Arden & Newton/Ardova Global Award: A win for Nigeria

It was a night of class, elegance, and excellence. Behind the oval-shaped bouquet hall of the luxury V hotel in Dubai, dimly lit with changing wall colours, business executives huddled in clusters.

Champagne in hand, they discuss business, exchanging ideas under a deep camaraderie atmosphere.

Two days earlier, a Sunday, they arrived in Dubai, precisely at the Al Habtoor City, the famed self-sufficient affluent “city within a city” that overlooks luxurious apartments, penthouses, and a galactic skyline that shines brightly at night.

On Tuesday, after the sun sets into the horizon, the moment all the travelling guests from about 30 countries had waited for, the 2021 edition of the Transform Middle East and Africa (MEA) Awards, was underway.

Every year, the Transform Awards event is held in London, Dubai, New York, Shanghai, Stockholm, and Sydney.

Transform celebrates excellence, and for the past eight years, the London-based organization is the only global platform that recognizes companies and creative teams exhibiting exemplary work in brand development and strategy that sets a business up for sustainable success and market dominance.

Beyond the country or location of the events, Transform invites legacy, household and new businesses with proven integrity to judge the creative strategy of each business brand. For the 2021 awards, a panel featuring TikTok, BMW Group, and Toyota UAE judged each entry.

In this year’s award held last month, Ardova Plc, an indigenous energy group operating in the downstream Oil and Gas industry in Nigeria, won a global award alongside their agency partner, Arden & Newton, a Lagos-based brand strategy consultancy. They beat off competition from the two international brands in Dubai and Argentina to win gold in the “Best corporate rebrand following a merger or acquisition” category.

The Lagos-based brands also won another bronze award, the “Best Naming Strategy”, following the transformation of Femi Otedola’s Forte Oil to Ardova Plc in 2020 after a corporate acquisition of the Forte Oil in 2019.

“We are thrilled and humbled to have won the Gold Award for ‘Best Corporate Rebrand Following a Merger or Acquisition’ and the Bronze Award for ‘Best Naming Strategy’ at the 2021 Transform Awards Middle East & Africa which held in Dubai, as it gives both international recognition and credence to the work we have put in building our brand.” Olumide Adeosun, the CEO of Ardova Plc said

From BP, AP, Forte Oil to Ardova PLC: Rebrand par excellence.

In Nigeria, the conversation around the absence of excellence is typical, especially in business environments. Customers complain about crappy customer services, business executives grumble about the scarcity of outstanding staff, and collectively, as citizens, we all whine about lousy governance. Ultimately, we are charmed by excellence, and the corporate acquisition of Forte Oil by a new acquiree, later known as Ardova PLC, in 2019 births black excellence.

This was typified in a brand strategy development process with outcomes that could pass for work done anywhere else in the world.

In 2019, Forte Oil, owned by Nigerian billionaire Femi Otedola was sold to Ignite Investment commodities limited for a 74.02 equity stake in the company. Ordinarily, rebrand and rename strategies are creative components of significant acquisitions. Think Econet to Vmobile, Zain to Airtel, and recently, Diamond to Access bank, among others.

In the past, rebrand strategy development as a service was often outsourced to global brand consultancies or agencies simply because it’s an intellectual exercise most local firms could not engineer. Today it’s still a rarity in Nigeria, a reflection of the state of an industry replete with public relations, advertising and digital agencies.

It’s important to note the differences between brand development/rebranding firms and public relations/advertising agencies for contextual understanding.

While the former, brand development/rebranding re-architects a business with a new corporate strategy, cosmic purpose, brand promise and customer experience. The latter, advertising and public relations, amplify the value and boost a business’s perception and reputation.

So when Access and Diamond banks, two different brands with a separate identity, coalesced after an acquisition with new brand collateral like logo, office designs – imbued with a new corporate strategy, what happened is a rebrand.

The transformation of Forte Oil to For Ardova PLC, the Nigerian brand that won a global award in Dubai, personifies an excellent example of a rebrand done from within Africa and by Africans. Primarily, Forte Oil is an offshoot of a legacy brand rooted in colonialism, the British Petroleum (BP). In 1978, BP was indigenized with the Nigerian National Petroleum Company controlling the majority stake (60 per cent), and in the year that followed, 1979, BP was changed to AP (African Petroleum). By 2007, AP was sold to Femi Otedola’s Zenon Oil, and in 2010 the legacy oil company rebranded again for the third time from AP to Forte Oil.

Moreover, in 2019, after its acquisition from Femi Otedola’s Forte Oil, the new management of Ignite Investments, the acquirer, was informed about crafting a new name and corporate strategy for the new acquirer as part of the merger deal. A bold new brand strategy that connects the legacy brand to its past while positioning it with future trends in the energy sector was needed.

“When we acquired the firm in 2019, our vision was to create a company that would champion energy sufficiency and lead the transition to cleaner energy in Nigeria,” said Adeosun, a former Country Senior Partner at PwC a multinational professional service brand. “It quickly became clear to us that to achieve this, the business would need to evolve to match the scale of our ambition and vision.

For this task, the new acquiree collaborated with a Nigerian brand strategy agency, Arden & Newton, to work with the new management. The mission is simple: to build a new corporate strategy, culture transformation, brand touchpoint, and service delivery design that combines the brand heritage with the future of the energy sector.

In the last decade, Arden & Newton, an Africa focused, strategy-driven branding consultancy, has built expertise in brand strategy. As leverage, they have a contextual understanding of businesses operating in Africa. Hence, they design a strategy that helps businesses around here win.

Arden & Newton’s understanding of the African market helped in designing a bold corporate strategy for the new client’s corporate rebrand, Ignite Investment. For starters, the Arden & Newton team understood the brand’s heritage (BP, AP, Forte) to the Nigerian market, its economy, and the energy company’s future. Besides, the team, up-to-date with global energy trends, also understood how the global energy sector is slowly transitioning from a fossil-fuel-based economy to integrated energy or sustainability as a strategy that guarantees market dominance in the present and the future.

Arden & Newton’s elegant solution to design a bold new corporate brand while retaining the iconic “AP” name resonates with the new management that understood where the world was headed and what excellence and doing right meant.

Consequently, the two forces created magic with the entire process birthing a new corporate rebrand that permeates through every aspect of the company from corporate strategy to culture transformation to brand touchpoint, product design and service excellence as brand experience design.

With these underlying values in mind, Arden & Newton dug into the company’s heritage, DNA and operations model over the years to craft a name that mirrors the company’s ambition of spearheading business excellence while driving sustainability leadership.

Ardova, which also won another award at the Transform Middle East and Africa (MEA) Awards, originated from a combination of the Dutch/Arabic word: ‘Aarde’, meaning earth, and the English word ‘value’ completes the rebranding process with a cosmic purpose: To preserve the earth’s value.

“Rebranding exercises have a global reputation for being tedious and risk-laden, as the results can either make or mar the entity that emerges from the process. Our transition to Ardova Plc was thoughtfully executed, as it merged the best parts of our legacy as a company with the right brand structure to achieve our new vision to take our customers along with us in our transformation to a fully integrated energy company, said Joseph Ogbeide, Manager, Brands and Corporate Communications, Ardova Plc.

Black excellence wins: A victory for Nigeria.

The Transform Middle East Africa awards don’t just celebrate businesses and creative teams. It also celebrates countries and government parastatals doing extraordinary works that improve governance. For instance, at the gala dinner in Dubai, The Abu Dhabi Early Childhood Authority (ECA), a government administration in the United Arab Emirate (UAE), won an award for its “Wed Movement”, a fun-filled brand that inspired learning among kids during the pandemic.

With such an elevated platform and the standard of entries judged on an international stage, Ardova Plc and Arden & Newton winning as the only African country is a big deal for Nigeria. Globally, Nigeria suffers from an already battered reputation with little credit or recognition for its talents architecting excellence in different endeavours.

For Ardova Plc and Arden & Newton, winning at a global platform is a testament to how excellence knows no colour, primarily when you work to build a brand that is chiselled for success.

“Ardova Plc, the business we have now become, is the result of in-house alignment of purpose and strategy to deliver this new company, and our collaboration with Arden and Newton, who we found to be the right brand consultancy to build the brand we envisioned. I am especially proud that beyond what these awards mean to our companies, it also indicates that business talent in Nigeria can compete and win on a global scale.” Olumide Adeosun, the CEO of Ardova Plc said.

As a result of a strategic rebrand, Ardova Plc didn’t only discover a working corporate strategy. The brand is also engineered to build a sustainable company on par with global brands in the energy sector.

For local businesses, government agencies and parastatals, Ardova’s exemplary approach to growing a local brand with an international outlook is worth emulating.