DISCUSSIONS AND INTERPRETATION

Discussions and Interpretation



Discussions and Interpretation

Virgin is often depicted as a 'philosophy' or 'lifestyle' emblem that has successfully stretched into everything from life assurance to lingerie, unbound by banalities such as purposeful merchandise performance. According to this idea, its the emotional values that ties simultaneously the 350 distinct disparate Virgin companies. So, persons go by plane Virgin Atlantic because they purchase into the philosophy of the emblem demanding the large-scale bully boys like BA.

Firstly, the emblem stretch presentation of Virgin has been patchy. Virgin Atlantic is by far the biggest success, with its £1.9billion of revenue approximately 50% of the whole Virgin Group's sales. But as Professor Mark Ritson of London Business School commented in trading publication, 'For every Virgin Atlantic there have been numerous failures such as Virgin Cola'.

Second, and most significantly, it isn't the emotional 'sizzle' of lifestyle values that motored Virgin's success. The successful emblem extensions all have a large merchandise 'sausage', inspired by the Virgin personality of being irreverent and fun. You can see this in the Virgin emblem values from the brand's website. Four of the six values are connected to product/service (innovation, bright customer service, value and worth for money), with the other two more about the sizzle (fun and competitively challenging). Of course the antics of Sir Richard have been a gigantic assist in getting PR for the brand's extensions. But the long period success or malfunction of these extensions comes down to how good the merchandise is.

There have been numerous pillar inches in writing about Virgin's enormous emblem strength and its seemingly voracious appetite for new business ventures. It is evidently this same emblem strength that allows Virgin to contend is a gigantic kind of countries and market sectors, but how much reality is there to this claim?

Conventional wisdom says that emblem strength comes from a brand's single strong message, its proficiency to express a mighty message to consumers in a simple, yet often abstract way. But Virgin doesn't emerge to have a single message anymore-the business that one time rode high the Sex Pistols past Parliament on a Thames riverboat now sells cars, borrowing cards and pension funds. Virgin is still a strong, recognizable emblem, but much of its significance has been diluted. It used to have the likeness of being the rebel, of siding with the consumer in the face of bureaucracy and monopoly, but with Virgin Trains and the Virgin Credit Card it doesn't have that likeness anymore. It used to be a emblem that catered to juvenile audiences, those dwelling the lifestyle of the juvenile and rebellious, but with Virgin Cars and Virgin Atlantic it doesn't actually have that likeness either. The connection challenges of Virgin's brands stem from the strange assemblage of Virgin businesses; Virgin has interests in selling trans-Atlantic flights, records, cola, lingerie, electrical power, trains, concerts, holidays and wireless phones, to title but a few. As the assembly has diversified, the emblem message has weakened-a occurrence that isn't exclusive to Virgin, brands ...