From Brand Building to Brand Rescue: What to do when things go very wrong.

Valeria Maltoni posed a great question on Conversation Agent last week: What happens when brands die?

The topic of the specter of brand death - which visits most companies in a state of distress - is one that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, methinks. (Look around. Distressed companies and lackluster brands are everywhere, and they certainly need help.) Symptoms of a dying brand may come in the form of customer attrition, declines in sales frequency or (volume per customer), eroding market share, a negative brand image (as reported through consumer reports, customer feedback and market studies), or even decreasing investor confidence.

The question I guess isn’t so much “how do I make sure my company doesn’t end up in this situation,” but “now that we’re in trouble, how do we keep our sick company or brand from actually dying?”

BrandBuilder conversations usually focus on helping businesses improve their position and reach the next level in their evolution, but what we are dealing with here is an intervention. Emergency care.

In our current economic downturn, this type of discussion might be more relevant than ever: From past experience, I know that helping successful companies become even more successful is great, but where folks like us can really make a difference is in seizing opportunities to partner with businesses that REALLY need expert help today. Especially if you can generate measurable results quickly.

But before this type of rescue/turnaround partnership can take place, managers of distressed brands need to come to terms with reality: Accepting that their brand or company is in trouble. Most companies ultimately fail NOT because they couldn’t be saved, but because their leadership fails to admit that they are in trouble and need help before it is too late. This is the first step in the process.

How do you know when your company or brand is in trouble? Simple: When a preponderance of symptoms from the following list start popping up in your monthly or quarterly executive meetings. The short list:

• Pricing pressures are eroding your market share (and you can’t seem to reverse the trend without lowering your prices).
• Consumer preference data indicates that you are no longer either a contender for the top 1 or 2 choices in your product category.
• Your quarterly net new customer count is either decreasing or stalled.
• You are seriously contemplating eliminating 5-20% of your workforce to reduce costs.
• Customer complaints about your brand are increasing. (Quality, service, delivery, etc.)
• You have lost several of your best (historical) customers in the last 12 months.
• Your competitors’ products are getting a lot of great press and attention. Yours are not.
• Your best talent is starting to walk away.
• You are having a very tough time recruiting talent.
• You have cut costs by moving your call centers overseas, but now your customer service department is broken.
• Despite spending an obscene amount of money on marketing, advertising or PR campaigns, your business barely matches your industry’s growth rate. (If you’re lucky.)
• At least two out of the three cardinal measurements of your sales health (Frequency of sales, Reach of sales and average sales yield) show a flat or decreasing trend YoY.*

* Corporate lingo for those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of working on the client side: QoQ = Quarter over Quarter. YoY = Year over Year.

Assuming anyone in your company is actually keeping an eye on any of this. You would be surprised how many companies’ sales managers don’t measure F.R.Y. or monitor historical new customer trending, how many marketing managers have absolutely no idea what is being said about their brands or where, and how many HR managers have their hands tied even when they it becomes clear that they are not winning the talent war.

Some of this can be attributed to managerial denial, sure, but a lot of the blame can also be attributed to two other factors: a) a lack of training or sophistication when it comes to establishing adequate, actionable metrics, and/or b) a lack of resources when it comes to managing these metrics with an eye towards regular course correction.

In order to connect the dots, you have to know how to identify the dots to begin with.

Getting help isn’t about admitting defeat, it is about getting results.

In order to climb out of a hole, you have to realize that you are indeed in a hole to begin with… and that you probably need help getting out. If you can’t think of a solution on your own, it’s time to get someone who knows how to help you dig your way out.

This topic reminds me of the scene in the 1998 movie “The Edge” (”The Wild” for my European readers) in which Anthony Hopkins’ character gets stranded in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness with two companions after a terrible plane crash. Alone in the wild, the three pampered city guys find themselves in an against-all-odds survival situation. The question the three characters keep asking each other - and themselves - is simple: How in the world are we going to survive out here? With no rations, no weapons or tools, no winter gear and chased by a relentless man-eating Grizzly, the three men have to rely on each other to make it back to civilization. About mid-way through the story, as their situation seems hopeless, Anthony Hopkins’ character explains to his lone surviving companion something that is absolutely relevant to today’s discussion of brand survival:

- You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame.

- What?

- Yeah, see, they die of shame. “What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?” And so they sit there and they… die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives.

- And what is that, Charles?

The answer in the movie is “Thinking.” The answer in the case of of rescuing a brand is the same: Thinking. The one difference being that brands don’t die because they get lost in the wilderness. They die because their stewards create an imaginary wilderness around themselves. If you’re a CEO or CMO who hasn’t figured out how to rescue yourself or your brand by now, it’s time to break out the emergency radio or start sending smoke signals. If someone doesn’t come help you get back on track soon, your brand will die, along with your career, and the only reason will have been that you were too ashamed to admit that you needed help.

Yes, brands can and do die of shame as well.

Reaching out for help is a tough sale for a lot of managers and business leaders. It requires them to admit two things they would rather not: 1. This brand is in serious trouble, and 2. I can’t fix this on my own.

The trick is to realize that asking for help is not the same thing as admitting failure. Quite the contrary. Hiring someone to help you fix something for you - or with you - is no different from hiring the best copywriter, salesperson or office manager you can find.

Here’s the thing: We are all too happy to turn to specialists when we need help in every other area of our lives: If we are sick, we go to a doctor. If we have a tooth ache, we go to a dentist. If we are out of shape, we hire a personal trainer. If we have psychological or relationship problems, we hire a therapist. If our dog misbehaves, we hire a dog trainer. We all hire people who can help us improve our lives or who can somehow help us do things we can’t do on our own. Landscapers. Attorneys. Consultants. Mechanics. Dry-cleaners. Interior decorators. Plumbers. Electricians. Life coaches. Nutritionists. Masons. Carpenters. Party planners. Accountants. Financial planners. Repairmen. Whatever. Specialists are there to fill our knowledge and skill gaps. Helping you fix a brand in crisis is no different. It’s just that there isn’t a section in the yellow pages for “brand interventionists”.

Hint: Looking for a brand specialist or marketing firm in the yellow pages is a lot like looking for a job in the wanted ads. Unless you happen to live in 1986, you are looking in the wrong place.

Likewise, looking for traditional marketing firms and ad agencies to fill your needs when it comes to the relatively new problem of brand erosion in today’s complex business world can be a risky endeavor. Old tactics don’t necessarily address new problems - at least not on their own. The toolkit has evolved. If your new advisor’s “ideas” sound awfully familiar, it’s okay to get a second opinion. Even a third. We’ll go into what to look for tomorrow.

Okay, so my brand is failing. I have to do “something.” What are my options?

While many marketing firms and departments are great at building strong brands, many fall short of expectations. It happens. Sometimes, they get too close to the company or the product and lose their ability to look at the big picture. Sometimes, they have been doing the same things for so long that they have lost touch with their customers, with new marketing tools at their disposal, or with consumer trends and tastes. These things happen. It’s just part of doing business. If - not when - this happens to your company and you find yourself in trouble, you basically have four options at your disposal:

1. Fire your CMO or Marketing department (pretty drastic and rarely the right solution).
2. Spend more money on the same tactics that have failed, but pretend that you are doing something different (the definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result each time).
3. Drastically cut your marketing budget. Marketing doesn’t work anyway, right? (You might as well update your resume while you’re at it. This is the worst possible thing you can do in times of crisis. Even worse than firing your CMO.)
4. Seek professional help to assist your CMO. Not just from a firm or agency that will gladly take your money to take approach #2, but from a firm, agency or specialist who will actually focus on getting measurable and immediate results for you, AND educate you in the process. Rescuing a brand needs to be as much a learning experience for your organization as it is an intervention.

The correct answer, of course, is option #4.

I cannot stress this enough: Do not hire a specialist, firm or agency that will take option #2 to get you back on track. I have seen it happen too many times, and it is the easiest trap to fall into. This will solve nothing, and waste precious resources on your end. Don’t do it.

Tomorrow, we will go over the second step in your brand intervention: Hiring a practitioner or specialized firm, and letting them help you diagnose and clarify the problems facing your brand.

Part 3 of this series will focus on developing a treatment for your brand.

In Part 4, we will go over how to best administer the treatment, and we will wrap it all up in Part 5 with long term strategies to kill the possibility of a relapse.

Tune in Monday for Part 2: Methods for diagnosing and understanding what is killing your brand.

Have a great Friday, everyone.

Normally email and profit don’t go in the same sentence at least in the minds of most B2B marketers – but actually they should.

Everything has a cost associated with it and email is no exception – so this podcast focuses on how much lift in revenues and profits you can get out of your email program if you are in B2C or B2B marketing.

To accomplish this I decided to speak to Steve Webster, Chief Strategy Officer from iPost who has published several case studies on the topic of improving profits via email. Don’t miss he views on this topic.

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About Steve

Stephen Webster leads iPost’s Sales team and co-founded iPost in 1996 to address the need for well-designed, professional email services and software. Prior to founding iPost, he worked on email systems for an IBM-funded consortium called ITC, and served as engineering director for the award-winning Z-Code, co-founded by iPost’s CTO, Bart Schaefer, PhD. Webster is a frequent keynote speaker on behavioral targeting, profitable and effective email marketing, and cross-channel marketing programs. He holds a BSEE from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

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Environmental concerns are not new and Green IT efforts are gaining ground at many companies, both big and small. Of course, Green IT solutions are available to companies, but what else can businesses do to become more green? BearingPoint is searching for some new thinking on the topic.

We launched a contest on Facebook to gather the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ on how businesses can become more environmentally conscious in their operations. Facebook users can contribute their ideas and pass them along to their friends and the larger Facebook community to vote on by Nov. 15. (And yes, the winner gets a green prize!)

While a contest or giveaway on Facebook is not new, the use of Facebook as a method of crowdsourcing is. The contest hopes to unearth some new approaches that businesses can take to increase their environmental efforts while also increasing their bottom line.

Here is how you can contribute your ideas on how businesses can be more green.

Full Disclosure - I work for BearingPoint and this is a campaign I am working on - wanted to expose my audience to this concept and would love for you to participate but only if you wanted.

This is a case study in ethical branding and using the power of the online medium to spread a message and help the community. As an Italian, I love the idea of gathering around food. You’d never think (well, I wouldn’t) that a Brit could do Italian - Jamie Oliver has done it.

He sounds and looks, as he puts it, massively excited about working with and talking about food. Born of a restaurant owner in Essex, Oliver states to have always been fascinated by what went on in the kitchen. Everyone working together to make lovely stuff and having a laugh doing it.

His first TV show was “The Naked Chef” - the idea being that you strip down food to its bare essentials. As the site description says, it was about real food for real people. His latest project is The Ministry of Food.

The idea behind that project is to inspire people to get back into their kitchen and start making food from scratch again. There is a big community component to that message. In addition to helping people regain a sense of balance with the food they eat, potentially together with their families, the deal anyone who joins the movement makes is to pass on a recipe to at least two other people. Notice the viral component built right in.

Oliver has also built a cookery in Rotherdam where people can watch a demo, pick up a recipe, book a cooking class. He believes so strongly in the idea that cooking is the foundation of a good diet, that he is asking people to vote to build a food center in every town. The UK government should fund and promote these centers for local communities, he writes. He has gathered 4,057 votes at his site so far.

The 33 year old chef has also been campaigning to ban the junk in schools and get kids eating fresh, tasty nutritious food instead. Oliver has written a manifesto to that effect. In September 2005, the Department for Education and Skills established The School Food Trust. Its remit is to transform school food and food skills, promote the education and health of children and young people and improve the quality of food in schools.

Given that part of the appeal and message are around young people and their well-being, Oliver held an Unsigned Bands contest. See who won for 2008.

On the site you will also find member blogs (599 so far), the chef’s diary, and forums where people can swap recipes, get advice, share experiences on growing one’s own produce. As the trend towards local produce and even self-produced food develops further, social media can help people who have a common passion get together and form a community of practice around their pursuits.

James Oliver is an example of a person becoming a brand and then using that influence for the well-being of others. Sure, his brand started on TV, with food shows. Then, using social media, he was able to get the community involvement needed for a full-out engagement with the message. As well, he has created a destination for people who were looking to share.

To me there is a powerful combination of a likable brand, a simple and focused message (eat simply, cook yourself, eat healthy), and a mission to help people regain ownership of their eating experiences. The site is portioned so well that many viral components are built right into it. (hat tip to Kim Moore)

It’s not like it’s any big revelation that traditional media is on a downturn.  We’ve been seeing traditional print and now even online display revenues take a beating at media companies. Layoffs and restructuring abound (even at Gawker and MySpace). Technology and consumer behavior has changed the landscape entirely and a new business model has emerged.But, until this point, it has been happening slowly.  The 20% of traditional media spending that was chopped off after the 2001-2003 recession never came back, but it did stabilize, where we were seeing flat spending across the board in most industries. Over the past five years, marketers have been slowly socking away more money into their own content efforts, and pulling pennies from traditional media space to do it.

The economic “crisis” (or whatever you want to call it) will fundamentally change where marketing dollars go.  Frankly, I’ve been surprised that more companies haven’t taken this on sooner.  Yes, companies spend between 27 and 30% of their budgets on their own content, but that number should be more like 50%. The case for content - engagement, search engine optimization, lead generation - it’s there, no doubt about it.

Here’s the news though.  Yes, advertising spending will drop substantially over the next year+. And yes, money will be moving around quite a bit, with more (even though a much smaller dollar number), going into online marketing. But the shift from traditional to content marketing activities will happen swiftly because of one big reason now - marketers now have the excuse they needed.

Seems almost silly, but marketing departments in larger companies are often times slow to move (you know who you are).  They have well-worn paths with agencies and marketing partners that go back years and decades. Over the past five years, marketers have been testing and “playing around with” creating their own content on a significant basis (much like P&G does with HomeMadeSimple.com and BeingGirl.com), but we haven’t seen the significant “shift” as of yet.

This recession/crisis/slowdown is the excuse that marketers will use for moving traditional money out and getting creative. That means significant moves into content - blogs, articles, white papers, video series, variable enewsletters, eBooks - heck, even custom magazines are still hanging in there. If they are not already doing so, most companies will evolve themselves into true publishers of media, targeted to their specific segments of customers and prospects.

In the previous recession five years ago, most of this “content” stuff was still unproven (even though content marketing spending is in excess of $30 billion dollars per year).  Today, we know it works, and marketers, although still a bit unsure and tentative, are licking their chops to move money into this area.

Inform or entertain. Inform or entertain.  Say it again…inform or entertain.  That’s how engagement is created. That’s how you become a part of the conversation.  That’s how you create a dialogue and stop shouting. Both are tough to do today without creating relevant, compelling and consistent content.

How do I know all this? I have the opportunity to talk with custom publishers on a regular basis.  These are the guys that traditionally have provided content services for companies (although that is changing fast - but that’s for another blog post).  You know what?  Business is up almost across the board.  Sure, there are a few big programs that have been cut, but those are being replaced by other new content projects.

Hmmm….end of times are here, and business is up.  Odd, to say the least.

Marketers are starting to get creative.  With this, we are seeing the biggest marketing supplier shakeup in history.  Publishers, custom publishers, pr firms, advertising agencies, interactive firms, SEO/SEM firms are all going after this thing called “content” (call it what you will…content marketing, custom publishing, custom content, branded content, corporate content, etc.). The next five years will be the wild wild west of mergers, buyouts and closings we have ever seen in the marketing industry. Those that understand the value of content (from a journalistic standpoint) will win.

If this prediction was available in a stock, I’d bet the farm.