Wednesday, June 18, 2025

What’s in a Brand?

CLAC’s brand has undergone several revisions over the years. One thing that’s remained constant? Our commitment to serving you

Guide magazine

By Henk de Zoete, National Board President

In Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Lonesome Dove, the main characters brand their mostly rustled Texas longhorns. They did this to set their cattle apart from others on the long trail to Montana.

Branding, whether of cows or kings, has been happening for millennia. Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, set up his empire’s boundary markers with a notice that “this is Babylonian territory, and I’m in charge here.” The Romans’ brand for their vast territories was the Pax Romana: “we give you peace and prosperity, and you pay taxes to Caesar, whose image is on your coins.”

More commonly today, brands are associated with businesses. Although CLAC has a logo and tagline, it wasn’t always so. During our first few decades, the organization was more concerned about getting its feet on the ground than having a well thought out, professionally designed brand.

In the mid-1970s, we had established a considerable presence in the automotive parts industry in southwestern Ontario. This attracted the attention and ire of the dominant union in that sector, and our members were constantly harassed and raided at every opportunity. Among the tactics they used was branding us “clickety clack,” deliberately misspelling our name. This ridiculing of who we were put us on the defensive and provided little incentive to emphasize or expand our brand.

In the early 1990s, we hadn’t yet grown and professionalized to the point where we had a good set of products and services to offer that could be confidently branded, tagged, and promoted. But we did cautiously get into swag—mostly low-end, inexpensive pens, pencils, and plastic mesh baseball caps. That’s all we could afford at the time.

As our style of nonadversarial, but intensely focused, dedicated, and individualized representation caught on, CLAC experienced a surge of growth in the early 2000s. By then our member services, such as health and benefits plans, retirement plans, and training programs, had grown and matured, and we could legitimately say we were a full-service union.

This encouraged us to engage in a serious, professionally conducted organizational branding exercise. The tagline A Union Making a Difference, which emphasized our core values of integrity, partnership, fairness, respect, and community, was the result. Our swag offerings also underwent noticeable improvement. Later, we changed our tagline to Better Together, which reflected our cooperative labour relations model.

Today, CLAC is recognized as a union that works for you, resolves issues in a constructive way, promotes women in the skilled trades, engages concretely with Indigenous peoples, and provides useful insights and advice to politicians, bureaucrats, and agencies. We work to promote good stewardship, cooperation, rewarding and satisfying work, restoration of lives broken by addiction and mental health challenges, and so much more.

From a union too busy simply struggling to survive to worry about things like branding, moving forward CLAC is adopting a new tagline that succinctly states who we are: A Union That Works. Look for it to appear on swag, posters, publications, and other communications in the months to come.

What’s in a Brand?

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