25.01.2008

A new image at Lavendon

UK based Lavendon, the world’s largest powered access rental specialist opened its new headquarters building today in Lutterworth.
The purpose built offices will house the staff of both the Lavendon Group and Lavendon UK (renamed Lavendon Access Services).

The new building is located to the rear of Midland Court, the trading estate (office estate?) where Lavendon rented its first small office unit in 1992, after it was formed to take over Nationwide Access.

Over the years the company has taken on additional units to house its growing staff and had ended up with offices splattered all over the estate.
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The New Lavendon headquarters

The company will retain some office units to house the Lutterworth based Nationwide Access staff.
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(L-R) Mark Johnson, Alan Merrell, Maarten Mijnlieff, Kevin Appleton, Neil Back, Andy Wright and Ivan Papell at the ribbon cutting ceremony

The new building was officially opened by Rugby player Neil Back, a member of the England team that won the world cup in 2003 and former player with the Leicester Tigers.

He cut the Lavendon blue ribbon, joined by group chief executive Kevin Appleton, Lavendon UK’s Andy Wright, Maarten Mijnlieff head of Gardemann in Germany and Ivan Papell of DK Rental Spain.
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The Ribbon Cutters

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The ribbon is cut - the building open

New Corporate identity

Following the official opening the company announced a completely new corporate identity, and rationalisation plan, cutting the number of trading names from the current 12 to four in Europe and one in the Middle East.

In the UK Rise Hire, the van mounted lift rental company, acquired last year, will be merged with Nationwide Access/Skylift. The Rise and Nationwide-Skylift brands will be dropped in favour of Nationwide Access. Self propelled booms will continue to be painted blue, while road going lifts – Van mounts -Truck mounts and trailer mounts will be a slightly warmer version of Gardemann Yellow,delivery vehicles will continue to be blue with yellow signwriting.
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The new corporate Identity

Merging the UK regionals

Panther, AMP, Kestrel and Higher Platforms will come together under the Panther name by mid-year, and adopt the new Lavendon corporate style. Panther will use the yellow colour for its delivery vehicles in order to provide some visual differentiation from Nationwide Access.

While the four companies will trade under a common name they will continue to be managed separately by their entrepreneur/managers. Reporting in to Richard Miller managing director of what is currently know as “Lavendon regional businesses’
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The 11 European brands will be merged into four within 18 months

Nationwide Access will be the last business in the group to adopt the new identity, with the initial focus being on those markets where there is most need of rationalisation – Spain, France, Germany and the UK regional businesses.
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Worldwide there will be five businesses sharing a common image

In France Spain and Belgium, where the group now operates as Zooom and DK Rental, the local managers have chosen to drop both DK and Zooom names in favour of the Lavendon brand.

This will be the first time that the Lavendon name has been used operationally. As with Panther - Lavendon Spain, Lavendon France and Lavendon Belgium will adopt the new corporate identity at the same time as it implements the name change.

The German identity was already announced earlier this month, See Lavendon restructures in Germany Zooom gives way to Gardemann, which has an incredibly strong and long established reputation and image (Gardemann entered the access market 36 years ago), as with the other companies self propelled lifts will be blue and the road going machines Yellow.
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Machines in Gardemann Yellow and Lavendon Blue

In the middle East Rapid Access simply becomes simply 'Rapid' while adopting the new identity.

The key elements to the new identity are the Tick (Check if you are in the USA) logo representing a positive image reflecting its new slogan “Straightforward, professional access rental.” The new logo incorporates the two group colours of Blue and Yellow.

The company feels that the new identity makes a clean break with the past, and will help it encourage common values throughout the group. It will also provide a structured and thought-through image that can be easily adopted by new acquisitions.

The cost of developing the brand so far is around £100,000 with further costs for changing over letterheads and literature. However the 21,000 unit fleet will not be subject to any mass repaint or branding exercise. New machines and those subject to repainting will be ordered with the new image while the tick logo will be added to lifts as they come in for service.

Vertikal Comment

This looks like a fairly logical solution to what would have become a problem. With the entry of DK rental into the group plus two brands in Germany and six in the UK there was a danger of the group identity splintering into ragbag (identity wise) collection of businesses under common ownership.

The objective for all Lavendon companies to adopt a common identity dates back to 2000 when the current colour scheme was introduced and the Zooom name was selected for the new business in France and for Germany, where it replaced Prolift and Furg.

At that time the intention was to eventually drop the Nationwide name in the UK in favour of Zooom, but this proved to be too big a step for the management to stomach, given the strength of the Nationwide brand at that time.

The two biggest surprises with this announcement are the dropping of the AMP, Kestrel and Higher Access names in the UK and the adoption of Lavendon as the trading name for Belgium, France and Spain.

The local managers deemed Lavendon to be better than the various permutations of DK and Zooom, Such as DK-Zooom. It can be pronounced easily enough in each language and does not have an oddball translation. It also overcomes the emotional internal issues of one team having to subjugate its identity to the other.

Ivan Papell, who now runs the combined Spanish business, claims that the undoubted Englishness of the name will, if anything, have a slightly positive cachet.

In the UK given that each of the four businesses has its regional base, one might have expected the four names to remain, with each simply adopting the new identity. However as the four companies are moving ever closer together, a common or collective banner was probably necessary or at least attractive..

Given that for the long term it is better to adopt a common name than develop and invest in a collective banner then a change to Panther, which is the strongest brand nationally, makes sense.

However the change in the UK will essentially give Lavendon two national businesses – rather than one national business and a collection of local companies. The question must be asked about how long it will be before Nationwide and Panther are merged?

It certainly does not look like it is on the cards for anytime soon, but the time will surely come. Perhaps when it does Lavendon GB will come into being?