On his own admission, David Wiggins of brewing giant Coors is not popular with design agencies. “We had to be prepared to turn round to the agencies and say ‘this is the way we are going to work, and if you don’t like it, there are plenty of people who do’. You have to have some bold conversations – and the agencies can get quite upset.”
The reason for those “bold conversations” is Coors’ desire to have maximum control over its brand equity through its relationship with Schawk, the US-owned brand imaging and asset management firm.
Schawk is responsible for managing Coors’ brand assets, including Carling and Grolsch, and the two organisations between them are the brand custodians. The agencies still have a role, but Wiggins says, “they are now doing what they excel at, they are just producing the creative”.
“There is no point paying agencies a premium rate to do something they are not good at,” Wiggins continues. “When the agencies get through the pain of being told ‘this revenue stream is going away because you are not very good at it’, they realise they are playing to their strengths.”
The two firms started working together in October 2001. Schawk originally provided Coors with reprographic services for POS, commercial print and packaging. It also agreed to provide those services on site at the Coors brewery in Burton-on-Trent with support facilities provided by Schawk Newcastle. The relationship has since developed well beyond that agenda however.
Wiggins joined the business roughly six years ago with a history in packaging innovation and development, and in developing brand asset management tools.
“Traditionally, agencies had designed the branding, and then different people took that branding and dropped it into different media. Unintentionally, this created the opportunity for those brands to become corrupted. Yet as a business we look after some of the biggest brands in the country, and we spend a lot of money on how those brands are seen by consumers,” he says.
Such a situation was not acceptable, and the solution was the concept of a “single source of truth”.
He explains: “I believe absolutely that if you are going to invest a lot of money in your brand equity, then you must faithfully reproduce it whenever it is seen by the consumer. You have to create a single source of truth for all your brand images.”
First, though, he had to win the backing of his own board. To underline his point, Wiggins tells a story about a board report which had “seven or eight logos on the front” and only one of them was being used correctly. “The report’s author had dug into a filing cabinet, pulled out the images available and scanned them into Powerpoint. So we said to the board, if you are getting it wrong, then how do you expect everyone else to get it right.”
As a result, an amnesty around the business was declared, and everybody’s filing cabinets were emptied of marketing materials. That, though, was the easy bit. Having identified the problem, what would a solution look like? Enter Captain Cook. “We knew we had to improve the situation but at the time had no clear idea of what the solution was,” Wiggins admits. “We called it Project Cook because it was a journey into the unknown, just like Cook’s.”
In fact, Coors knew where it wanted to end up – it just did not know exactly how to get there. The ambition was clear – a common central resource for all business images, available to anybody that needed them, in a form that was most appropriate for their use. Consistency matters, Wiggins says, because the way you develop is to deepen your relationship with your consumers, so the brand has to look the same everywhere it appears.
The phrase “appropriate for use” was also key. Whatever was developed had to be able to deliver appropriate images for different circumstances – Coors did not want a salesman trying to send a Powerpoint presentation to a customer with a high resolution reprographics file in it. The file would simply be too big.
Today, a key role for Schawk is to look after the database and keep the information available in whatever forms are appropriate. The database lives outside the Coors firewall, so Schawk also provides all the software and structures that allow Coors’ staff access.
“Any Coors employee can use that database,” Wiggins stresses. “I think that is really important. Access to the images is not restricted to the marketing guys.”
What is more, this is not a file of logos. The database contains all of Coors’ corporate images, photographs of the board, pictures of the breweries, lifestyle shots for advertising and promotional materials, elements of raw artwork, print layouts, and more.
“When we first wrote our brief in the days of Project Cook, we knew what we wanted to deliver, but we could not write a specification for it,” Wiggins continues. “Our relationship with Schawk was born out of the fact that they had the right technology, but also shared the vision of the direction we wanted to go in.
“We knew we could improve the way we worked, we knew we would save money – we could not justify doing it if we did not – but we did not know where we’d end up.”
In effect, Coors and Schawk have created a win-win, where the client benefits from Schawk’s world-wide resources, technology and expertise, has far better control of its brand equity – and is faster to market and saves money at the same time, in particular through reduced duplication of artwork, photography and colour separation. Indeed, Schawk says that it managed to reduce the costs of design and production on just one piece of packaging for Carling by £47,000.
“We still go to an agency for the original brand iconography – in the case of Carling it would be the lozenge,” Wiggins explains. That goes on to a database of prime data, which needs to be used in a number of places – packaging, POS, communication, the stuff the sales teams leave behind, job ads, ad campaigns, promotions, t-shirts, pens, bags, and so on.
“Because the images are all on one database, and because they are stored in a way that does not allow them to be altered, they are not going to devalue, and whoever uses an image is going to use the correct one. That is my single source of truth. What’s more, if I am a brand manager, and want to know the history of where that brand imagery has been used, I can go back to the database, search it, pick up all the artwork and reuse it.”
The system also aids the effective and accurate sharing of good ideas across different brands. “If someone has done a really nice point of sale for Carling, and I want to use similar imagery for Coors Fine Light, I can go to the studio here and merge the two, creating a new piece of imagery without having to go back to an agency.”
In the past, marketing would brief somebody to rework one of the “raw” images.
“So every time I needed something new, I’d pay an art worker to redraw one of the images, and they might not get it right. You end up diluting quality and squandering the massive investment you have made in your brand equity,” Wiggins concludes.
But having worked together for several years now, how do Coors and Schawk stop the relationship getting stale – and with technology changing so fast, how does Coors make sure it is still getting value for money? Long-term relationship or not, Wiggins makes it clear that he can go out and bid the contract any time he likes.
This is not an approach that seems to bother Schawk’s Stephen Marshman. “It is about not standing still and not getting comfortable. We might be six years in, but it is essential that we keep challenging each other.”
Schawk’s performance is continually measured against an agreed set of metrics – for example, quality and lead times – and that is complemented by periodic performance reviews. In addition, Coors treats the Schawk on-site team as they would any Coors employee. So they receive annual appraisals, performance monitoring, improvement plans and so on.
Schawk also takes it upon itself to invest and innovate so that it can give its clients first mover benefit of technological developments – an approach it says it can deliver because of its global reach and size. For Wiggins, that is a big plus. “I expect Schawk to come to me and say ‘have you seen this development in technology, it will enable you to do x better, faster?’”
Creating artwork is only part of the journey, however. The next stage is to get it printed, and that is another crucial element in the Coors-Schawk relationship.
“For example, getting reprographics right across six colours, across a number of substrates, across a number of printers is a whole different level of technology to working in four colours,” Wiggins says.
“The technology behind it is vast. I could set up here to do it myself, but the technology is very expensive and rapidly changing. So the best way of me buying that is to go to somewhere like Schawk Newcastle – who are industry leaders in this – and share that investment with all the other customers that they deal with.”
• www.schawk.com
• www.coorsbrewers.com