Mike Dane
In late March Ricoh Americas Corporation announced the launch of a new global brand identity with the tagline “imagine. change.”. The launch aligns Ricoh Company, Ltd. operations worldwide under a common vision, focusing on how Ricoh brings value to its customers’ business. The new brand identity also unites Ricoh and IKON Office Solutions under one brand in the U.S. Ricoh’s new brand identity also coincides with its 50th anniversary selling products in the U.S. Last week I spoke with Mike Dane, Ricoh’s vice president of marketing about the new global brand identity, IKON, and the 50th anniversary.
Does this mean that the IKON name will be no more?
Dane: It does. As of Monday [April 2, 2012], the first official business day of our new fiscal year the IKON name has been, I guess you can say, retired. And we go to market in the U.S., the Americas, and around the globe as Ricoh.
Do you think this will have any effect on existing IKON customers?
Dane: We don’t anticipate any impact with our customers, in fact in many ways there’s an ‘it’s about time’ kind of feeling out there. Number one, it’s been 3½ years since the acquisition of IKON and from the very beginning we made it clear at the time that IKON was a Ricoh Company, operating separately within the Ricoh family. There’s been a lot of work done at the field level during the past 3½ years with our customers integrating the Ricoh message, communicating the value of what it means to bring the IKON organization—which was traditionally known for the services delivery capability across all technology, and Ricoh from a pure technology and manufacturing standpoint—together.
We did a lot of customer research, learning what they felt the values were of the IKON organization, the values of Ricoh, and as we brought the two brands together we made sure in every element of the integration, whether it’s our back-end systems, our sales organizations, or our leadership, that we comprehend all the things customers loved about IKON and folded that into the Ricoh brand.
How are you presenting this to the Ricoh customer base?
Dane: We have a lot of activities planned. We have a completely new look and feel for the materials we take to our customers and it reinforces the messages that are a part of the new brand positioning. We have videos and information for our sales people to make sure they’re able to share the value of the new brand positioning with our customers. The materials for our sales organization and across the organization are to make sure they comprehend the new positioning. Then we’ll have materials and activities that we’ll put in front of our customers this week and the rest of this year as well.
It’s also the 50th Anniversary of Ricoh in the U.S. so we’re combining the IKON merge into the Ricoh global brand positioning and the anniversary all together because we think there’s a good message there.
Will this new corporate branding have any impact on your independent dealer channel, and if so, in what way?
Dane: It’s a global corporate brand. Our dealer channel is Ricoh, Savin, and Lanier in the U.S. and they each have their own individual identities and they are part of the Ricoh global family so we believe it provides a nice umbrella messaging from the standpoint of the Ricoh family group, and them being a part of it.
The brand strategy for our independent dealer channel that includes Ricoh, Savin, and Lanier is driven to a great degree by our dealer channel. That is what they’re telling us they want. At this point we’re keeping it in line with what they’re asking us for.
How does the corporate branding and IKON integration tie in with Ricoh’s 50th anniversary in America?
Dane: It’s not like we merged the IKON brand into Ricoh and now we’re starting the integration. We’ve actually have been integrating behind the scenes for three years. This to a certain level is almost like putting the wrapper on the package and the package is already filled. As that progressed over the past year or so, finalizing the integration of IKON, the 50th anniversary is on the calendar so that became an opportunity and the Ricoh brand position as it was unfolding became something that was well tied to the beginning of our fiscal year. Those two things were happening and from the standpoint, ‘let’s make sure there’s a good package and message that ties it all together’ we used the beginning of our fiscal year to do that.
Are you planning any kind of celebration to mark this event?
Dane: We are and throughout the year will make a lot of that public. This is an opportunity to have some fun and use it to reinforce Ricoh’s leadership position. As I’ve discovered in the past 50 years of Ricoh history it’s amazing how many firsts Ricoh is responsible for in the world of technology. We’re going to make sure that everybody understands our heritage. Then we’ll have local customer events and just a general theme throughout the year of 50th anniversary. It’s a fun theme, a way for us to bring people together, and a way for us to communicate the heritage of Ricoh.
The new tagline, “Imagine. Change.” what do you want customers to think of when they hear that?
Dane: We don’t want to restrict anybody from imagining what they can do and change and be proactive in the world. It’s really a statement about who we are versus who we’re going to be.
We’re a company that’s very focused on being able to respond and partner with our customers and imagine what they can do from a standpoint of creativity to address the world that’s changing so quickly. The change piece, to me, is the most important part because imagining or designing something is one thing, executing on it and making it a reality is what’s important.
Change means we can not only imagine our design and an answer to a customer’s problem, we can execute it and make the change happen. We know how to do that effectively in an organization. We do it every day. It’s about being able to imagine or design a solution and change, deploy, execute, and realize the results of that. We want to make sure our customers understand we’re with them, we can be creative, imaginative, and can also make those things a reality through effective change.
With the new brand identity in place what’s next for Ricoh here in the U.S.?
Dane: It’s a continued evolution. I think the brand positioning helps us to build the platform to continue that. And it’s more into the world of information and services. We’re a manufacturer, but we believe we have a good combination of technology enabled solutions that are driven by a services-led organization, focused on understanding customer problems and the intellectual property is the people we have. We use the term ‘services-led, technology enabled and people driven’. That’s where we see our business going forward, blending all the great things that Ricoh has been known for in the world of technology and manufacturing within the U.S., the heritage IKON had in terms of being a services organization, and bringing all the people together to take that to market.
What you see is us moving forward into a world that is more customer focused, led by services and understanding problems and solving them for customers and bringing the people and technology that we have in house to bear on that.
