Cleaning up on green carwashing
What colour should a green business – a waterless carwash – choose for its logo? Orange, of course. “Orange stands out against the black and white on our cars, and we didn’t want to use the obvious colour, green,” says co-founder of Ecowash Mobile, Jim Cornish.
Ecowash Mobile, which Jim started in 2004 with Stewart Nicholls, is a mobile waterless carwashing and detailing franchise system. At the time the company started, waterless carwashing was a new idea. The drought was biting and the environmental debate catching on, but the company’s waterless technology, which is from Europe, was virtually unknown.
Ecowash had to rely on brilliant design and branding to win its customers’ trust, and this has been key to its business growth and expansion into overseas markets. But it wasn’t expensive.
The brand is now so popular and respected that its customers, including big name car brands, are co-branding with Ecowash on their promotions.
One customer has even asked for permission to change their own cars to the Ecowash orange – a testament to the warmth and good feelings associated with the brand.
Ecowash is the 11th fastest growing company in Australia, according to SmartCompany.com.au, an online business magazine. It has 54 franchises in Australia and 60 overseas, all profitable. Revenue in 2007-08 was $3.4 million.
It sells its services to individuals as well as companies, government agencies, car dealerships and more recently, car manufacturers.
Establishing integrity and authority through the company’s branding was crucial, Jim says. “With something as radical as a waterless carwash, there were clearly credibility and education issues. When we chose a font for the word Ecowash, we were not trying to be funky. It is solid. Then, the word Mobile is a bit more fluid.”
A former car rally driver, Jim has a Masters of Business Administration and worked as marketing director for the food company Nestle Australia.
But his formula for good branding takes less than 30 seconds to explain. “Good marketing is thinking like a consumer,” Jim says. “I thought, if I was a consumer looking for a carwash, what would I look for in a brand to give me confidence?”
It was neither expensive nor time consuming to develop the brand because the founders were very clear about their intentions. After deciding on the colour and the important brand values, Jim sat down with a graphic designer and worked through the possibilities. In the process the company change its name from Mobile Ecowash to Ecowash Mobile, because the design looked better that way.
“Our designer is great. He doesn’t take it personally when you don’t like what he comes up with, and he is very good at interpreting what I am trying to get at,” Jim says. He says companies that have trouble getting designers to realise their ideas need to make their brief clearer.
The brand has been important to the company’s success in expanding overseas, where the technology was better known, but the Australian company was unfamiliar. “We had to work hard to associate our name and brand with the technology,” Jim says.
Single mother of two, Nejla Rawnsley, who spent $200,000 in 2005 for the master franchisee license in Queensland and established three franchises in four months, attributes a big part of her success to the strong brand (and her hard work). “I knew the strong branding and ecological soundness of the business would be paramount to its success,” she told the Sunday Mail recently.
The company’s brand design plays a role in its staff and franchisee culture. “Our staff joke that if you cut us, we bleed orange,” Jim says. “We keep the brand simple and strong and go to any lengths to protect it, both legally and in strictly applying it to our communications.”
In the early days, franchisees sometimes developed promotional material that wasn’t approved and did not fit with the brand or the company’s operations, and had to be gently brought back into line, without upsetting their enthusiasm. To do this, the founders developed the Ecowash Support Program, which trains franchisees in using the branding and marketing and following procedures.
The company’s website is designed both for branding and as an operational tool. Customers can book services online, franchisees can find training material there, and prospective franchisees can check all the relevant information in a password-protected site, once they have signed a confidentiality agreement.
As environmental issues gain traction in economy, established brands are keen to associate themselves with Ecowash’s image of a responsible, professional innovator in water use. (The company calculates that it has saved 48.5 million litres of water to date.) These include car manufacturers such as Lamborghini, Audi, and Lexus (which gave away a year of Ecowash carwashes as a promotion), and eco early-adopters, such as Hyundai. “The best piece of marketing we ever had from a company was when Industrie, the clothing company, approached us because our brand is ‘cool’. I thought, hey, you are ‘cool’,” Jim says.
Related Links
Ecowash Mobile — www.ecowash.com.au
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7 August 2009