Shetland Marketing

You are here: Welcome to ShetlandMarketing.org » The Shetland Brand Project » FAQs

FAQs

In this section, we offer answers to some of the many questions that have been asked about the marketing of Shetland over recent years. Here they are…

Did Shetland Islands Council pay £180,000 for a logo?

Why did Shetland Islands Council hire a London agency instead of someone local?

Why are brands important?

Does Shetland have a brand?

What is Shetland’s brand?

Why a Shetland brand project?

Why was there confusion after the report on the brand was published?

Why can’t I use the brand?

How can we make the Shetland brand stronger and market Shetland more effectively?

 

Did Shetland Islands Council Pay £180,000 For A Logo?

No. The logo was the most publicised but least important part of the work that Corporate Edge did. The real value of their work lay in the analysis of Shetland’s strengths and weaknesses and of the market sector in which we were most likely to be successful. Apart from that, other sources of funding (including Highlands and Islands Enterprise and LEADER) were involved.

Back to top

Why Did Shetland Islands Council Hire A London Agency Instead Of Someone Local?

For two reasons. Firstly, Corporate Edge is one of the leading firms in this field. Their client list has included New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Diageo and Edinburgh Castle; locally, there was no firm with comparable experience. Secondly, the project was partly about Shetland’s external reputation, about seeing ourselves as others see us. The overwhelming majority of our actual and potential customers are outside Shetland. Those who commissioned the project quite rightly took the view that people based outside Shetland were more likely to give us an accurate impression in that respect.

Back to top

Why Are Brands Important?

Brands guide our choices, because we decide what to buy or where to go on the basis of the reputation of a particular brand. If we’re looking for a holiday in a place that offers sun, sand and sea in the company of an 18-30 age group, we have a choice of places to go and a choice of tour operators to get us there. If we want a quiet walking holiday, a safari, or a city break, we’ll find places that specialise in these things. Exactly the same is true of products and services. People have clear expectations of names like Coca-Cola, Marks and Spencer, MTV, Apple, Bebo or Facebook, Oxfam, BBC Radio 4, Argos, Google or Sony.

Brands aim for different sectors of the market. Some people, seeing that a travel agent specialises in 18-30 holidays, will head straight into the shop whilst others will move on. Some retail chains try to appeal entirely to bargain-hunters; on the other hand, not long ago, one beer promoted itself as ‘reassuringly expensive’.

Service is important too, especially in the discriminating sector of the market at which Shetland is aiming. Staff must know about whatever it is they’re selling and they need to be attentive, confident and friendly. Complaints must be dealt with in a helpful manner. In all of these things, they need training and support.

These days, many purchasers are also concerned about other things; for example, Marks and Spencer’s Plan A focuses very much on the company’s ethical and environmental policies, because they know that many of their customers are concerned about these issues. As we explain elsewhere on this site, our customers are likely to share such concerns.

All of these different things build up a picture in customers’ minds, often called a brand image. Successful brands will be the ones that manage to build a strong reputation among the customers that are most interested in their particular offer.

Back to top

Does Shetland Have A Brand?

Shetland has had a reputation for as long as people have lived here or visited the islands, from the Pictish community onwards. In that sense, it has always had a brand. Places have brands because every place has a reputation. We associate certain things with (say) Switzerland, Texas, or Ibiza.

Some places have strong reputations that are shared by many people all over the world, like New York, Hong Kong or Japan. Other places have reputations that are locally strong but otherwise not widely known. Within Shetland, for instance, we probably associate Whalsay with enterprise in fishing, with a particular dialect and with the Hanseatic period, but few people outside Shetland would share these impressions. Some places have weak reputations and thus weak brands: compare, for instance, Oxford, which has a strong, world-wide brand, with another city of the same size, Târgu Mures in Romania, which is little known outside that country.

We use brands as a kind of shorthand, a quick (and, indeed, a rather lazy) way of summing up a product or a place. People will often link Africa with a few assumptions and prejudices, often involving poverty, war and corruption, ignoring the vast diversity of the continent and the successes and wonders that it embraces.

A place clearly isn’t the same as (say) a chain of supermarkets, in the sense that no government, even in a dictatorship, can exercise the same sort of control as a board of directors. Although reputations are vital for both countries and shops, they have to be managed differently; and dictatorships tend, for the most part, to develop pretty poor reputations.

So, Shetland has a brand, just as any other place does, and it has had one for as long as people have lived or visited here.

For more about place brands, it’s worth visiting Simon Anholt’s site or consulting one of his books. He developed the idea of place and nation brands and the previous few paragraphs take particular account of his thinking.

Back to top

What Is Shetland’s Brand?

One of the things we need to do is understand better what Shetland’s brand is; in other words, we need to see ourselves as others see us. What are we known for?

If we stopped a hundred people at random in, say, London, the chances are that some would never have heard the name, but that most would mention pullovers and ponies. Some would have a bit more to say, based possibly on having seen newspaper or television coverage, and might mention wildlife or oil. A small percentage might have much more detailed knowledge, maybe because they’d visited the islands or had friends here, or were bird or traditional music enthusiasts.

Compared to London, knowledge of Shetland would probably be a bit better in Edinburgh and Glasgow, a bit worse in New York and Berlin and extremely limited in Xian or Târgu Mures. Around the world, there would be isolated spots where Shetland was relatively well known: Maloy in Norway or parts of New Zealand would be among these.

Having associations with ponies and pullovers is in some ways a pretty good start: after all, we could be associated with crime or chemical factories. Thinking about those pullovers, though, it’s clear that the picture is distorted. Only the tiniest fraction of those described as ‘Shetland’ is made here; the description is applied (and loosely, at that) to a style of knitwear. Very few of our interviewees, even in places as close as Edinburgh or Aberdeen, would know about the range of knitwear we currently produce in Shetland.

Something else we must bear in mind is that there is quite a large proportion of the public that not only doesn’t know about what we have, but wouldn’t want it, because it doesn’t fit their requirements for (for example) cheapness or the presence of a global fashion label.

If these assumptions are anywhere close to the mark, what can we learn? Possibly that:

• Among most people in the world, Shetland’s brand image, where it exists at all, is probably quite faint, very incomplete and usually inaccurate
• With a few exceptions, the image will be stronger and more accurate, and therefore a better foundation on which to build, in centres of population that are closer to us
• Only a proportion of the public is likely to be interested in what we offer, so we’d do best to concentrate our efforts on reaching people whose backgrounds and interests suggest that they are potential customers.

Back to top

Why A Shetland Brand Project?

During the 1990s, there was a growing realisation that Shetland, in various ways, wasn’t making much impact in the marketplace. For example, there had been long-standing difficulties over the use of the name ‘Shetland’ in connection with knitwear. A brand involving the ‘Shetland Lady’ had been introduced, and had some success, but in a sense it served to confirm that Shetland had lost control of its identity. Another example comes from the salmon farming sector. We’d built an early reputation as a place that produced better salmon than other areas. However, that was gradually diluted as multinational firms increasingly used Shetland as a place in which to grow fish that were either ‘Scottish’ or simply anonymous.

At the same time, people in Shetland were becoming ever more aware that other areas had been much more successful at making a name for themselves. The most frequently-cited example was Orkney; their products were identified as Orcadian in the marketplace and the various elements of Orkney’s economy, such as beef, cheese, fudge, whisky, jewellery, tourism and the arts, all seemed to be reinforcing one another. The Council studied what they’d achieved and was forced to conclude that Orkney had firmly established an identity for its products whereas Shetland was heavily committed to a bulk, ‘commodity’ market in which the islands’ name had simply disappeared. Orkney was far from being the only example. At very different scales, Ireland and Arran were also seen to be making rapid progress.

The ‘commodity’ basis of much Shetland production was based on an assumption that somebody, somewhere would buy whatever we produced and that our products could compete (anonymously) against other generic products. If that was the chosen approach, low price was especially important. Trade buyers who didn’t mind where their salmon or knitwear came from could easily switch between Shetland and Chile, or Korea and Shetland. At lower price points, the final customer would be less likely to buy on the basis of where the product came from and more likely to buy on the basis of price.

Other Shetland producers felt that the only way to survive was to gain a better price for Shetland products. That meant that they had to be differentiated from the products from other places. Gradually, as competition in the ‘generic’ market became tougher, the argument for building a reputation for Shetland that would add identity and value became more powerful. The solution was seen as the ‘brand’ project.

Back to top

Why Was There Confusion After The Report On The Brand Was Published?

When the report on the Shetland brand came out, the really important sections, which set out Shetland’s strengths, described our target customer and explained how reputation might be built, attracted hardly any attention. All the debate (not to mention all the humour) was about whether this was the right logo for Shetland.

www.shetlandartsandcrafts.co.uk/smirkink.html

This had three consequences:

• Firstly, the underlying messages were lost and the debate that needed to be had about how Shetland might move forward simply didn’t take place at that time.
• Secondly, because the brand was seen as amounting to no more than a logo, it was assumed that the next stage would involve applying it to products from Shetland. This was a reasonable assumption, indeed the consultants had proposed that that be done. However, it posed practical problems and, later, legal ones.
• Thirdly, because the task was seen as consisting of the application of a logo, there was the impression that that could easily be organised and that Shetland’s brand could be established very quickly. But worthwhile reputations take years or decades to create and they’re based on people’s shared experiences, not logos. If (say) our salmon had slipped down the reputation scale, adding a logo wasn’t going to turn that around, it would simply devalue the logo.

These misunderstandings didn’t arise out of anything the consultants had done; on the contrary, their explanation of the challenges that Shetland faced was very clear. The difficulty was that a logo was always going to make a more immediate impact than pages of careful analysis.

What did we mean, back there, by practical and legal problems? The practical problem of applying a logo to products originating in a particular place is that, unless there is some kind of quality control, the logo will end up on products that do not offer high quality and both the logo and the reputation will be damaged. Corporate Edge did recommend that the logo be tied into existing quality control schemes where possible, but for the moment it looks as though the application of the logo on a widespread basis would be somewhat cumbersome, possibly divisive and perhaps expensive. Our quality control schemes may be up to the job, but that can’t be assumed. For the time being at least, the focus needs to be on building a reputation through offering high quality products and services that we believe the market will want, making it clear that they’re made in Shetland.

What of the legal problem? The issue is to do with ‘State Aids’, the rules that make it illegal to offer government aid that could distort competition between different parts of the European Union. Following a complaint made to them, the European Commission was concerned that the logo and related material could give Shetland an advantage in trade and therefore distort competition between member states. Because the development of the logo was funded by the Council (a government or state body), its use would be contrary to State Aids rules. For that reason, the UK government gave an undertaking to the Commission that the Shetland logo would be used only in connection with tourism, an area in which State Aids appear to be much less controversial.

To sum up, if we talk about developing the Shetland brand, we mean the development of a stronger and better reputation for Shetland. Shetland is the brand. For places like Shetland, logos and colour schemes may help to bring some discipline and consistency to, say, tourism promotion, but to see them as a magic key or quick fix would be mistaken.

Back to top

Why Can’t I Use The Brand?

You can, in the most important sense, which is that any local firm can benefit from Shetland gaining a reputation for excellence. By the same token, everyone can contribute to building the Shetland brand. If you produce a first-class product and you ensure that the final consumer knows that it comes from Shetland, you’re making a huge contribution to improving Shetland’s reputation – which is what we mean by ‘the brand’.

If you’re thinking about the logo, please bear in mind the point we’ve made about the brand not being the same as a logo. That said, it’s true that there are limits on how the logo can be used. Because of an undertaking given by the British government to the European Commission, the logo can be used only to promote tourism. This, we understand, is because tourism is the only area of the economy in which its use wouldn’t infringe the rules on state aids.

However, even if the ‘state aids’ problem didn’t arise, there would be the issue of how the application of the logo would be policed. It might be that some existing quality control processes could be involved in that task, but otherwise there would have to be specialist advisory groups who would sit in judgement to determine whether one particular producer’s lamb, beef, scarves, mussels, salmon, woodwork, chocolate, soap or bed-and-breakfast deserved the logo and another’s didn’t.

All of that would be hugely bureaucratic, expensive and (not least) divisive; and it would largely miss the point, which is that it is the name, Shetland, that needs to be associated with quality. It would also divert the time of staff who can be much better employed on other work that will help build Shetland’s reputation.

Back to top

How Can We Make The Shetland Brand Stronger And Market Shetland More Effectively?

Much of the material on this website and the downloadable Marketing Toolkit is aimed at answering that question. In summary, though:

• We need to remember that good marketing begins with knowing who our customers are, understanding their preferences and needs and producing things, or offering experiences, for which they will want to pay
• We must appreciate what we have. The best of our products are world-class and our environment is very special; in this, we need to see ourselves as others see us
• It’s important that we produce things with as little impact as possible on our environment and we must protect that environment as though our livelihood depended on it – because it does
• We mustn’t be complacent about our products and services. Ultimately, it’s the consumer’s experience of them that determines what sort of reputation Shetland gains. So, we have to improve and innovate
• Our produce needs to be aimed at discriminating consumers, which means we should sell through better-quality outlets and not through cheaper ones. Our target customer is willing to pay a good price for something that they can be sure comes from Shetland; he or she deserves the best we can bring to market
• We should try to make the brand more accurate, in the sense that products that come from Shetland should be labeled as such, even if the law requires that they must also be labeled ‘made in Scotland’ or ‘made in the UK’. At the moment, a large proportion of the produce of Shetland is labeled as ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’, giving no more detail
• We should discourage, wherever we can, the use of the word ‘Shetland’ on products that have no real connection with here, and encourage customers to be inquisitive about the origin of anything labeled ‘Shetland’
• We should promote our products with confidence where we’re sure of their integrity and quality
• We need to be patient. To get to where we need to be will take some years of solid, disciplined work. We need to remember that, in the end, it’s how we behave in the marketplace that will count for most.

Back to top

---