing on the lists of both best- and worst-managed brands, with 8% of those surveyed ranking it as one of the worst.
Some long-lived brands like Loblaw and Canadian Tire continued to score highly, but others didn't fare so well. Hockey Night In Canada--one of last year's top-scoring brands--has been severely damaged by the National Hockey League labour dispute that forced the cancellation of the recent season. This year, just 6% of respondents ranked the ritual hockey telecast as one of Canada's best brands--down from 13% last year.
The long-standing labour dispute between Telus Corp. and its unionized workers in Western Canada, however, appears not to have damaged the brand of the Vancouver-based telecommunications provider. This year, 10% of those surveyed ranked Telus as one of Canada's best-managed brands, a dramatic change from last year, when 16% ranked it as one of the worst. Telus itself is a relatively new brand--at least to those outside the western provinces. It only began offering its mobile phone service in the east in 2000, when it purchased Clearnet Communications.
Telus is the only telecommunications company to make it to the list of best-managed brands. For the second year in a row, telco giants Bell and Rogers Wireless (Rogers owns Canadian Business and Marketing magazines) both received low scores: 14% ranked Bell as one of the worst-managed brands, 13% chose Rogers. Brand management in Canada's telecommunications category offers unique challenges (see story, page 43). Few companies have as many points of contact with customers as the telcos: consumers rely on them for their telephone and cable service, cellphones, Internet and pagers. But so much exposure makes building brand equity more--not less--difficult. "Every dropped call, every minor error in your bill, annoys the customer and makes it that much more difficult to build your brand," says Peter Francey, president and CEO of Spencer Francey Peters.
It doesn't help to build brand loyalty when a mainstay of telco marketing is telling one another's customers they should switch because they are being shafted by hidden fees, high rates or poor service. Those lucky new customers are offered low introductory rates and free equipment to entice them to move, while loyal customers feel they get little but an ever-increasing pile of bills.
It's not just telco brands that consistently scored low; so did most airlines (see story, page 41). While WestJet ranked among the best-managed brands, both Jetsgo--the defunct discounter that left thousands stranded when it collapsed in March--and Air Canada are at the bottom of the list. But it's not all bad news for Air Canada: this year, only 30% labelled it the worst-managed brand, down from 46% a year earlier.
The emergence of new and innovative brands is good news for consumers. Older companies can no longer afford to rest on their laurels and depend on goodwill to keep their businesses afloat. If they want to stay on top, companies must continue to focus and innovate their products and services to keep their brands fresh. After all, they may own their products, but it is consumers who ultimately own the brand. |