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The Venerable Westinghouse Brand Thrives Again In Licensing Pacts with Savvy Product Packagers Today it’s possible to license a well-known brand and bingo, you’ve become a Westinghouse, or Remington, or even GE. Virtually every brand from the past is available for licensing, even if the contemporary incarnations have no connection to their products of yesteryear.
For companies that acquire brand licenses, the advantages can be instant recognition in their categories and the right to brand magic developed over decades.
“A recent study by Home Furnishing News magazine ranks Westinghouse as the number one brand in lighting among consumers,” notes Stan Angelo, chairman and CEO of Westinghouse Lighting Corporation. “People remember the brand fondly.” “Brand licensing strengthens our position in certain categories and gives us an extension into different areas where Westinghouse is known to be a leader,” explains Jackie Jones, vice president of marketing for Salton Inc. “As a result of brand licensing, we have more brands to give retailers and more choices and variety for customers.” Value and integrity are qualities that most people associate with Westinghouse—qualities that appeal to Salton’s customer base. Salton markets many items under the Westinghouse umbrella: kitchen electronics, vacuums, clocks, seasonal appliances like portable fans and heaters, tabletop air cleaners, curling irons, and hair dryers. Keeping the brand owner wired in Westinghouse Electric Corporation—a wholly owned subsidiary of Viacom Inc.—owns the famous Westinghouse name, the Circle W logo, and the tagline, “You can be sure...if it’s Westinghouse.”
Westinghouse Electric issues a stylebook to promote consistency, but licensees come up with their own interpretations. Logo guidelines establish a format so that all products have similar brand association. All licensees use the historic circle W topped by three dots, and the tag line. Westinghouse blue is also a common element. Other elements required on packaging include license and trademark disclosures. Designers can manipulate some elements as they translate the Westinghouse brand into new product packaging. The encircled, bedotted W and the phrase “You can be sure...if it’s Westinghouse” are not negotiable, but they are open to interpretation. Each licensee has its own strategy for expressing the visual Westinghouse brand through packaging. Salton’s package design focuses mainly on the Westinghouse logo. Decisions that go into the process include how and where to place the logo, how to make it more recognizable, and how to make it consistent with the product. Different Salton product package designs also use gradients of Westinghouse blue. A unique background time line giving a brief history of Westinghouse and its founder, George Westinghouse, Jr., appears consistently on Salton packaging. Relentless refinement Salton picked up the Westinghouse brand about 18 months ago and since then, monitoring global brand and management and packaging strategy has become a nonstop occupation. “It’s been a priority since the beginning,” says Jones. She has even scoured eBay looking for old Westinghouse goods and packaging. To research the direction of their packaging, Salton used focus group studies provided by Viacom. “Salton is very hands-on about where we are going with the Westinghouse brand,” Jones says. “We look at what is being done in retail and come back to the packaging designers with ideas about how the brand should be presented.”
How does a licensee take the visual image of a time-honored brand and make it proprietary while continuing to convey everything that made it worth licensing in the first place? “Our marketing group spent time in the archives researching all types of Westinghouse marketing materials,” answers Angelo. “This gave us an idea of the brand equity associated with Westinghouse, and we were able to understand what consumers were used to seeing. We took this information and combined it with our knowledge of our product categories and today’s consumer environment. “In addition to researching marketing materials, we also look at the products that were introduced by Westinghouse. The older products provide inspiration for the ones we introduce today,” Angelo says. Connecting brand to product
What’s more, notes Angelo, “our products are sold in multiple types of retail environments and several departments throughout stores. Our challenge is to create a consistent brand image with all of our products and at the same time design them so they fit in every type of environment.” Westinghouse Lighting adopted a blue color scheme based on Westinghouse PMS 285 blue and incorporated the famous circle W and tag line. “Guidelines from Westinghouse Electric provide specific rules on how the logo and the tag line can be used. From there we incorporate the individual demands of our product categories and our commitment to provide consumer-friendly packaging,” Angelo says. “To keep the design current, we introduced accent colors and lifestyle imaging into our packaging. All of our designs are forwarded to Westinghouse Electric for approval.” Linear Corp. licenses Westinghouse for garage door openers, intercoms, and home security systems. Newton Associates, Linear’s advertising and package design partner, quickly jumped out with strong packaging. Jon Newton represents Linear at licensee meetings. “We talked about having common packaging guidelines, but they were too restrictive because most of us already had packaging set, and it would be expensive to change.” The design firm used the “W” from the licensee style manual as a departure point for Linear’s Westinghouse brand packaging. “The W alone has as much brand weight as the name. It’s like ‘Intel inside,’” says Newton. The brand in action Newton’s interpretation of Westinghouse for Linear treated the W as a big watermark, a strategy that never before had been implemented. When shown the design, Westinghouse adopted the look as its own in the ultimate compliment to brand-licensed packaging.
The packaging goal for Linear intercom systems is to make them stand out. “This is not a product everyone thinks they need, so the package has to grab them,” Newton explains. “The Westinghouse brand helps make this happen, so the package design has to make it bold and very ‘Westinghouse.’” Packaging for Linear garage door openers tapped into a different purchasing motivation. “People need these products to get into and out of their garages,” Newton says. “Because people read the box, packaging has to convey a lot of information.” Research for the garage door opener assignment included a focus group, which in turn led to a four-color box for the high-end garage door opener and two-color packaging for the low-end model. The focus group consisted of 25- to 45-year-old do-it-yourselfers who owned house, car, and garage. To see which designs stood up, participants were asked to comment on different boxes. Although no one would have seen the Westinghouse-licensed product in a store previously, the focus group members knew the brand and assumed Westinghouse made it. Thus, the box was rated highest. Getting boxes into the big boxes Brand packaging has to satisfy more than the manufacturer and customer. It also has to please the middleman in the distribution chain—the buyer at Lowe’s or Home Depot—who may not fully appreciate the nuances of good packaging design and branding. Some buyers even ask for changes. Packaging can make or break a product distribution strategy. Place a Westinghouse logo on a package, though, and you’re in. “In some cases, this is the only way you get into the mega-merchandisers like Home Depot and Lowe’s,” observes Newton. “Angelo was in before with just a few SKUs, because that brand had less recognition. It took a name like Westinghouse to get them in in a big way.” When Salton first licensed the Westinghouse brand, its design firm came up with a universal look drawn from the Westinghouse style guide. Jones oversees the consistent implementation of the visual style in Salton offices worldwide. Consumers of all ages and around the world remain loyal to the Westinghouse brand. Such global recognition works to Salton’s advantage in many markets as it works to create a worldwide brand identity with Westinghouse-branded products. Packaging the Westinghouse brand is an important part of Salton’s distribution strategy. Some designs must work in markets outside the U.S. and Salton’s challenge—and that of all the licensees—is to package the products to draw upon that loyalty wherever it lives. | |||||||||||||||||||
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© 2004-2008 ST Media Group International. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part is prohibited without consent from publisher.
DECEMBER 4, 2008
1:00 PM EASTERN
This special 90-minute webinar will feature up-to-date insights into the market forces affecting package design and sustainability. Registration for this program is $89.99. Attendees will receive a copy of Packaging Sustainability: Tools, Systems and Strategies for Innovative Package Design (a $49.95 value) by Wendy Jedlicka.
Keynote Address by:
MINAL MISTRY
Project Manager, Sustainable
Packaging Coalition/GreenBlue
COMPASS is an online software tool for packaging designers and engineers to compare the environmental impacts of their package designs.
