Being Earnest

One of my favourite moments from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is when, even though they are in the middle of an argument, etiquette demands that Cecily offers Gwendolyn a cup of tea. The offer is accepted, but with the pained explanation to the audience:

"Detestable girl! But I require tea!"

When you know it, it's a surprisingly useful quote. I was most recently reminded of this when British Telecom announced that they are ditching BT Openworld in favour of BT Yahoo! BT hope that Yahoo! will do a better job of branding, and developing broadband content than they did, and that customers will be more willing to pay the extra for content as well as for internet access.

"Detestable girl, but I require tea!" sums up the access provider/content dichotomy. How can ISPs avoid commoditisation and offer something more than their competitors? The dot-com era answer is to do what BT has done - invest in the 'extra value proposition' of a broadband portal. BT has set themselves the challenge of using a partner brand to prevent commoditisation, to maintain a price-premium above not only their competitors but also their own BT Internet product, and to increase the number of subscribers from 1 million to 5 million.

In the early 1990s quite a bit was made about the transition from Unique Selling Points (USPs - remember those?) to Extra Value Propositions. The idea, quite rightly, was that companies could not sustain a single distinctive product feature for long before it was copied by everyone else; it was deemed far better to surround the product with a set of related services that rounded out the overall brand proposition. This extension into related services was termed the 'Extra Value Proposition' (EVP).

EVPs, because they offer extra value, also imply extra cost. That didn't matter too much because it was boom-time and spending silly money on frivolous extras was practically an ideology of its own. Now that we're all a little more sanguine and hoping to be post-recessionary very soon, much more old-fashioned issues than USP or EVP are back. The big issue in branding for now is VFM - good old Value For Money.

At the moment, people demand that companies are good at what they do, that they are straightforward and trustworthy, and that products and services aren't absurdly over-priced. This is in fact an issue for us here at 1827. We offer brand strategy consultancy, and so do a lot of other companies. Now, we happen to have our own talents, approaches, ideology, models, tools and methodologies, but then so do the other companies. What our clients like about our work is that the results are of really high quality, we don't try to be a jack-of-all-trades, and our fees aren't outrageous. In short, we offer extremely high quality brand strategies for a reasonable price.

BT's current advertising for their telephony services reflects this trend. They have reduced the absurd and confusing number of price variants for making a call. The new campaign uses rather charming stick-figures to reinforce what they claim is a new, simple approach to charging.

Other aspects of BT's approach to communications are less easy to understand. You might have noticed that they have set about replacing their logo with the old BT Openworld logo. The Yahoo! decision acknowledges that the BT Openworld brand failed to generate any equity so it is surprising that the Openworld logo is now going to become the BT corporate logo.

The Openworld logo is almost a parody of dot-com era graphic design. All the clichés are there: 3-D, Ellipses, Globes, and Animation. Lack of originality is combined with fabulous impracticality: all those different shades of colour will be difficult and expensive to reproduce, and - perhaps this is deliberately 21st Century on their part - there's no way this design could survive a fax machine or photocopier. Such considerations used to be the standard rubric of design briefs.

The change of design does inadvertently express a brand truth about BT. They have moved from being the nimble herald of a new age of telecommunications to being just splodgily there all the time. It's strangely fitting that my journal entry on childhood obesity should be followed by one that covers logo obesity. Being persistently and unlovably there is an essential but not necessarily positive aspect of the BT consumer experience. Despite the advertising own-goal of boasting that only 90% of phone boxes work at any one time, BT is fantastically reliable. Your phone or internet connection will work almost all the time. The problem comes when something actually does go wrong or when you want to change something such as your number, your address, or your tariff, or if you're a small business. I once had a client who queried why the words 'reliable' and 'accountable' both appeared in a brand model. Surely, he asked, you can't have one without the other? It was to his credit that this confusion was possible - people who worked for his company prided themselves on taking on an issue and seeing it through to resolution. BT, however, is a triumph of reliability and a travesty of accountability. Although the people that work there would, I'm sure, be delighted to sort out their customers' problems, their systems constantly undermine this intention. I write from personal experience.

Efficient response and resolution is a vital component of a value-for-money proposition. There is a positioning available within the broadband market that could be based on helpful, friendly, value for money. It's the kind of positioning that helps companies propel themselves from having a major share of early adopters to becoming a mass market provider. This is, in fact, the story of AOL. Although they had proprietary content, most commentators and analysts agree that it was easy set-up, good support and clear pricing that helped them to dominate the dial-up market.

BT's reputation for customer service is currently too poor for them credibly to occupy the value-for-money brand position for broadband access without significant investment in service improvement and subsequently in communicating the service improvement, but can they really a deliver a content-based extra-value proposition? In other words, whatever one thinks of the girl, will the requirement for tea carry the day?

First of all, what is the extra-value offer going to be? It's early days yet, of course, and one imagines - or hopes - that BT Yahoo! is keeping its powder dry before launch, but they have promised customised default browser pages, 'security', parental control, and anti-spam filters. To the web-aware, most of these are already offered for free by Yahoo! or can be part of a standard system configuration. The way that the anti-spam movement is gathering momentum, filtering will become the responsibility of ISPs anyway. We can expect the promise of more high-bandwidth media content to be announced closer to when the service goes live, but will it really be better than Yahoo!'s already excellent Launch music service?

Who is it for? Non-users may be non-plussed by these minor, mostly technical enhancement or put off by the apparent necessity or perceived complexity of customisation. Infrequent modem users will have to be convinced that these extra services are worth the money or that having them will usefully increase their usage of the Internet so that the upgrade is worth it. More savvy users will either already have broadband or know that what has been announced so far is already available without a subscription. Whichever target segment you consider, so far either the need or the offer is less than convincing.

What about the competition? Well, the two UK Cable providers already offer broadband, media content portals on their services. I have only tried Telewest BlueYonder, but I'm surprised at how good their portal is. The real competition over content, however, is not what becomes possible on the PC, but what becomes possible on the TV. The cable companies have an ace up their sleeve, because however customised your Yahoo! home page is, it doesn't really compare to a hundred or so extra TV channels if you take up one of the cable company's packaged offers. They even throw telephony into the bargain. BT cannot really easily compete with such a simple integrated offer delivered under one brand.

What has this to do with The Importance of Being Earnest? In the play, Jack begins by pretending to be someone that he knows he is not, then resolves to stop pretending and to just be who he thinks he is, and then finally discovers the he's not Jack after all, but is in fact called Ernest. As a child he was mistakenly left behind at Victoria Station in, all together now, a handbag! It is equally important for a brand to be earnest as it is for Jack to be Ernest. BT, in dropping Openworld and hitching up with Yahoo!, has only made half the journey that Jack makes. Rather than soup-up the superficialities of broadband access in order to inflate the price, there is ample opportunity for BT to occupy an earnest brand position of value-for-money, reliable, well-supported broadband access for all, so long as it can repair its reputation for poor service. This would require real and necessary work, but the risk that someone else might steal this position is too serious to ignore. As Jack discovers, in the end one can only succeed if one is truly Earnest.