Changing a Brand: Usually a Very Bad Idea

This blog entry is about the foolhardiness of deciding you need to fundamentally change the identity of a strong brand. By "strong" I mean a brand that has managed to stand for something distinctive and unique, even if that "something" may be polarizing or limiting in some way.

The bogus logic behind deciding to change strong brands usually goes something like this.

* "The Brand is strong but we need to broaden it in order to capture new markets/new customers that are not part of the brand's audience today." This is the GREED reason.
* "The Brand has new competitors that are more broadly positioned and those competitors are growing faster than we are. We need to respond." This is the FEAR reason.
* "The Brand is not relevant to enough people today. What was OK once is not OK now." This is the COP OUT reason.

First of all, if you're fortunate enough to be managing a strong brand, give thanks to the Career Gods. Strong brands are rare as diamonds and just as valuable. If you inherent one, your job is to nurture and protect it. Your job is definitely NOT to change it. The change agents will be everywhere. Your job is to fight them off. Why? Because the absolutely hardest thing to do in marketing is to change someone's mind. If I think "X" and you try to convince me of "Y", good luck to you. Maybe a friend or someone I really trust and respect MIGHT be able to get me to change my mind. But doing it with an ad or some other marketing tool? Not a chance.

Let's say the strong brand you're managing has acquired its identity over 20, 30 or maybe even 50 or 100 years. That's a lot of accumulated marketing that you're now going to try to "change." The only way you're going to be successful is if your company is prepared to keep with the "change" program for the next 10 or 20 years.

The most likely outcome in these situations is that you muddle your brand's previously precise and strong identity, begin to confuse and alienate your brand loyalists, waste a lot of money and time, and (more than likely) experience worsening business results followed by unemployment.

There is almost NEVER a good reason to change a strong brand in any fundamental way. The GREED and FEAR reasons are both lazy marketing solutions to the need to introduce a new brand or brands designed to broaden your company's overall business. The COP OUT reason is really just an acknowledgment that your recent marketing of your strong brand has probably sucked.

Here are two examples of brands that have been working hard at changing; Mercedes Benz and Gold's Gym. I content that both are worse off now than before.

Mercedes fell prey to the GREED reason. They extended the brand into lower priced cars to broaden it and increase its overall market share. The result? Lexus has surpassed Mercedes in both perceived and ACTUAL quality.

Gold's Gym fell prey to GREED, FEAR and COP OUT reasons. New competitors had more all-family and female appeal than the hardcore serious fitness image that Gold's Gym owned. Rather than respond with a new brand, they decided to change Gold's, even going so far as considering dropping the "Gym" from its name. The result? An increasingly muddled image and a me-too fitness club experience.

The only success that I can think of is Cadillac. GM had successfully changed the brand's image by making fundamental changes in the Cadillac products, in its target market and in its marketing AND, it has taken years and lots and lots of money. This is the exception that proves the rule.

If you've got the money and the will and the time (and the product news) to be like Cadillac, go for it! If not, resist the urge to change. Make the most of what you've got. If you need more, create and build new brands that get the job done. Don't wreck the good thing that you already have.

Your Brand Could Be Hijacked - Get Ready!

In the good old days, when your company inadvertently disenfranchised a customer by some tacky bit of poor service or poor product performance, there wasn't much they could do.  The really angry customers would simply stop doing business with you.   If you were lucky, an aggravated customer would send a complaint letter or email or make a call to your customer service desk.   Customers like these were providing both incredibly valuable feedback to your business as well as giving you a chance to remedy their problem so they could continue to do business with you.   If you mishandled this golden opportunity, only the disgruntled customer generally knew about it and the worse that could happen is that you lost them as a customer.

In today's world, the downside of creating angry disgruntled poorly-handled customers is much greater.  That's because it's not just between you and them anymore.  Now, customers have the power and the ability to literally inform the world about how poorly your company or one of your brands has performed and how badly your people have responded.  

In today's world, BEWARE THE TECH-SAVVY DISGRUNTLED CUSTOMER!  They can hijack your brand.  They can dominate the Internet conversation about your brand.  All it takes is one really angry and highly motivated tech-savvy brand pirate and your goose could be cooked.

The Internet is the tool.  Anti-brand blogs and text messaging can be powerful but the real brand killer is video.  

Image the following marketing nightmare.   One of your customers records and uses their cell phone to video tape a particularly idiotic and callous encounter between them and someone from your company.   The video (because it's either funny or outrageous) finds its way on to YouTube and then starts showing up on emails and on other social networking sites.  People who may have had similar experiences with your company appear out of the woodwork and jump into the exploding and negative Internet conversation that's happening about your brand.  Your brand is being "flamed."  Are you paying attention?  Are you aware this is even happening?  Are you prepared to do something about it?  Or are you asleep at the switch as millions of dollars of your marketing investment go up in smoke?

Even if you don't experience this type of brand nightmare, there is still an Internet conversation going on about your brand.  It's happening right now.  Are you plugged into it?  Are you tracking it and using it to understand what is being said and thought about your brand?  Are you using it to gain brand insight?

You must recognize and embrace the idea that you are no longer in complete control of your brand.  Viral transmission and re-transmission of messages can propagate negative information FAST.  Is your company ready to deal quickly with information like this that gets out there? Do you have a company blog that you can use as a communication tool to combat this kind of thing?  Do you have a PR response plan ready to implement?  Is your marketing team empowered to respond FAST when these situations occur?

If you don't, you've got a time bomb on your hands.  The clock is ticking.  What are you waiting for?

Marketing Metrics - Meaning vs. Misery

It's amazing to me how many otherwise intelligent companies don't invest any money to adequately measure the impact of their marketing programs.  The logic goes something like this....the marketing budget is too small to enable us to afford any marketing research...we need to put all our money to work on programs and not waste it on research...we've never done research like this in the past and we don't need it now....there are too many other important things that we need to fund in this year's budget....we don't need this type of research because we use our sales results (or input from our sales force) to determine if our marketing programs are working.

Sound familiar?  If so, it's more marketing insanity at work.  

The result of this type of thinking is an often catastrophic situation where someone's "opinion" (usually a heavy breather like the CEO or CFO) determines what marketing programs get funded.  These same C-level opinionators (I know there's no such word) also determine whether the top marketing exec is doing a good job or not.  If you happen to be that top marketing person, you are in big trouble.  You better measure or you're headed for misery.

In today's metrics-management business world, it is imperative that marketing metrics be clearly defined and measured with regularity.  The information needs to be relevant and useful so that marketing programs can be evaluated and fine-tuned (or scrapped) based on what is learned.  

It's Marketing 101.  Start by clearly defining the objectives of your marketing efforts.  Define these objectives in terms of the things that marketing can directly impact.  For example in a B2B company, marketing has an indirect impact on sales, but it has a very direct impact on leads generated (both quantity and quality).  It also has a very direct impact on the awareness of your company and its products and services among with your target audience(s).    It has a direct impact on the perception and attitudes that prospects hold.  (Your customers opinions and perceptions are the result of first hand experience with your company but your prospects have opinions and perceptions based largely on your marketing).

It's very possible that marketing is working great (generating high-quality leads, increasing awareness, moving perceptions in a positive direction) but that something else inside the company is falling short and THAT is the reason why sales aren't improving.  Maybe the sales team is dropping the ball.  Or the products or pricing are flawed in some way.  Can you tell?  Do you know?  Or is it "opinion time" when the executive team sits around and tries to figure out what is going on?

Most marketing people love to create programs and they want to spend their time doing that, but it's the road to marketing misery.  You've got to fight to measure the impact of your programs.  Even if your overall budget is small.  I would argue ESPECIALLY if your marketing budget is small.  

Measuring your programs creates meaning and purpose and effectiveness and accountability and (if they're working) some measure of job security.  Failure to measure is insanity, leading to finger-pointing, guesswork, ignorance and probably unemployment. 

Stop Thinking Like an Advertiser and Start Thinking Like a Brand Programmer

The classic ad model is quickly dying.  

Cable TV started to kill it by dramatically increasing our viewing options and making it easy to zap ads and switch channels.  The Internet is finishing off the job because TV is no longer the only place you can use video to communicate about your brand.  Everyone now has the web.  It's easy to use video on your brand's web site.  In fact, you can create whatever web programming you want.  You're not interrupting anything with an ad.  You're now conveying information (or branded infotainment) that people have surfed their way to your web site to find.  You are no longer an advertiser.  You are now a brand programmer.   Big difference!

As a brand programmer you're free from all those constraints that "advertisers" face.  The big one being the limitation to thirty seconds (or sixty if you've got the big bucks).   Hey, it's your web site.  Those videos can be any length you want.  But long videos cost too much money to produce I hear someone saying.  Not necessarily.  You can spend a fortune or you can spend almost nothing.  That's a marketing decision based on what you think your brand requires.  The most popular viral videos from the web are home-made and that's a big part of their charm.  They are not slick and they are not overly produced and people can't get enough of them.  They're real and that makes them believable and (potentially) persuasive.

Research  techniques that play a large role in shaping TV ads at many companies are not relevant for web-based video.   The research tools that have been used for years to measure and evaluate TV ads don't apply to web-based brand video.  All those research-driven "do's and don'ts" can be tossed right out the window, too.  How liberating for brand communicators!  And how scary.  No rules.  No road maps.  A blank palette where brilliant creativity can flourish and where lame creativity has no excuse to exist.  

But this new world requires a new mindset among marketers and "advertisers."  An ad created for traditional TV is not likely to work on the web.  New thinking and new approaches are required.   Similarly, if you've never been a TV-driven marketing company, you now need to move into the world of video production and become a brand programmer for your web site.   There are many small B2C and many B2B companies that have NEVER considered video as a brand communication tool.  Today, this is just silliness.  If you've got a web site, you've got a platform to use brand video as a marketing tool.