The innocent brand
- Oct 15, 2008
I'm Adam - a co-founder of innocent drinks and I wanted to join in Richard's discussion about branding.
People say the most important thing with innocent is the brand. But you've got to start from the very beginning. In fact the most important thing is the product - it's our smoothies. It's the fact that they're the best tasting, most natural, best-for-you drinks out there and only then does that give us the right to start talking about the brand. And that brand is basically the badge to identify those fantastic drinks.
Obviously over time innocent started standing for more than just the drinks, but we must not lose sight of the fact that fundamentally people are not buying the brand, they're buying a lovely drink - that's what they're spending two quid on. That's the most important thing. The bit around the edge of that is bringing that experience to life a bit more. It's the promises, it's the assurances - for us it's guaranteeing that the fruits we're using are great tasting as well as ethically and responsibly sourced. It's that full set of promises.
A lot of the time you get companies which just say 'we're a brand – here you go' and they talk down to people. For innocent the brand is a way of engaging people, it's a way of actually having a dialogue with our customers. So we try and talk to people from the side of our bottles. We want people to engage with us about, what we're doing well, what we're doing badly - that sort of openness and communication is really important. It's the right to talk to people, the right to communicate.
Virgin is pretty good at that as well. People feel like they can say something to that brand because of the Virgin figurehead – because of Richard Branson. innocent doesn't have a figurehead in quite the same way - we don't have the three of us founders up there. But what we do try and do is get people to talk to us, to email innocent and have a communication with the company. That's really important because then, as a customer, you start forming a relationship with the brand more so than you would do if you were just drinking a great drink.
http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk
