Over 90% of the UK population live within 10 minutes of an Argos store. More than 18 million households have a current Argos catalogue. So when the Brand Union took the brief to rebrand one of the nation’s biggest retailers, it knew what was at stake. Frank Sutton reports

"You can do some amazing things with Argos. I’d not anticipated that when we started working with them,” admits Simon Bailey of The Brand Union. Yet his candour cuts to the heart of the challenge facing the Argos brand. A decade on from the company’s last brand overhaul, a lot had happened.

New introductions included the Argos Extra brand, mobile phone-based services and, of course, a little thing called the internet – today 35% of all Argos sales are made online. In retail-speak, the company had gone ‘multi-channel’. Yet the brand had not kept pace with these developments – and wasn’t speaking to customers, employees and the communities in which it operated with a clear voice.

Sunita Yeomans, creative controller at Argos, is clear about the overwhelming need for a rebrand. “We started to hear little hints and snippets that made us feel our brand wasn’t coming across as the confident, modern brand we wanted it to be. The way the brand was expressing itself wasn’t giving people a full sense of what we did.”

It was by no means doom and gloom though. In fact, continues Yeomans, the branding on individual components of the identity – uniforms, catalogues, the website – worked well in isolation. “But we found that when we brought it all together and showed people, everything started to look disjointed and almost chaotic.”

So the challenge for Simon Bailey and the Brand Union was to evolve the brand to reflect a ‘multichannel’ business, while ensuring a unity across the different places that the brand identity would be seen.

The first thing that struck the team was the sheer scale of the Argos business. Some numbers: a staggering 96% of the UK population lives within 10 minutes of an Argos store. The company serves more than 130 million customers each year. And since it went live in 2000, www.argos.co.uk has been visited more than a billion times. (It is now the second most visited internet retail site in the UK).

In short, we are all Argos stakeholders. But while that is good news for the financial director (the company turned over £4.3 billion last year), it presents some interesting headaches from a brand perspective. Rolls Royce knows exactly which narrow segment of the population it’s going after. In a different income group, so does Iceland. But Argos has to appeal to everyone. Prince, pauper and everything in between.

So how did Argos go about figuring out what its all-encompassing stakeholder base might like? Simple – it asked them.

“We carried out a lot of research,” explains Yeomans. “The Brand Union started in a conceptual way, using almost a mood-board style. Imagery, ideas and stimulus were put in front of members of the public while we sat behind one-way glass studying them, watching the expressions on their faces and looking at how they each of them responded.”

Bailey picks up the story. “The aim of the rebrand was to reassert that the brand is for everyone. From young families to older people. And in the research sessions there was a lot of warmth towards the brand. There was almost an implicit commitment from customers to help with this process. Not a sense that we were taking people on a journey they didn’t want to go on.”

Yet Bailey is equally keen to emphasise that this was not re-brand by focus group. “I was very impressed by the way Argos wanted to use research and feedback. They used it in an intelligent way. They used it to inform the process. Not to pick a winner.” But why not let the customers decide? After all, they are the main audience a brand is intended to influence. Bailey again: “Any product or service is a combination of our instinct for what a customer might respond positively to, but also something they might not necessarily have come up with themselves.”

And so the process picked up speed. “It was more like a prototype approach. We built several different ways the brand could be manifested and tested them at an early stage, then refined them based on which parts were getting positive feedback.”

Yet just as things were in full swing, the world suddenly changed. The banking system went into meltdown and the economy followed. “Things got tougher. Brands like Woolworths faded away.” This is Bailey putting it delicately. The sobering truth is that it was a massacre on the high street. Was Argos not worried about how launching a major rebrand might look in the teeth of a recession? Not a bit of it, says Yeomans, bullishly.

“We did go back to our customers when the recession kicked in. We talked to them about how they viewed Argos rebranding at this point. What we heard loud and clear was that they knew Argos wouldn’t just be frivolous and start spending huge quantities of money on this. They also told us that it gave them a lot of confidence that Argos wasn’t just standing still.”

The new brand identity launched earlier this year. It can be seen on the website, in the new spring/summer catalogue and is being rolled out in stores over the next four or so years.

The most noticeable change is to the logo. “We cleaned up the corporate mark. We modernised it. Made it easier to read. Made it more impactful. And we made it much more of the implicit smile from the previous mark,” says Bailey, with obvious pride.

“We also calmed down the amount of colours being used. This allowed us to reassert some confidence in the mark.”

Bailey’s point is most noticeable in the use of just red and white in the new logo.

Sunita Yeomans expands on this point. “The previous logo had a number of variations. Some used two colours, some had a hint of a drop shadow, and some were three-colour options. This added to the feeling of chaos. Now there are no variations of the logo.”

This simplicity was no accident, she says. “The Brand Union did a lot of research into logos and into which were most memorable. The best tended to use just two colours.”

Beyond the logo, both Bailey and Yeomans are keen to talk about something they have termed the ‘red thread of value’. This is a means to communicate the key components of the Argos offer consistently and clearly. So, for example, on literature and in-store where customers see the strap line (“Helping you live for less”), they will also see the Argos web address and the five icons that communicate the multi-channel nature of the business (a laptop symbol to symbolise online shopping, a lorry to represent home delivery, and so on).

What is it they are hoping to achieve with this ‘red thread’ motif? “Overall when you pick up any publication you instantly get a sense of order. You get a sense of Argos helping customers feel more in control,” says Yeomans.

Bailey goes further. “We have deliberately tried to build a greater sense of attribution. So if you put your hand over the brand mark, you get a sense that this is still Argos. I think we’ve achieved that.”

And with the economy now tip-toeing out of recession, could it be that the timing of the rebrand might just be perfect? Who says that a recession means communicators need to batten down the hatches and wait for the good times to return? Not Argos, that’s for sure.