Making The Switch When Wwp Changes To Avista, It Marks A Company Move Toward ‘Branding’ Itself In Our Hearts And Minds

Is there anyone in Eastern Washington or North Idaho who can’t complete the phrase “Washington Water Power, soon to be — — — — ?”

Even if you’re not among the Spokane utility’s 400,000 customers, the blitz of television, radio and newspaper advertising must have imprinted the name “Avista” on your mind.

Come Tuesday, WWP will be just a division of a subsidiary. One of the region’s most recognizable names will all but disappear from the landscape.

Another — Seafirst — will soon follow. Company officials are reluctant to comment about the transition, but they have already acknowledged the state’s largest bank will take the name Bank of America sometime this year.

Though well regarded within their home markets, WWP and Seafirst are strictly regional names that officials and consultants say are not appropriate for companies cultivating a national identity.

To overcome their parochial roots, they and many other companies are assuming new identities designed to give them the kind of image captured in names like Levi’s or Disney.

Called branding, the process sets businesses apart from competitors and endears them to customers, says Spokane advertising executive John Robideaux

“It’s really what challenges companies to keep their uniqueness alive,” he said.

Banks and utilities, suddenly confronted by a deregulated marketplace, have wholeheartedly embraced branding, added Denver consultant Mario Giordano.

Both industries had been regional in scope almost by definition, he said. To expand, companies in those businesses must shed names that contain geographic labels.

Giordano said branding is particularly important for utilities because, as monopolies, they did not have to work as hard as other businesses at building relationships.

Deregulation will force them to approach customers in new ways, he said. Branding is part of that effort.

The new business environment has triggered a mass molting by electric, natural gas and water utilities, said Giordano, whose company, Monigle Associates, has counseled many during their transformation.

WWP is among his clients.

Spokesman Pat Lynch said “Washington Water Power” evoked conflicting impressions of the company’s business.

Even some shareholders think the company is in the water business, he said. “We’re lost out here in the zone of not being identified.”

Giordano said WWP solved the problem in a fairly typical way for utilities: The company brought home a brand that has already established credibility outside the home market.

Avista Energy and Avista Enterprises have sold energy and energy services nationally for the last two years, tripling WWP revenues to more than $3 billion in the process.

Replacing WWP with Avista Corp. symbolizes the shift from a pure commodity business to a value-added business, he said.

Avista, Giordano added, perfectly captures the desire for a broadened perspective. “They want to stand for much more than they used to be,” he said.

“The Avista Corp. name was a natural outgrowth of what we were already doing,” Lynch agreed.

He said establishing the quality of the Avista brand is more important initially than getting customers to associate the name with any particular business.

Once that connection with quality is fixed in customer minds, he continued, selling additional Avista services becomes easier.

Giordano said companies that change their name, but not their approach to business, will soon be found out. There must be some shift in strategy to go along with the new identity, he said.

“Don’t rebrand for the sake of rebranding,” he said.

Giordano said companies also shouldn’t try to overextend a brand.

“Should you put Nike on a bank,” he asked? “It just doesn’t fit.”

Levi’s, for example, couldn’t make headway in the chinos business until determining that a name long associated with blue jeans wasn’t going to sell a different kind of pants.

Launching a new, separate brand - Dockers - solved the problem, Giordano said.

He said taking the Washington Water Power name national would be “like swimming upstream.”

Giordano said employees are an important constituency when a company introduces a new brand.

“Many times this is a tumultuous process for a company to go through,” he said. A big concern: “How is it going to affect my job.”

If employees are positive about the change, they become ambassadors for the emerging company, Giordano said.

That will be especially true for Seafirst customers, who will want to be assured that the tellers and loan officers that are their personal link to the bank are going to remain in place, he said.

At the same time, he added, Bank of America will have to maintain leading-edge banking services that also attract customers.

“There’s still the need for a blend there,” said Giordano, whose firm has done some work for Bank of America in the past.

Teri Orr, WWP’s director of marketing and sales, said the transition to Avista has gone well because employees bought into the idea early on.

And in the weeks since the decision to become Avista Corp. was announced in August, she said, their support has been reinforced by incoming callers who chime in with “Soon to be Avista” as if cued by company operators.

Lynch said the employee transition was helped by the aborted merger with Sierra Pacific Resources, which called for uniting the two utilities under the name Altus.

Although the merger was abandoned in 1996, he said the process of coming up with a new name was a useful dry run for getting the Avista name in place.

Most physical traces of the WWP name will start disappearing this weekend.

Crews will replace signs and trucks will be repainted as part of a $1 million process Lynch said will be 99 percent complete by the end of March. The largest vestige of the old name will be the Washington Water Power sign atop the Post Street Substation in downtown Spokane.

Monday, company stock will trade under a new ticker symbol, AVA. The convertible preferred will trade as AVAPfrL.

Checks, by the way, will be cashed whether made out to Avista or WWP.

Orr said changing identities involved more than cosmetics. Everything from software to contract proposals that was internal to WWP had to be patented or copyrighted, she said.

The payoff, she said, will be a more efficient company in the long term.

Giordano said Avista will know in a few months whether its make-over has been successful. By then, surveys should indicate customer acceptance of the new brand, and what it means, he said.

The worst thing that could happen, he added, would be a response that shows “Nobody cares.”

Robideaux said the campaign to introduce Avista has been done well.

“This is really a comfort zone thing,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be served at least as well as you have been in the past.”

Giordano said WWP was already a thriving energy company. As Avista, it can introduce itself to a bigger audience.

“Now,” Orr said, “we’re a national company.”