NZZ GROUP: CREATE A DISTINCT BRAND ARCHITECTURE
The acronym "NZZ" and the postillion emblem were not used consistently and stood sometimes for the newspaper, sometimes for the publishing group. Therefor consistent rules of application had to be defined.
The group's name had to be optimized to avoid mix ups with the subsidiary company publishing the newspaper NZZ. The task was solved as a joint project of ABT Management GmbH and Branders Group AG.
A series of management interviews and a demoscopic research on the awareness and association of ideas about NZZ and the postillion emblem were initiated to get an impartial decision base. The same was repeated for the affiliates of the NZZ group: „Tagblatt Medien“ and „ LZ Medien“.
It had also to be assertained how far the acronym "NZZ" is associated with the affiliated products such as "NZZ am Sonntag", "NZZ online" etc. and understood as an umbrella brand.
A main issue was the inhouse question wether the group should still continue to bear the name "NZZ" even though the group is much larger now and the news paper "NZZ" no longer the financially leading product of the group.
There was another question: The design of the group logo had been explicitly conceived differently from the classical type face which is used in the acronym "NZZ". But since its introduction nobody liked it. A step back was necessary.
Based on these findings the brand architecture of the company and the family of NZZ products were defined. The group's name now is "NZZ Mediengruppe" and it is written in a classical typeface. The postillion is used at group level only.
For the NZZ product family a new and emotional claim was created:
„Freude an Qualität“
The "NZZ Mediengruppe" includes 3 publishing houses in Zurich, St. Gallen and Lucerne. A permanent source of mix ups are the legal names of the group "AG für die Neue Zürcher Zeitung" and the name of the subsidiary company publishing the newspaper "Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG".
