By Peter Job, Chief Executive, and Jean-Claude Marchand, Group Marketing Director

As the world’s leading news and financial information organisation, Reuters starts with some formidable brand assets. According to the Interbrand branding agency, it is the most valuable brand in the U.K. Its reputation for independence, integrity and impartiality goes back for 150 years. The idea of the Reuters correspondent going to the ends of the earth and bringing the news back first strikes a chord with populations across the world. Even in deepest China, the name of Reuters is known -- and there is a Chinese expression for it (meaning “whispers on the street corner”).

In its main activity as a vendor of financial information supported by advanced technology, it is a clear market leader in most parts of the world. It is unrivalled in the scope, sophistication and depth of information that it supplies to banks, media and increasingly also to other businesses and private individuals. With some 2,150 journalists, photographers and camera people operating from 190 bureaux, it deploys one of the strongest forces in the world for gathering and disseminating news.

All the world’s leading banks, brokers and other financial institutions use the information to trade on markets. Top companies use it to research markets and competitors, and the media throughout the world use it to create newspapers and television and radio programmes. Individuals can now use Reuters information to manage their personal finances on the internet.

We are living in an information-driven society today, and Reuters is positioned as one of the most respected sources. It provides information and technology to help people make decisions crucial for their business and private lives. Above all people believe us.

So Reuters has many of the components of a major global brand in one of the most exciting and promising industries of today and tomorrow. When Interbrand made its latest calculations in July 2000, it valued the Reuters brand at $4.9 billion, representing about 15% of our market capitalisation at the time. It placed us second globally among media businesses, and overall the 46th in the world.

However, as it celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2001, Reuters too faces a number of branding challenges as the internet and other new information technologies change the shape of the world.

Reuters Branding Challenge

To start with, what exactly is Reuters? Few people would be able to give anything like the wide-ranging description of our activities above. Despite the fact that the company has been building its financial markets business at often very fast rates of growth over the last 28 years, most people know Reuters just as a news agency. They know that we provide news and photos to newspapers, and assume that is our business. At a time when Reuters is poised to penetrate a much expanded online market for financial market professionals and private investors through the internet, our market research is showing that only a small percentage know we have anything to do with finance. That is quite a branding challenge.

So where do we come from? The other fact which a fair number of people know about Reuters -- and are intrigued and fascinated by -- is that our founder, Paul Julius Reuter, began business flying information from one place to another by pigeon. In 1849, there was a gap in the telegraph line between Aachen and Brussels. So stock prices being transmitted between the Berlin and Paris stock exchanges had to be sent over this stretch by a very slow train. Reuter used pigeons to fly the prices faster and secure a competitive advantage. It was a brilliant example of improvisation and innovation, which however lasted for just a couple of years until the missing telegraph line was installed.

And that’s when Reuters history really started. And to appreciate Reuters and its brand, you have to understand its history. Reuter moved to London and established his news agency there in 1851. He quickly established a reputation as a prime source of fast, accurate and unbiased foreign news, and for imaginative use of information technology. At the time, that meant the telegraph, and Reuter’s motto, implemented with growing success, was “follow the cable.” In today’s world of the internet and wireless application protocols, this inspiring idea is still very largely relevant. What goes around comes around.

But until the 1960s, Reuters was essentially a news agency. In the 1970s, it transformed itself through bold pioneering ventures which created a range of electronic information products for the world’s rapidly growing financial markets. It first revolutionised foreign exchange trading by giving dealers access to real-time rates and news on Reuters Monitor computer terminals. It followed in 1981 with the launch of electronic transactions over the Reuters network, which again changed practices in this market.

This led to rapid growth in the company’s revenues and profits, and a high level of development expenditure enabled Reuters to pioneer electronic broking systems, multimedia in financial trading rooms, massive financial databases, and most recently, applications of internet technologies.

Reuters became a publicly listed company and was floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in New York in 1984. By late 2000, it was the 17th most valuable company on the London Stock Exchange by market capitalisation.

Reuters has offices in 204 cities in 100 countries, with staff of just over 18,000. It has currently some 558,000 users at 50,600 locations in 151 countries. Today, over 93% of Reuters revenue comes from the financial markets, all over the world. Besides the public internet, Reuters uses one of the world’s largest private communications networks, now being progressively converted to internet protocols in collaboration with our Equant communications partner.

Reuters statutes prevent any shareholder from owning 15% or more shares in the company, and Reuters Trust Principles provide further safeguards of independence and integrity. The Principles are backed by a Founder’s Share which can out-vote all other ordinary shares.

So this is a distinguished record of innovation and bold entrepreneurship in the world’s financial markets, built on a solid foundation of trust and longevity. But public awareness of the special qualities of the Reuters brand does not run very deep.

For much of its history, Reuters has felt no great need to promote its brand. We were confident in our reputation for independence, integrity, impartiality and reliability, which were well established as core values held in high esteem by our customers.

There was a wholesale nature to the business model. Often, the person with whom we would do business has been a bank’s IT manager, and the counterpart on the Reuters side a sales person. Functionality, product upgrades, competitive advantage for the customer institution and cost were the main issues driving the business relationship.

However, IT managers after a time did not just want to plug in Reuters terminals linked to our network. They wanted to integrate Reuters information and added value software into the ever more complex high-performance systems they were building inside the banks. Reuters met this demand by providing datafeeds instead of terminals and embracing the philosophy of “open systems.” It was the right decision, since it addressed the customers’ wants and needs, and gave us an even stronger competitive position vis-à-vis rivals who were slower to move this way. But the price to pay was loss of branding. The distinctive rows of branded Reuters screens in dealing rooms gave way to a diverse array of systems where the Reuters name faded into the background.

Success also bred stronger competition. In Reuters mainstream financial markets business, the number of competitors is not large, but they do include one or two which do not hesitate to use aggressive brand promotion to push their way into the markets.

In our traditional markets of newspapers and broadcasters, the brand exposure derived from credits could no longer be counted on as much as in the past. In the old days, a Reuters dispatch was often the only source of foreign news. Improving communications make it easier for others to provide such news. Computerised editing systems in newspapers enable sub-editors easily to merge Reuters news into reports from their own journalists or other sources. Often the Reuters credit is sacrificed in favour of the newspaper’s own branding -- “from our own correspondent.” In super-market terms, it is like the perpetual conflict between the established brand (Reuters) and own label offerings.

Television has also become a more important source of news for many people, and there branding is all “own label.” Reuters has always been the wholesaler, and most television stations reject any attempt to admit our branding. Few people know that a large part of the foreign news film they see on their evening television programmes comes from Reuters. Our name does not appear.

The Internet Changes All That

The internet represented a significant potential threat to our business. Financial information which previously was only available on the Reuters network is now much more freely available. But the internet also opens vast new opportunities for Reuters, not least in branding. In recent years, we have been rapidly building up our news presence on web-sites all over the internet. With a presence on over 1,400 sites reaching an estimated 73 million viewers per month, Reuters is the principal supplier of news to the world wide web.

In this internet environment, partners are much readier to publish Reuters credits. The news helps keep a web site active and attractive, so that viewers keep coming back. But it only does that if the source has prestige and is trusted. The internet is also a great pool of rumour and fraudulently misleading information. The Reuters credentials count for a guarantee of quality and reliability in an environment where such attributes are not automatically to be counted on.

Digital television stations operating on the internet or telecommunications channels often welcome the opportunity to brand the digital multimedia output of an established player such as Reuters. They have much lower cost structures than traditional television stations, and their business models do not need a powerful “own label” brand.

This is not just an internet phenomenon. Partly it is a factor of geography and political history. In Russia and eastern Europe, for example, our brand is much more readily acknowledged and valued. During the cold war, populations knew the name of Reuters as one of the few sources of trusted news about their own countries. Western radios broadcasting to these countries often quoted Reuters correspondents living in their midst. When political regimes and markets opened up in the early 1990s, Reuters was immediately a trusted partner in a new world which was often harsh and chaotic.

But the new world of the internet, and soon too mobile communications, is also forcing companies like Reuters to become more marketing-driven and use the brand as a fundamental weapon in its business armoury. The field may be more open to us for branding, but it also opens the gates for a host of others to do likewise. On the internet, a brand profile does not fall into your lap. You have to fight for it.

Now Reuters is on the net too, and the same goes for us. We are moving to take a more aggressive stance in our branding.

A New Business Model

In February 2000, Reuters announced a series of bold new initiatives to exploit the internet and open new markets, reinforced by a number of joint ventures in communications, wireless delivery and investment research.

It convinced people that Reuters had an imaginative and credible strategy for the internet. Inside Reuters, the changes have also been felt deeply, since our business model is changing radically. There was an immediate buzz of enthusiasm, a sense of excitement that Reuters is heading full-tilt into a world where it has every chance to succeed.

For the internet is a natural environment for Reuters. We have been building electronic communities around real-time information for thirty years. Our vision now is to ”make financial markets really work on the internet.”

“Really?” Yes, because a sea of raw information surging around the internet is not enough to make financial markets really function in this environment. You need the skill to gather the right information, and select and display it in ever more sophisticated ways for different groups of users. You need to be able to analyse the information, and then rapidly and easily access pools of liquidity in the markets where the best prices can be found. Above all, you need a reputation of trust based on truthfulness. That’s exactly where Reuters core competencies lie.

Reuters is now moving rapidly to an e-business model – in product development, delivery, administration and support. The internet is opening the way for us to create online communities of professional market participants and private investors. Before, the cost of development, selling, support and delivery were relatively high, so cost limited the potential market for Reuters services. Now, the internet brings all these costs down, and Reuters can tap new markets with lower-priced offerings.

It is about linking the process of “knowing” to “doing,” in a few seconds or, at most, a few minutes. And all of this now available not just in financial trading rooms, but potentially also directly in people’s living rooms.

Banks themselves move information around their newly-created intranets. Again, an opportunity for Reuters, which before could not cost-effectively reach customer-facing staff and back offices who had only an occasional need for market information. Now Reuters serves these people with smaller, specially-tailored packages of information piped at minimal cost through the intranets. This represents not only a new source of revenue, but also a new opportunity to spread the name of Reuters more widely and obtain word of mouth recommendation.

The banks often want to make Reuters information available directly to their own clients on the internet. Reuters provides the information and the web facilities to do this. Reuters web-farm serves this rapidly growing clientèle, and with over 400 million hits per month has become one of Europe’s busiest financial internet sites.

Brand: the plan of action

The new business strategy focusing on the internet has had a revitalising effect on the Reuters brand, increasing its position as a major global force. Reliance on a highly-skilled sales force to be the main interface with the outside world is no longer sufficient. With the new business model, face-to-face contact cannot be the only means of penetrating potential markets numbering tens of millions rather than a few hundred thousand.

Our sales force remains an important asset, since customers often benefit from counselling to find the right mix of Reuters products to match their exact requirements. However Reuters is now also using more of the marketing techniques of consumer and internet businesses – advertising, public relations, direct marketing, community building, channel marketing, affiliations and partnerships.

We began our brand development programme in 1996, when we did our first in-depth review of the Reuters brand ahead of a re-modelling of the Reuters visual identity – the corporate logo – working first with Landor and subsequently with Lambie Nairn. This resulted in the formal expression of our core values and a new visual identity.

The Reuters logo had spelt out the Reuters name in dots since 1965. At the time it was original and distinctive, but by the 1990s it was too redolent of old-fashioned telex ticker tape. Worse still, it failed to stand out, in particularly on video-screens. Since the first task of a visual identity is to be visible, we joined up the dots so that the Reuters name stood out clearly and emphatically. The dots re-appeared in a sphere symbolising day-and-night operations, global ubiquity and openness.

The next step in brand development was brand advertising which began in in 1998, in the five countries that are our most important markets – the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Japan and Switzerland. The end-line of the first campaign “Reuters. The Truth. Deal with it” underlined the company’s reputation for accuracy and trustworthiness, and its usefulness in financial trading. Although initial media spends were relatively modest, research showed it had the desired effect of bringing this vital attribute to the forefront of people’s minds.

As the company swung more decisively to the internet, we moved to a new message which made the Reuters brand relevant to the new generation of professionals and private investors working in this environment. Many of these people had little or no experience of Reuters more sophisticated financial products, which had been confined largely to trading rooms because of network costs. Yet, Reuters was already highly visible on the internet, and it was time to talk about it, loudly.

Before moving ahead, we re-examined our brand positioning in interviews with senior managers and customers world-wide. The reputation for truthfulness was clearly well established, but customer feedback was showing this was not enough as a sole differentiator in choice of brand. There was also a pressing need for Reuters to profile itself more forcefully in the dot.com world. Too few people were aware of our dynamic and imaginative initiatives in this area.

So we developed a new brand proposition which picked on the attributes of Reuters that are particularly competitive, and added a sense of speed and excitement. The proposition encapsulated in the phrase “Reuters. Where the action is” puts our brand on to the front foot and lets us go on to the offensive. It highlights the aspects where Reuters is truly ahead of our rivals, such as our leading role in the world’s financial trading rooms, and the global scope of our coverage and support infrastructure on the ground.

In journalistic terms, it means our reporters and camera people operating in zones such as Kosovo or Sierra Leone. Or financial journalists covering interest rate changes where absolute accuracy is imperative, and a few seconds advantage or delay can spell millions of profit or loss for our customers.

Reuters is also “where the action is” in providing information and key components to more than half the world’s top online brokerage sites, being the top provider of news on the world wide web, moving in the vanguard of share trading reform through our electronic trading subsidiary Instinet, and developing internet software through our TIBCO associate company in Palo Alto.

It reflects what Reuters has been doing for 150 years, placing skilled experts where world events are unrolling and pioneering the use of the latest methods of communication.

We asked our advertising agency BMP/DDB to develop the creative idea behind the brand proposition, making it relevant to the on-line private investor audience we in particular want to reach. The texts ask a series of questions which widen perceptions of our activities, and to which the answer is always “Reuters. Behind Every Decision.” The ads shows how Reuters plays a key role in our customers’ decision making – in ways they had not imagined before. The style is contemporary and upbeat. Beneath a striking image of criss-crossing rail tracks, we ask: “Who delivers information to all of the world’s most popular online brokerages?” The answer: “Reuters. Behind Every Decision.”

In 2000, we decided to do our first television advertising. We began with a commercial which by its size and scope was designed to emphasise Reuters potential global brand stature. It is a parable along the lines of Noah, in which the hero anticipates a flood through information which enables him to save his pet-shop animals and make a financial profit. He obtains the information online from Reuters -- “Behind Every Decision.”

To reinforce this image of a new, more dynamic company, at ease in the dot.com world, we built up a network of public relations agencies in 13 countries. Public relations is for a Reuters an efficient and cost-effective means of putting across messages about the company which are of necessity sometimes complex, and pushing the Reuters name towards the “top-of-mind” position which all brands aims for.

As a next step we decided to use another marketing tool, sponsorship. Although we had been sponsoring various activities on a small scale for some years, we now chose an initiative which would demonstrate Reuters new dynamism and vitality with maximum impact (and ear-splitting noise). We also selected it because we knew it was popular with our existing customers and the new ones we want to attract on the net. Since the beginning of 2000, Reuters has been co-sponsoring the BMW WilliamsF1 Team in Formula One Grand Prix motor racing. It is an excellent fit for a brand on the move: it is all about speed, adrenalin, leading-edge technology, and reliability. It is also a truly global sport with 17 races in 15 countries over a nine-month period each year. It is one of the most popular televised sports in the world, attracting audiences of over 300 million for each race.

Tobacco sponsors are becoming rarer in Formula One, and Reuters is among a number of financial and high-tech companies which are moving in to take their place. We find ourselves among other newcomers such as Crédit Suisse, HSBC, Compaq, Nortel Networks, Intel, Orange and Hewlett-Packard. Apart from the external impact, this new sponsorship also had a galvanising effect on our own staff, coming as it did just a few weeks before the announcement of our enterprising new business strategy.

To reinforce this initial high-impact entry into major sponsorship, we have targeted other sponsorships at the 65 million people we believe will be using the internet to conduct financial business, professionally or for their own private wealth. We want to reach these individuals through sponsoring the sort of sports they typically like to practise, such as golf, skiing and yachting.

Through Reuters Foundation, our charitable arm, we further profile ourselves through sponsoring a series of educational and humanitarian projects, mostly linked with information. An outstanding example is Alertnet, an internet site run by the Foundation on which humanitarian relief agencies can exchange and find information when disasters strike, enabling them to target their efforts more effectively. The Reuters Foundation operates on a budget of around £3.3 million.

For Reuters, the brand is Reuters. We have noticed that many users refer to the product they use as just “my Reuters.” So we have decided on a basically monolithic brand structure, that is, all the brand equity is loaded into the Reuters name and product names are for the most part purely descriptive. There are a few exceptions where a product name has built its own brand equity.

Purely descriptive names clarify what each product does and how it potentially fits together with another product. This is much welcomed by our customers, and helps our sales force too. This inter-connectivity of our products is becoming increasingly valuable to our customers. So the extra clarity is an important business asset.

The Future

In branding, the sky’s the limit. One never reaches the summit. There is always more to be done. Brands need constantly nurturing and adapting to changing market conditions. Behind the smart communication, there must be solid achievement in innovating to meet customers changing needs and wants with products they want to buy. There is no room for complacency.

However, after 150 years of existence, Reuters is assuredly on the threshold of the most exciting period of its colourful history. The internet and new wireless technologies open the way for the company potentially to broaden its markets hugely.

Reuters sets off on this exciting road with a wealth of trust attached to its brand – perhaps the single most important brand value for any business in the new economy of the 21st century. With a dynamic new business strategy which is transforming the company radically, the Reuters is at the leading edge – ahead of the field, where our journalists and engineers first began carving our reputation one and a half centuries ago.

END

A new book on branding, "Warriors on the High Wire". The book, authored by Fiona Gilmore and sub-titled "The balancing act of brand leadership in the 21st century," covers 13 well known brands including Vodafone, Disney, Sony, Visa, Yahoo, Psion and INSEAD. It is a sequel to "Brand Warriors," which was published in 1997 and became a best-seller.

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