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Bt Wally Olins

Wally Olins' final interview: The brand guru on terrible names, overtaking rivals and business today

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By Cameron Clarke, Editor

May 27, 2014 | 3 min read

In his final interview, Britain’s preeminent branding expert Wally Olins offered a precious insight into the wisdom – and wit – that kept him at the forefront of his industry for almost half a century.

Speaking to Courier magazine a few weeks before he died in April, the Wolff Olins co-founder shared some of his prized thinking on why brand names don’t always matter, how a company can distinguish itself from its rivals and why there’s never been a better time to start a business than now.

On the role of a brand…

“Most organisations have competitors, which are functionally and rationally very similar in price or quality or service. If you want to differentiate yourself from your competitor, you have to find a way of talking about yourself with an emotional context.”

The importance of brand names...

“Somebody asked me recently ‘how important are names?’ and I said, ‘well, it is useful to have a very good name but even if you have a terrible name and you’ve got a product that works, you can live with it’. The worst name that I know of, for a very successful organisation, is Volkswagen. It’s completely unpronounceable in any language other than German, it has associations with the Third Reich and Hitler and everything else that you can think of. And yet it’s an incredibly successful organisation."

Perception of branding...

“A lot of people talk about brands as though [we] create them. Most of the time we're not creating them. Most of the time we're refreshing them, reinvigorating them, because the world has changed so they have to be different (even though they're the same brand, in the same place) they can't look like they used to look."

Starting out today...

“It’s infinitely easier today to start a business with an idea than it has ever been. The question is, how you project the idea of what you’re doing. But there has never been a better time to start a business than now.”

Olins’ death at 83 saddened an industry he had come to define. Acknowledged as the ‘godfather of branding’, he co-founded Britain's first brand consultancy with Michael Wolff in 1965 and was the man who persuaded British Telecom to rebrand as BT.

The full interview with Wally Olins is available in the latest issue of Courier, a new print and digital title that looks at start-up culture and modern business.

Bt Wally Olins

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