Why company anniversaries bring no value to your brand and how to celebrate instead
In our part of the world, we see numerous high-budget brand communication campaigns centered around the age of the brand or brand anniversaries. Most of them have either a sales-oriented message (‚on our 10th anniversary, 10% off of all our products’) or a positioning oriented one (‚10 years of family care’), but some only mention the brand name and its current age, sometimes presented in the abbreviated form of an anniversary logo.
Over the years, we must admit to having designed more than our fair share of anniversary logos at Brandtailors. Besides struggling to introduce extra graphic elements without ruining the original brand identity, it didn’t amount to much – the real issue in these projects is to avoid damaging the brand while trying to bring a fleeting slither of value.
From a brand strategy perspective, anniversary communication campaigns don’t hurt anyone and are not harmful in any way – the thing is that they take the place of more relevant and valuable campaign messages that could build long term brand value.
Bearing that in mind, it makes almost no sense to develop brand campaigns to communication how old your brand is. Here’s why:
- important & differentiating – if your brand can boast no more than 30 years old of market presence, that doesn’t seem an impressive number and people are not likely to be awed, although you and me both know it wouldn’t have been easy to stay on top of things for this long in this ever-shifting business environment. When most other brands are the same age as yours, the number wouldn’t even be differentiating – trust me, there are other things that would set your brand apart. So, if a communication message is neither memorable nor differentiating, why even bother?
- long-lasting – let’s say that, against all odds, you manage to turn your brand’s age into a strong brand association – then what? As a common feature of age is that it changes every year, all you would have managed is to generate an ephemeral butterfly of an association instead of a solid long-lasting bridge that could get you across to your desired brand KPIs or to a more consolidated market position.
- memorable & relevant – do you know how old your favourite brands are? Or, more importantly, do you care? If the answer is no, you probably count yourself among the vast majority of consumers for whom other things are more important and relevant than the length of time a company or another has been in business. People don’t remember how old brands are, despite having seen or heard the information, and it wouldn’t make a difference in brand KPI even if they did remember.
I am a strong supporter of facts and figures as central information of brand communication messages and, if you are looking to replace the yearly brand anniversary, here are some ideas of numbers you can communicate to bring true value to both your brand and its consumers:
- star ratings or any other type of quality assessments made by the consumers
- number of positive online reviews
- number of clients served during the brand lifetime or in a certain amount of time
- number of brand products sold/manufactured/consumed in a certain amount of time
- scores and ratings obtained in competitions judged by professionals
- number of product/services related awards gained in contests and competitions
- any relevant numbers about your product recipes or service methodologies that could bring value to your brand.
What do we do with brand anniversaries, though?
Despite it being irrelevant to your clients or consumers, they must be important somehow and worth mentioning. Their most cherished role is inside the companies.
The value of brand anniversaries to the employer brand is pivotal, it is a celebratory moment in the life of the brand and in the careers of people closest to the brand. It can be a perfect moment to share stories, bring the team together, inspire them for the future with the magnetism of a warm retrospective glance. In the case of brands – as with people – anniversaries are true reasons for joy only for the people closest to the celebrated one.