Trust and Recognition
“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself a loser.”
—William Shakespeare, Othello, Act II, Scene III
The increasing use of technology for retrieving information has been an impetus for some publishers to align their corporate name or brand more closely with digital formats and platforms, particularly as the amount of their own digital content grows as a percentage of their product portfolio. For example, Rosen Publishing, a major publisher of nonfiction library and educational books, uses “Rosen Digital” as a marketing imprint for its databases and epointplus for its e-books. Pearson, the largest global publisher, established “Pearson Digital Learning” to represent its instructional technology offerings.
Without mounting a major, persistent, and costly public relations campaign, the effort involved in changing brand perceptions can be like using a hairdryer to melt a glacier. But when a market undergoes a paradigm shift, aligning the company’s brand with market trends and expectations is an important step in responding to disruption and in positioning the brand for future growth.
Historically, many well-known multinational companies have made name and logo changes as a way of embracing a shift in their product strategy and refocusing their brand. In the 1920s, Computing Tabulating Recording Corp became International Business Machines, and later simply IBM; Lucky Chemical Industrial Corp became Lucky Goldstar, then LG in 1995; the Nintendo Playing Card Company became Nintendo; and Apple Computer changed its name to Apple when the iPhone became its best-selling and most profitable product. As diverse as these companies are, they all made the name change in an effort to better align themselves to market trends and consumer preferences for their more technology-driven and strategic products. In hindsight, and in light of the Internet’s explosive growth, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was too quaint of a name for an ambitious search engine, regardless of how one responds today to the “Yahoo!” brand.
Looking for a Fit
When the choice between the two brand names and logos comes up in actual product branding discussions on licensed products, I usually let the licensee choose, and defer to its sense of what its market’s preference will be—and which branding option will help them sell more products.
Outside of the big newspaper and magazine publishers (which reside more in the media sector), few publishers (even large ones) have the kind of consumer brand awareness that can make a significant difference in their ability to market, sell, or license products based on their name alone. In the publishing industry, authors like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, or book series like The Hunger Games or A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), have more brand awareness than the publishers that brought these properties to market.
For this reason, publishers often look to consumer brands when making licensing deals and also take into consideration how much market preference a brand might have in a specific publishing segment. For example, Disney, one of the most recognized global brands whose products appeal to similar demographics in many cultures, has been an excellent brand for building successful licensees, not just in videos, games, and toys, but in the publishing industry as well. The Disney brand is often a trusted and preferred brand among parents, especially when used for products aimed at young children. We can find the Disney brand on a wide range of books and interactive e-books, handheld devices for kids, and websites in dozens of languages. Many publishers license the Disney brand to help sell their own locally produced content—from coloring books to high-end picture books. As with all successful global branding strategies, the Disney brand is promoted differently depending on the language and culture while satisfying strict corporate licensing guidelines.
Book licensing for companies like Disney, Lucas Films, Warner Bros., or Sesame Street, to name a few of the global brands with youthful demographic appeal, is not only a very big business—it’s basically an industry in itself. At the same time, these successful megabrands may not be as valuable in some publishing areas as in others. With the exception of products for very young children in a few Asian markets, educational licensing, for example, is not Disney’s most active publishing category. Nor does the Disney brand resonate as well in reference publishing as, say, National Geographic, the BBC, or Oxford University Press. With this in mind, a publisher in Korea might be better off with using Oxford than Disney if it wanted to produce a line of dictionaries for young people.
