Creating a brand for an established business is always a tall order. But selecting one that snugly fits seven different business lines is something else all together. Max Hotopf asked The Co-operative how it managed it:

It was hard to believe back in 2004 that once, before the First World War, the Co-operative movement had enjoyed a larger market share then Tesco does today. Decades of competition and mismanagement had left the movement clearly unable to compete with a plethora of fast moving private companies.

Worse still, the 30 individual mutuals who made up the movement were pursuing different strategies and trading under different names. The Co-op brand was dated, flat cap, grotty, degraded. Even some co-operatives had ditched it completely. Why sell travel to the young under the Co-op label when the average membership of the movement was in their seventies?

Yet by 2007 the Co-operative brand had become the most trusted retail brand in the UK. Many business lines including hyper-competitive food retail had gained marketshare and the membership, the bedrock of any mutual, had become far younger and more than quadrupled. The Cooperative had even won the first Queen’s Award for sustainability given to a big retailer.

The transformation certainly looked a massive task to Zoe Morgan on her appointment in 2004 as group marketing director at the Co-operative Group, the largest co-op in the country with some 80% of the total turnover of the movement. Morgan, who had previously headed up retail marketing at Boots and HBOS, was given the task of reviving the brand by chief executive Martin Beaumont. Both Beaumont and Morgan believed that there was still life in the concept of mutuality; that, indeed, the Co-operative brand had a future.

Morgan says: “We could not compete with Tesco just by making a better and cheaper cheese sandwich. Consumers would only switch or show real loyalty if they bought into the underlying philosophy of the movement.”

But she did not face an easy task. Even within the Co-operative Group, how the brand was used varied dramatically across each of its seven main business lines – food retail, travel, pharmacy, banking, insurance, funerals and farming. Morgan was the first group marketing director for the mutual – how to convince those running the line businesses to throw away the brands they had carefully nurtured? Then there were the other 30 Co-operatives across the country. And let us not forget that this is democratic mutual, with area and regional committees deciding, for instance, where the movement would invest in good causes. Not to mention all the employees. Life was made slightly easier by disastrous results in 2003/4, it made it painfully clear to many that there was no alternative to change.

A first step was to check that the mutual image had a wide appeal. Research scotched the widely held view that mutuality did not appeal to many. Morgan ticks off three fallacies: “ 'Social giving is all very well if you can afford it. I want cheap chicken’. Then there was ‘The Co-op is flat-cap Northern and won’t appeal to aspirational Tories.’ Thirdly there was ‘Only tree huggers care about the environment.’”

Research on 3,000 consumers showed, says Morgan, that “very few people really don’t give a damn, nearly everyone cares about some social cause the trick was to make the agenda broad enough to be relevant to them all”. Further research showed that the Co-op customer base pretty much mirrored the British. Yes, retail was older, but the bank had more As and Bs than average and travel reached the young.

As a mutual, one obvious strategy is to talk about the good you do. And a surprising amount was going into charity work. The Co-operative spends a multiple of its profits more on good causes than other retailers. But much was at an invisible, local level – rebuilding a scout shed, redecorating a hospice. Morgan says: “I realised fairly early on that we needed to be able to put more of this money into highly visible projects, such as alternative energy, or sustainability in the Third World, if we were to use it in the brand.”

The answer was to structure social causes through three lenses. “There are a few causes which are immensely popular, headed up by animal welfare. Then there are new areas where people are changing behaviour, such as climate change, and, finally, there are local projects which are really dear to the people who work in the Co-operative.” She managed to persuade more money to go into the larger headline projects.

“Once the people on the regional and area committees realised that you were serious about stopping the decline of their movement, you could win them over.”

Another task was reviving the membership which had fallen to a still impressive 600,000. Says Morgan: “The average age was close to 70 - about the same as buyers of our funeral plan.” The task was to widen out membership appeal and sell the cooperative’s values to the new generations.

This process has already started before Morgan came on board. To blow new life into membership the decision was taken to start paying dividends for the first time in decades. Secondly, all those with loyalty cards were invited to become members. Thirdly, a £100 million was spent on a CRM system which allowed the group to look for the first time at how its members and consumers spent across the group.

One of her hardest tasks, she says, was to persuade the board to postpone the relaunch of membership for nearly two years. “I saw no point in relaunching, unless we had a new identity that would project our underlying values.”

Brand and membership are joined today. Says Morgan: “I can take my dividend points and give them to good causes on the Co-op website.” For the brand redesign, she turned to two designers she had worked with at HBOS and Boots – Harry Pearce and John McConnell, both now at Pentagram. “I was very impressed by what they had done at Boots on value, trust and authenticity. I also knew it would have to be language-based – as it had the word Co-operative in it, this couldn’t be a fashionable, snazzy new logo. It had to authentic, to embody the values. I knew they would understand this.”

The second step was the decision to put “The” in front of the name. “That made it unique, exclusive. There can only be one The Co-operative.” The Co-operative bee was used to show where members could get discounts across the lines and across the different societies.

Rolling the concept out across seven lines was immensely complex. Banking decided to do a big bang and to wait until brochures and websites were ready. Retail was changed at the rate of a store a week with tens of thousands of SKUs being changed gradually over time. Morgan who left in 2007 says the process is still ongoing with three stores converting a week.

Some of the smaller Co-operative societies came on board with the new marketing early on. “We tried to involve them from day one and also used the carrot of running the CRM system.” In 2007, the second largest society – the United Cooperative with another 15% of the movement’s total sales decided that it was willing to merge with the Co-operative Group. United with strength in the movement’s heartland of Yorkshire had good profitability and it made sense for its chief executive Peter Marks and his team to take over at the newly merged company.

Morgan was one of the departures, but says that the roll out and strategy has continued under her successor, Patrick Allen: “This February they aired the brand advert, Seeds of Change, with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ that I signed off in July 2007 just before I left,” she says.