Obviously Branson doesnāt agree (or more likely doesnāt care) - but once you sell off businesses with your name on, you run a huge risk of just tainting everything that bears your name. You canāt claim to be ethical, you canāt control having a level of consistency between all the different things that bear your name. You just become a shapeless non-entity coasting on fake brand association for people that donāt know any better.
I mean, my good childhood memories of spending hours in Virgin Megastore donāt make it any more likely that Iāll fly with Virgin Airlines or sign up to a Virgin Active gym
I donāt think itās harsh, I imagine itās what Branson coasts on - the idea that association of a positive experience with a high-performing company, like Virgin Airlines, might encourage people to use poor performing services such as Virgin Mobile - despite the companies having nothing to do with each other.
Perhaps āless discerning peopleā is a nicer way of putting it
I donāt think people think as much in those terms of a connected brand these days. If thereās any āconnectionā itās usually in the negative.
Fifteen years ago l bought into the Virgin brand l had Active, Energy, Mobile flew Atlantic. Now l have Active and Media because itās a good product offer for me in terms of location, quality and price.
Maybe fifteen years back Monzo would have set out to offer current accounts, cards, etc because thatās what brands in banking did (see first direct, cahoot, et al). Nowadays thereās āconfidenceā that a brand can excel with one product and let others contribute without tarnishing the central brand.
Iām not so sure about that, you can coast on goodwill for years.
Nokia are doing well in the last year since they finally switched to making Android devices, despite the fact that the company has changed hands twice and all their products had been a complete shit-show for the last decade.
They still have a huge amount of goodwill from their original run and they finally made some strategic product decisions that can benefit from it!
Prehaps they are nostalgic brands. I think Nokia certainly is. I fondly think back to my 3210, completely overlooking the thing gave me headaches and that l was rubbish at snake.
Interesting point from one of Monzoās co-founders on this -
Before anyone gets pedantic, we can assume that theyāve done some closed testing but nowhere near as much as Monzo did, via the prepaid programme, before they spent anywhere near as much.
Actually the new Nokia phones are not made by the Nokia firm who are actually doing other things but made by another company using the Nokia brand under license
Yes, itās HMD Global, and before them it was Microsoft.
Iām aware of this, and it proves my exact point - most people donāt know that and donāt care. They assume itās the same company and therefore have goodwill towards it.
To be fair, the company that makes the phones was founded and is run by ex-Nokia employees, so it is a bit of a return to the roots of their mobile division.
Not sure if Ericsson is better tbh. Their ācarrier-gradeā hardware is a joke and the only reason theyāre still in business is because of the lack of competition.