The other major European players and brands from the past decade are also mentioned, leading me to ask, ‘Do brands matter in the European cooler industry?’.
When cooler brands engage with end-user consumers in multiple environments, from the filling station to the supermarket, in the office and even in the home, they can encapsulate quality, hydration and service. I wonder if, in markets where most activity is restricted to business to business, and the ‘H’ in HOD is all but absent, can brands make any difference at all?
Outside Europe, some cooler brands have enormous power. The Coca-Cola Company’s Ciel brand, sold in Mexico and Africa, is an excellent example, as is The Pepsi Bottling Group’s Electropura, also available in Mexico. Both are available in retail outlets in small pack as well as for coolers – in both home and office.
Nestlé Waters has a star brand outside Europe, too, with Nestlé Pure Life. In small pack and cooler bottles, it’s the company’s leading brand by volume and is available in 21 countries.
In Europe, brands in the cooler industry haven’t proved as successful. It may be that the Eden brand, and some local and regional brands, are exceptions – and sometimes exceptions prove rules. However, let me consider why Powwow at first sent out all the right signals, but whose fire may now be faltering.
Nine years ago, in an industry previously dominated by entrepreneur-run and generally local businesses, the creation of Powwow was certainly brave, and many were stunned when it was announced. To read the story of the series of acquisitions by Watsons Water, which led to the launch of the brand, read the current issue of Cooler Innovation.
In a statement to UK customers, Powwow said: “The name change has been implemented because the company is dedicated to building one large brand. Powwow stands for talking and listening – communication in its broadest sense.”
As I wrote in the article in Cooler Innovation: “This was a brave and unprecedented move – both exciting and extraordinary, as the brand did not feature any of the usual references to water and its logo even used a shocking pink rather than the ubiquitous blues and greens. This was a brand developed by people who developed brands rather than people who delivered water and serviced coolers. It was a brand that was going places and setting the pace.”
The brand certainly gave the company’s employees a sense of identity – not an easy thing to achieve during the sometimes painful integration process following a succession of acquisitions. And looking back at the timing of its creation, with the new millennium lifting the business mood, it probably made a significant impact on facilities managers who were seeking something new; something that alluded to the intimate social attraction of meeting to communicate around the cooler, made no direct reference to water, and was proud to be pink rather than blue. While this provided an essential and timely point of difference, it was also the essence of why the brand may not have been a massive success.
Meanwhile, Nestlé’s new Aquarel small pack brand moving into coolers made a great deal of sense at the time, but with a home and office business that relied primarily on office contracts, the brand reassurance crossover promised by Aquarel has never been fully delivered. It was no surprise when the Nestlé Waters Direct brand was developed for coolers and applied in all markets except the UK. ‘Nestlé Waters Direct’ really does “do what is says on the pack” and therefore delivers on its promise.
The agency that took on the task of branding Watsons’ water cooler business in 2000 was well known to Watsons’ parent, Hutchison. Wolff Olins was the same agency that had taken Hutchison’s failing Rabbit wireless communication brand and created Orange in 1994. History demonstrates that this agency was rather good, as the future is still, as they say, Orange.
Similarities to the ‘talking and listening’ angle and the brave choice of purple for Powwow echoed the Orange launch statement: “The orange colour was chosen because it’s said to have a strong feng shui element. The square logo was used to differentiate it from the citrus fruit.”
But the Powwow name didn’t translate into other languages, and in some where ‘w’ often sounds like ‘v’ or ‘f’, it was plain laughable.
And, though I’ve acknowledged that the brand did go some way to deliver a sense of continuity to the newly grouped businesses, that factor only applied in the UK, and the predominantly UK-based management couldn’t see the potential problems for the brand outside Great Britain.
It seems that the reality that water coolers in Northern Europe are still predominantly a business to business activity was lost in the brief, and that coolers became confused with being a consumer product. There may well have been a sense of ‘if it works for mobile phones, it will work for coolers’.
Customers – and I mean business owners and office and facility managers – see only price, quality, reliability, consistency of service and convenience. I don’t think that they see brands. They may seek reassurance in a familiar name such as Nestlé or Danone, but unless they’re in the cooler industry itself, they’re unlikely to hear of Eden or Powwow in other contexts and therefore gain any particular additional confidence from an otherwise unknown brand. It’s generally accepted that only when brands have either multiple exposure and/or a massive marketing budget do they succeed over time. Maybe the brief for Watsons’ brand should have included a quick look at successful B2B brands such as Fedex or TNT.
Consumers, and by that I mean end-users, for the majority of coolers placed in the market are also, I believe, immune to brands. They see a gadget that’s simply there, provided by their employer for their free use, that conveniently delivers cool, refreshing water or enables the making of hot drinks or food. In this context, the brand in unimportant. It’s taken for granted and ignored.
Were Powwow’s ‘talking and listening’ connotations taken by office managers to mean ‘wasting time chatting by the cooler’? I wonder.
I’ve said so many times over the past decade, in H20 Europe, The Point and in Cooler Innovation, that service is the most important thing for the cooler industry to offer. The next is quality. Quality should be delivered without question, whether it’s the water itself or the cleanliness of the units, but service is a harder task. And service is often easier for a local company to deliver than a national or international organisation.
Go back to the start of the cooler industry in Europe. The start-up model was a local business with a local identity backed by exemplary local and often seemingly personal service. Its company names easily identifying core values – ‘water this’ and ‘aqua that’ in reassuring blues and greens. Perhaps, when most service difficulties are immediate, personal and local, customers seeking reassurance become cynical of a brand that tries to be a ‘one brand fits all’ face, while the day to day experience may ultimately fail to impress.
In the US, Culligan developed its brand with the personality of the ‘Culligan Man’, but that charm never really seemed to catch imaginations in Europe. Nestlé Waters Direct does what it says but, in my view, adds little with Aquarel. Eden, however, seems to be working. Perhaps many customers see Eden as a local brand.
How many perceived Powwow as a local brand? Will the brand remain? We’ve asked the question and will report if we hear anything. Perhaps the name Lomond Hills will work for those near Glasgow in Scotland who know that the picturesque Loch Lomond is just up the road.
Maybe the Powwow brand will carry on. If so, then I wish it lots of luck. In an economy even more obsessed with price than ever before, I wonder if it matters at all. What do you think?
Email Bill Bruce
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