“A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” – Jeff Bezos
Today, our customers tell us that the Ideal Standard brand has lots of great qualities; we are reliable, helpful, quality. They also tell us that we are basic, bottom end and utilitarian.*
Since the beginning of the year there have been a huge amount of people in the UK and Ireland business and across group functions working on a strategy to be able to drive significant change in how our customers think of Ideal Standard, creating a desirable, design-led and innovative brand that consumers want to buy and professionals want to specify.
A group wide strategy, we are focused on creating a truly international Ideal Standard brand so that no matter what country you are in across Europe and the Middle East, when you come into contact with Ideal Standard you have the same experience and it is instantly recognisable.
For the UK and Ireland to do this we have put into place a lot of significant change, which started with the withdrawal of the Sottini brand and the creation of one single streamlined product portfolio for the Ideal Standard brand. This has involved aligning our ranging with the rest of Europe and giving ourselves the ability to be able to provide the full range of residential solutions within the single brand along with lots of exciting new NPI in all areas of the market. 
Following that, we changed the logo on all our products, implemented a new channel strategy, adjusted terms and pricing, developed new service propositions, created a new selling toolkit and are now taking it all out to market in a big sales and marketing drive, particularly targeting our key growth areas of Specification, Retail and eTail.
This week colleagues from across the internal and external sales teams joined sessions to explore and understand further what we need to do in the market to develop our brand. We talked about how to tell our brand story with confidence when talking to customers and to talk about the way our business is changing in terms of working with new design partners, investments in service, manufacturing, innovation and new products.
Key Account Manager Rachel Steer said: “Showing customers the Atelier Collection is definitely having an impact as they can see we are serious about being a design-led, high-end brand.
"I’ve had conversations with customers who I expected to be resistant to Ideal Standard but they’ve bought into the Atelier dream, and selected some great products within the full Ideal Standard range.”
Marketing Director Katie Cope said: “This strategy is all about taking the next steps on our journey from being thought of as functional to being seen as aspirational.
"It is a journey that will take commitment and repetition but we will achieve it and shape a brand that we are all incredibly proud of.”
*UK Brand Temperature study Dec 2019