Like a Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School

STRIKE UP THE BRAND

A lot of people ask me about the Virgin brand – what’s our secret? What’s the enduring magic formula?

The truth is, we started with a really simple idea that has developed over time. When I opened my first record store, I thought it might be a success if I made it a cool place to hang out and kept prices low. I hoped that the combination would make the store popular and that the resulting sales volume would make up for lower prices. Although I didn’t know it at the time, these basic notions were the beginning of what’s now called brand values. At Virgin, ours include providing good value for money and a great customer experience.

I firmly believed back then, and still do now, that you can apply those rudimentary values to any business situation. Today Virgin has become one of the most diverse brands in the world as we have continued breaking into new markets and shaking them up for the customer’s benefit. And our brand values are the glue that holds it all together.

That doesn’t mean our business is a complete free-for-all, as my team often reminds me. Though we receive proposals for almost every imaginable product and service – drinks, plastic surgery, clothing, restaurants, care for the elderly, even funeral services – we have a central team that evaluates each idea to see if it fits with our values and what consumers expect of Virgin. Sometimes the debate is fierce!

And then sometimes our risk-taking pays dividends, such as our turnaround of Britain’s NTL:Telewest cable business, which became the successful, customer-focused business now known as Virgin Media. This major effort involved moving some of our best people into that business and changing the focus from quarterly sales targets to longer-term goals that involved keeping customers happy and loyal. Keeping customers and employees happy is good for the business, and not a cost that can be cut!

As nice as it is to read articles that say the Virgin brand is one of the most powerful in the world, our corporate goal is to make it one of the most trusted.

To this end we have put together a structure to ensure that every company in the Virgin Group is fully attuned to our values as well as the customer expectations that accompany them. We provide brand training for all our businesses and supply the tools they need. We set targets at all our call centres for customer satisfaction and measure them on a regular basis. We bring together all our marketing departments to share ideas. And every new business gets all this help right from the start.

We try to lay out how we will make Virgin even stronger in the future. Regardless of how respected Virgin has become – we now operate in over thirty countries, employ over 50,000 people and serve millions of customers every month – we cannot be complacent. We focus on core areas that all Virgin companies must treat as priorities in order for the brand to flourish. These include everything from Virgin brand basics to connecting with customers online. It also emphasises collaboration among Virgin companies, entrepreneurialism, ethics – and also music, fun and rock ‘n’ roll! In essence, it is a route map connecting our past to our future.

I often mention people – not sales statistics or the bottom line – because, as I hope I have made very clear in this book, I truly believe that our people are the heart and soul of our brand. The simple concept of offering customers a better experience, and having fun while you do it, attracts very bright and enthusiastic people. That said, as important as it is to have gifted, creative types developing great products and marketing, it will all go for naught if the people at the sharp end aren’t delivering it to our customers, in the right way, 24/7. This emphasis on the importance of every one of our people is what really makes Virgin’s brand values something more than a dusty mission statement stuffed into a drawer somewhere.

In business schools, brand values are often discussed in terms of marketing, as though they are an end result of a scientific process, rather than embedded in a business’s soul. Thankfully, I’ve learned that in the real world of business it’s better to rely on creativity, intuition and empathy. You can hire consultants to build a brand using a hands-off, theoretical approach, but you’ll do far better – and have more fun – if, like Virgin did, you nurture your own.