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Canadian brands as corporate chameleons Print E-mail

Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service
Published: Monday, June 30, 2008

OTTAWA - Forget the industrious beaver. Canadian businesses ought to look to the adaptable chameleon for a modern corporate model, a new book suggests.

Canadian entrepreneurs and business owners can learn plenty from the colour-changing lizard if they want to become global brands, marketing experts Jeannette Hanna and Alan Middleton say in their book, Ikonica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape.

Canadian entrepreneurs and business owners can learn plenty from the colour-changing lizard if they want to become global brands, marketing experts Jeannette Hanna and Alan Middleton say in their book, Ikonica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape.The authors chastise Canadians, especially marketers, for dismissing some of the country's greatest international brand success stories as mere flukes, and call on other companies to learn from these case studies.

Although Canadians are shaped by their environment, "business lives in denial of this basic fact. Trying to understand commerce independent of its context and community is akin to farming oblivious of the variables of climate and local ecology," they write in the newly released book by Douglas & McIntyre.

"If you don't understand your environment, growing anything is a highly risky process of trial and error."

Enter the chameleon.

In an interview, Hanna says the knock against the lizard - the creature doesn't know who it is - is unfair. Businesses, she says, cling to this perspective at their own peril.

"I don't think chameleons have an identity crisis. They're very social. If you think about it that way, their ability to blend in is an ability to create community wherever you go."

And soaking up the local scene is a simple, ingenious model for companies trying to build a global brand, Hanna said.

"The ability of a chameleon to adapt to its environment and its camouflage is actually one of its greatest strengths."

Just because many American companies take a different tack by emphasizing company of origin branding doesn't mean this approach is a winning formula for Canadian businesses, Hanna added.

"They think that's the only way. That's what a strong brand is - it wears its flag on its sleeve and has a certain brawniness about it. That is one approach. But there's another kind of strength that is highly adoptable, the ability to morph to the environment it's in, read that environment with great savvy."

In Ikonica, the authors trace the evolution of Canada's best-known brands, from the Hudson's Bay Company to Canadian Tire. They interview business and cultural figures at the helm of Canada's successful companies. The people might not be household names, but they preside over world-famous brands, including Tim Hortons, McCain Foods, Umbra, and Cirque du Soleil.

A unifying element to their success is their adaptability, or, in the case of Cirque, to incorporate the sense of the nomadic into their brand.

"They're all great examples of that adaptability, so they transcend nationalism," said Hanna, co-founder of the corporate branding and design agency Cundari SFP.

Ikonica co-author Alan Middleton is a professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University.

They say Canada's successful brands profiled in the book are able to bridge this focus on external communities with internal corporate culture.

"The people who succeed are the ones who intuitively or strategically understand the connection between internal culture and building community connections, said Hanna.

Canadian companies, she added, are particularly good at this. "Because that communitarian instinct is there, that sense of building community is one that comes easily to certain brands."