Virgin Spreads
By Jackson Mahr - Brandchannel.com

There have been many column inches written about Virgin’s enormous brand strength and its seemingly voracious appetite for new business ventures. It is apparently this same brand strength that allows Virgin to compete is a huge variety of countries and market sectors, but how much truth is there to this claim?

Conventional wisdom says that brand strength comes from a brand’s single strong message, its ability to convey a powerful message to consumers in a simple, yet often abstract way. But Virgin doesn’t appear to have a single message anymore—the company that once floated the Sex Pistols past Parliament on a Thames riverboat now sells cars, credit cards and pension funds.

Virgin is still a strong, recognizable brand, but much of its meaning has been diluted. It used to have the image of being the rebel, of siding with the consumer in the face of bureaucracy and monopoly, but with Virgin Trains and the Virgin Credit Card it doesn’t have that image anymore. It used to be a brand that catered to young audiences, those living the lifestyle of the young and rebellious, but with Virgin Cars and Virgin Atlantic it doesn’t really have that image either.

The communication challenges of Virgin’s brands stem from the odd collection of Virgin businesses; Virgin has interests in selling trans-Atlantic flights, records, cola, lingerie, electricity, trains, concerts, holidays and mobile phones, to name but a few. As the group has diversified, the brand message has weakened—a phenomenon that isn’t unique to Virgin, brands such as FedEx have had similar challenges over time. In these cases, the solution has been to realign brands by cutting out the confusing sub-brands, names, graphic styles, or even individual business lines to present a more uniform look. FedEx renamed its entire portfolio of products and sub-brands, focusing on the more uniform but various Fedex brands; they absorbed Kinkos as “Fedex Kinkos” into the new consistent brand structure.

Virgin's brands don’t really make for a comfortable fit, visually or culturally, with each other. It seems that simply adding the word “Virgin” to a multitude of businesses doesn’t necessarily make the Virgin brand any stronger. A measure of a brand’s strength can lie in answering the question “what do you do?” in as short a sentence as possible. For example, ask someone this question about Ferrari and the answer could be “they make cool cars,” the reply for Google could be “they give you great answers.” Ask the question about Virgin and the answer could run into several paragraphs.

The mixed bag of business identities is reflected in the brands’ visual styles of the various sub-brands. The consistent elements of the color red and the original Virgin hand-drawn text are there, and these are still powerful visual devices. But from a strategic perspective, many of the sub-brands seem poorly thought out; place them side by side and they don’t make sense as a single message anymore. While this doesn’t make the individual brands less recognizable, it does weaken the consistency of the overall brand message.

Virgin does have a consistent visual element to its brand—the founder himself. Richard Branson has never been shy of launching a new Virgin business in a hot air balloon or a wedding dress. But attaching this great brand icon also has its drawbacks. If Branson should want to sell one of his businesses, what is the business worth if the biggest brand element, Branson himself, is no longer associated with promoting it?

This problem can work against Virgin as well. Take Virgin Records or Britain’s Virgin Radio as examples. Virgin Radio was sold to SMG and is, therefore, no longer part of the Virgin group. While it could be seen as a benefit to have Virgin’s brand retained to promote the rest of the Virgin companies, what would happen if a scandal were to occur with Virgin Radio that was nothing to do with Virgin as a whole? In other words, a high profile part of the Virgin brand is now controlled by a company that has nothing to do with Virgin at all, a situation that could leave Virgin open to difficulties down the road.

Virgin isn’t a leading brand in any of its businesses. Whether it is flights, electricity or music, Virgin is simply one of the market players but never the market leader. Virgin may be an internationally recognized brand, but Virgin Cosmetics isn’t, nor is Virgin Cola, Virgin Active or Virgin Cars.

The problem is that the company doesn’t innovate the way that Apple or Samsung have been doing. Instead it takes an existing service or product and undercuts prices, or offers a variation on the business model. Virgin Megastores followed HMV Megastores; Apple’s iTunes Music Store was followed by Virgin’s own less expensive version. This is great business thinking, and a welcome alternative to the competition when it is done well, but this is not the same thing as good branding. While nobody doubts Virgin’s credentials as a strong global business, a strong business is not the same as a strong brand. A really powerful brand is made not when a business is merely better, but when it is different, when it stands for something simple and powerful in people’s minds.

Virgin is, however, a bold experiment. For all the brand’s weaknesses, it is one of the few brands that can, through a series of licensing deals, realize its brand equity into real dollars and cents. It is one of the few cases of a single name being applied across a seemingly disparate collection of businesses in a variety of markets.

However, in the UK, Virgin’s birthplace, the company doesn’t really grab headlines anymore. This happens mostly in new markets such as Australia, where its airline made a big impact against established, sluggish and arrogant competitors. It is a brand with various concurrent growth phases; while it is a mere baby in Melbourne, it is mature, if not middle-aged in London. And this makes for interesting observation: can Virgin do as well as a mature establishment player as it does as the new kid in town? It will be interesting to see what the Virgin brand means in another 20 years.