Our OS brand transformation hits Marketing Week
Original article appeared in MarketingWeek
How one brand is trying to shift from being known to being understood
OS is synonymous with orienteering, bobble hats and mountains, but hopes a transformation that includes a new brand purpose and switch from a focus on products to customers will help improve brand equity and grow the business.
Think of OS (or Ordnance Survey as it was known before a rebrand in 2015) and the images that spring to mind are probably of school orienteering trips, hikes up Snowdon or family rambles outdoors during lockdown.
One of the brand’s greatest strengths, according to marketing and customer director Rebecca Paterson, is that it is so well known. But that is also causing the company some problems.
“OS is known, but it is not understood,” she says, speaking exclusively to Marketing Week. “We have a big transition to make.”
Despite being synonymous with the paper maps you might take on a holiday to the Lake District, this makes up just 5% of the company’s revenues. The rest comes from how it helps governments and countries use its location data.
For example, Sainsbury’s uses OS data to better plan grocery deliveries and the government to map areas with car parks large enough to take a testing centre for Covid-19. The emergency services use it to route vehicles, while its data is also used in disaster relief.
“If you ask 100 people what OS does, probably 99 of them will say mountains or maps or bobble hats,” says Paterson. “That is a big association for us, but it’s such a small part of our business.
“The people who work with our data know us really well and will say our data is authoritative or critical to doing my job, but we started to find the decision makers – the ones making those critical choices around the future of Britain and the digital economy – were associating us with what they did at weekends, rather than necessarily understanding there are swathes of people even within their own businesses using OS data to help them define where their next asset is.”
To try to correct that, Paterson is leading a transformation of the 239-year-old brand. That is centred around a new purpose created with its agency Idealogy: ‘See a better place’. This, it believes, can help the company showcase the work it does in mapping and helping people enjoy the outdoors, while also showing companies how it can work with them to drive economic returns.
“There were two strands to it – we can return social good and deliver an economic return,” says Paterson. “Seeing a better place is the culmination and expression of that in terms of saying you can go from where you are now, but if you go with OS we’ll help you to see this better place whether that is social good or for economic purposes.”
It has already launching a brand ad online that aims to showcase the breadth of work it does. It is currently working on what Paterson calls ‘beacon campaigns’ that will more specifically demonstrate how it operates in different sectors and ensure businesses understand its capabilities and how it could help.
To ensure this purpose runs across the business, the marketing team has worked with HR from the start. The company ran two streams simultaneously – one looking at brand purpose and the other at the company’s values and cultures.
It also insisted its two agencies – Idealogy on brand and Dragonfish on values – were “locked together” so the two streams were developed in unison. Paterson thinks working so closely with HR on this project has been a revelation, meaning its brand purpose is true to the company’s goals and that, importantly, colleagues understand it.
“If there is one thing I would take from this, I wouldn’t leave home without HR when doing brand development,” she says.
“It’s back to the old adage that as a marketer you hear all the time about brand – a brand is as a brand does. If the representation of a brand is the people that work for OS then you cannot deliver a strong brand purpose without having all those people lined up beside you.”
Shifting from a product to a customer focus
That has also helped OS as it attempts to manage another shift within the company – from a focus on product to one on customers. Paterson admits that in the past OS would all to often develop a product and then work out who would want to buy it. The aim now is to shift, so that staff look at what a customer needs and then develop a solution.
An example of this is it’s work with Sainsbury’s. Previously, the supermarket used postcode data to manage grocery deliveries but found that wasn’t always the most efficient route, so the data team at OS suggested it use addressing data.
The upshot has been consumers are more likely to get their delivery on time, while Sainsbury’s can better manage the volume of shoppers – critical as online delivery soared during the pandemic.
“If you ask 100 people what OS does, 99 of them will say mountains or maps or bobble hats. That is a big association for us, but it’s a small part of our business.”
“We’ve been quite product orientated in the past,” Paterson admits. “It is a long journey, but we are getting to a place where our first stage is asking who the customer is, what they look like, what their needs and aspirations are.”
OS completed all this work despite lockdown, when many brands pulled back on marketing spend and halted major brand projects. The reason for that, says Paterson, is the brand transformation is key to its future – even more so given the faster shift to digital the pandemic has caused.
That is reflected in the fact that Paterson’s current role is the first time OS has brought together marketing and customer, and elevated it to an executive board level.
“I am a little ashamed to say this is the first time we have had a customer director on the OS exec leadership team. But the coupling of the two has already been amazing in terms of making sure we are moving to that customer focus and away from product-orientation,” she states.
OS is just at the start of its transformation and Paterson knows it will take time to shift perceptions. It wants to raise awareness of the breadth of work OS does and in the process shift associations, so it is seen as innovative and commercially focused, on top of brand traits that already exist around trust, reliability and accuracy.