How to make a pan European brand make its mark?
Interview:
How to turn a leading business with multiple stakeholders into a conscious brand?
A leading brand needs to be ambitious, focus on market trends, and adapt by facilitating new goals and desires among customers. More and more they are increasingly choosing thriving brands with a meaningful story over brands that only sell a good product or service. We asked our clever client Jan Van Belleghem, the managing Director of Q-CONNECT®, how important it is to give purpose to a brand to fulfil its mission.
Why did the Board of Directors decided to reposition Q-CONNECT®?
“For 25 years the Q-CONNECT® brand has been Europe’s brand of choice for affordable and reliable business supplies. We continuously strive to make the workday of our customers as productive and comfortable as possible. This also means that we need to adapt to new requirements, changing working environments and evolutions in our society. We are facing numerous social, economical, and environmental challenges that we need to tackle. As a leading company, it is our duty to take on a more active role in tackling these worldwide challenges. That is why we asked Cojak to reposition our brand, our plans, and our ambitions.”
What was the trigger to challenge your status quo and reposition Q-CONNECT® as a meaningful brand?
“Being a successful brand that is offered by leading distributors in Europe, allows us to serve a myriad of customers from students to SMEs and multinationals to the public sector. Our position gives us the opportunity but also the responsibility to do well for the planet and help preserving it for future generations. Worldwide we are confronted more and more with the effects of climate change.
Moreover, we are facing numerous social and economic challenges. Therefore, we have decided to reposition our brand around sustainability. With a 360° view we focus on the whole supply chain. It is our ambition to be a brand that is not only reliable, convenient and contemporary but conscious and fair as well. We have used the United Nations’ sustainable development goals to create our roadmap, making sure we stay on track. Together with Cojak and our stakeholder we have worked out the Q-CONNECT® Ecological and Social Responsibility Charter as a guideline of our ecological and social responsibility journey.”
How does the E.S.R. charter influence our brand model?
“Q-CONNECT® aims to be more than just another brand of office supplies: we help our customers reach their goals in a sustainable, green way. This long-term mindset is necessary in the current climate of our society. We want to make a difference and communicate that ambition to our customers. In order to do that, we created a complete new brand model entirely based on this E.S. Charter in the beginning of 2022. We use the sustainability goals we formulated in our charter to structure our brand model. “
(The member teams brainstorming during the brand positioning sessions in Frankfurt.)
How did you translated this charter into a new brand identity?
“After some intensive brand positioning workshops with our European members Cojak created our Brand Passport. From now on, this document will be our guidelines to anyone working for the brand Q-CONNECT®, representing the brand, or helping to shape its status and character.”
What does this brand passport do? What will it help you achieve?
“A lot, it contains our main storyline to reposition us in the European market. It is our long-term foundation of all of our brand communication and marketing activities.”
“Q-CONNECT®’s Brand ID is the result of a collaboration with the branding agency Cojak. The new brand positioning is based on their strategic method and provides the foundations for the development of our brand, with which we want to contribute to a more meaningful society in the long term. We embrace the basis of the purpose economy. Our brand passport is a map for the proverbial journey we will undertake in the next decade. We want to remain true to our identity in the future and consistently extend that in our communication & marketing, from the words we use to the images we display.”
This brand passport will help Q-CONNECT®:
• Define a Pan-European marketing roadmap for the Q-CONNECT® members, containing long-term goals
• Set communication priorities and bring structure
• Define a structured approach and brand goals that give us more credibility
• Create a clear tagline message for the future
• Embark on a marketing journey that lifts the brand up to a higher level
• Sets the standard for proactive communication about the Q-CONNECT® brand”
About Q-CONNECT®
INTERACTION is an alliance of leading European distributors in the business supplies segment. The alliance has a joint turnover of over 2 billion euro. The main focus of the association is the sourcing and development of a pan-European house brand of high-quality office products that provide an alternative to the major brands. The house brand is called Q-CONNECT®. It is one of Europe’s leading brands of office and business supplies used daily in more than 20 countries. Q-CONNECT® has been around for more than 20 years and has a turnover of over € 171 million per year. It consists of over 3.700 product references. They asked Cojak to be their branding & marketing agency and lead them in their marketing quest to reposition themself in the European market.
Interested in using our methodology for the benefit of your brand? Contact us.
We coach companies & entrepreneurs to define their brand identity based on their conscious ambitions at any stage of their business. We help them find solutions for their brand positioning, brand equity, communication, (digital) awareness, marketing campaigns and (future) branding.
