Business Stripped Bare

we’re involved in, the customer is about the only factor common to all of them.

And that really is all there is to it. The Virgin brand is a guarantee that you’ll be treated well, that you’ll get a high-quality product which won’t dent your bank balance, and you’ll get more fun out of your purchase than you expected — whatever it is.

You see, what gets me up in the morning is the customer, and the idea of giving the customer a good time. No other brand has become a ‘way-of-life’ brand the way Virgin has. And we achieved it, not by clinically deciding one day to become a way-of-life brand, but simply by following our appetites and the things we were curious about. I’ve always and continually been interested in learning new things and, equally important, I’ve always wanted to share what I learned with other people.

Should you follow the ‘Virgin formula’, and focus your company around the customer’s experience? Probably not. Not unless your heart’s really in it. Not unless, like me, you wake up of a morning saying to yourself, ‘Let’s give people some fun!’ Obviously, I hope you care for your customers. But I can’t tell you that your company should be about customers. What your business is about is up to you.

The Virgin brand came into existence gradually, to reflect what I was fundamentally interested in. And to my own surprise, it wasn’t publishing magazines; it wasn’t even music. My driving force, I realise now, was finding new ways to give people a good time — ideally, in places where they were least expecting it. Like airports.

While the brand has its roots right back in the seventies with my beliefs and spirit, I think Virgin Atlantic has done more to capture and articulate what the brand stands for and personifies to consumers. Many other Virgin companies have adopted those powerful values of innovation, honesty, caring, value and fun. So I believe it’s about great customer service and giving people a good time.

This is why Virgin wears its sense of humour on its sleeve. We want to inform and entertain people. You don’t have to be a Virgin customer to enjoy our adverts and our publicity stunts. We have found over the years that giving people a good time, and making them feel like they’re in on the joke, has been better for the brand than any amount of complex campaigning.

I’ll give you a quick example: on Virgin Atlantic flights we had these beautifully designed salt and pepper pots. At least, we had them when we took off. By the time we landed, most of them had disappeared. Our passengers were swiping them and using them at their own dinner tables. What to do? We decided to make a joke of it. At the bottom of each pot we stamped the words ‘Pinched from Virgin Atlantic’. We turned an embarrassment into a piece of cheeky loss-leader promotion. We got people onside by bringing them in on the joke. In itself, this was a fairly trivial matter; repeated across our whole group, our fun-loving attitude makes a tremendous difference to our business.

Irreverent humour is one of Virgin’s brand values, and this has to do with our wanting to be honest about the ups and downs of our business and to share what we think with the people who matter most to us — our customers. The people who read our adverts are the same people who read about our tussles, our setbacks and our mistakes. So why would we want to pretend the real world doesn’t affect us? Everybody knows of our run-ins with BA over the years. When the world’s press gathered to watch BA erect their London Eye Ferris wheel on London’s South Bank and we heard they were having technical problems, we scrambled our airship. The banner trailing behind it read: ‘BA can’t get it up.’ We also had a lot of fun when we introduced onboard massages on Virgin Atlantic, running an advertisment in the newspapers saying ‘BA doesn’t give a shiatsu!’

When Sydney Airport Corporation (owned by a division of the very successful Macquarie Bank) decided arbitrarily to raise their landing charges, Virgin Blue’s CEO Brett Godfrey and I decided to put a slogan on the side of our planes and on the massive billboards lining the road to the airport. ‘Macquarie. What a load of bankers!’ It made headlines, and it made a point: the bankers seemed to be after easy cash at the expense of the low-cost market. Eventually Macquarie agreed to renegotiate the fee question. I dressed up as a native American Indian, smoking a pipe of peace, and buried the hatchet with them. (Literally — it’s still there somewhere, under the tarmac!) It was one of those ‘No hard feelings, mate’ moments, and I think the Australian public enjoyed our irreverent approach. Interestingly, as a result, we’ve now become partners in a number of companies. Befriending one’s enemy is a good rule for business — and life.

Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealised, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character and no public trust. At Virgin, we certainly talk ourselves up, but we are genuinely a real company doing real work in the real world — not some sort of alien visitation.

It may be that Virgin has grown up to be one model of what a modern company should be. It may be that, by making the customer the focus of its business, and by giving good customer service a brand name, Virgin has created something genuinely new in the business world — something future generations can emulate and build upon.

Past a certain age, we all want to be Moses, leading our people into the promised land. Then I look at myself in the mirror in the morning after a heavy night and I think: Oh, Richard, get over it!

Virgin may simply be odd — an accident of history. I like fun. I began work in a decade that prized fun. People associate me with that decade and the feel-good factor has stuck with me ever since. Virgin’s been a rallying point for that spirit of fun — but would Virgin have worked at any other period of history? Would it work now? The bottom line is, we’ll never know.

Good brands reflect the histories of the time and the group of people that made them. They cannot be easily copied. They cannot be recycled. A brand is like an artist’s signature (in Virgin’s case our brand is literally an artist’s signature!) What you make of your brand is up to you. While I hope and expect that there are lessons in this chapter for you, I cannot tell you what your brand should do. What I will do is ask that you take it seriously — as seriously as a painter treats the signatures on his canvases.

A brand should reflect what you can do. You have to deliver, faultlessly and for all time, whatever your brand promises, so it’s better to make your offering sound witty and innovative than to pretend you’re more than you are. Get the brand right from the start, by being honest with yourself about what it is you’re offering. A brand will eventually date you, so I think you’re better off intelligently evolving it as we have always done than tritely updating it. These rather trivial rebrandings generate a lot of fairly funny adverse publicity, and with good reason: they’re a sort of corporate comb-over — and about as effective.

This, anyway, was our philosophy when we came up with the name ‘Virgin’ — and I had to respond vigorously to the Registrar of Companies Office in the UK when they said the name Virgin was too rude to register. Part of that response consisted of proving that ‘Virgin’ had been used as a ship’s name without complaint as far back as 1699 and indeed one such ship was recorded as having docked at Cadiz on 26 April 1699 in the May edition of the London Gazette. It was a bit risque, I suppose — a bit of fun. But the word wasn’t simply plucked out of the air. It reflected the fact that every business we began, we started from scratch. We’ve been ‘virgins’ in almost every new business field we’ve entered. To my mind the name Virgin was the opposite of rude: it meant pure, in its original condition, unexploited and never used. Virgin referred to us, because we were all virgins in business. Registering the brand was critical. Defending it in every legal jurisdiction in the world has been expensive. But it’s all proved essential for Virgin’s success.

A brand’s meanings are acquired over time. Some meanings will be the product of serious discussions and years of directed and dedicated effort. Some meanings will just stick to the brand, whether you like it or not. Remember, a brand always means something, and ultimately, you can control the meaning of your brand only through what you deliver to the customer.

If I describe to you Virgin’s early years, you’ll be able to see how the Virgin brand came to mean what it does today. I would like to say that all the things Virgin means to people were the product of masterful business planning. They weren’t. Luckily, we did a good job, so the labels that stuck to us were generally positive, whether we intended them or not.

Immediately, however, I am confronted by the fairly frightening fact that I will have to explain to younger readers what music meant to my generation. How else are they going to understand Virgin Records, our first company?

I believe music isn’t as central to most young people’s lives today as it was back in the 1970s. There’s a lot of brilliant music around today — I think about KT Tunstall and Amy Winehouse for starters — but looking back, the 1970s was a unique time, and people then had an incredible passion for rock music.

Partly, it was about choice. In those days, living in England, we didn’t have DVDs and mobile phones, and we