Brandus Interruptus: When Good Brands Go Bad
You wake up with a brilliant idea, a new concept no one has thought of before. You develop a flawless marketing plan over morning coffee, word gets out, and by noon the best teams of specialists call you. All these world-class designers, marketing consultants, media planners and brand management professionals offer you their services free, just to be part of your breakthrough concept. By 3:00 p.m., four major global corporations have had their legal departments fax over contracts to form cobranding efforts….
Hey, let’s get real. If it were this easy, there wouldn’t be brand development and image management firms, nor all the activities (not to mention all the books on the market) designed to develop and manage brands. So until it gets this easy, brands do either well, so-so, or poorly, depending on how well they are conceived and maintained. If it’s going well, good. If not, then you’re suffering needlessly from a dreaded affliction: brandus interruptus.
The symptoms of brandus interruptus
A brand exists for one key purpose: to be the bridge that connects a product’s or service’s promise (for instance, “To help you become a world-class athlete”) with the consumer’s desire (“Just do it”). So how do you tell whether your brand is living up to its potential or giving you the short end of the stick (in other words, brandus interruptus)?
There are symptoms. Trying to be like another company is one (violating every basic premise of positioning). Trying to be everything to everybody is another. Having no or random design consistency is yet another. Identifying the branding objective is the key step in preventing or halting the dreaded brandus interruptus and its accompanying symptoms. Is it to reposition an ailing brand? Is it to invent a category that no one has claimed yet? Or is it to handle a real oversight where the brand has lost its relevance?
The grandest objective and ultimate dream come true would be becoming–and sustaining–a category of one. Being best in a category is admirable, but being in a category of one is truly the prize trophy.
Maintaining brand stamina
The scale below shows the qualities that a brand has, as well as the qualities that reflect how it is managed. The qualities on the left, by their very nature, detect and prevent brandus interruptus. Conversely, the qualities on the right are not only the warning signs of a troubled brand, but are also the very demons to be found in a brand skating on thin ice.
Healthy, thriving brands
Consistent (Note: This is not the same as stagnant)
Image conscious
Dynamically relevant Meaningful
Focused Inclusive
Focused on long-term objectives
Market sensitive
Inquisitive Proactive
Alive
Suffering, weak brands
Chaotic
Overly confident
Stagnant
Empty
Ambiguous
Exclusive
Focused on short-term objectives
Arrogant (or short-sighted)
Complacent
Reactive
Dead
Examples of consistent brands are MTV and IBM. Neither is capricious about how its brand is presented to the world. Neither allows chaos to compromise the brand. MTV’s “chaos” is its brand, whereas IBM’s reinvented freshness has rejuvenated a stale and previously stagnant brand. Hewlett-Packard has openly expressed to the world that its brand had become complacent and has since done some soul-searching. As a result, HP has moved from the right side (complacent) to the left (inquisitive).
Prevention is the best medicine
Just as prevention is the best medicine, understanding is the best form of prevention. The best-managed brands usethe brand as an anchor. To understand this is to understand the difference between a brand strategy and a brand tactic.
A brand strategy is a long-term plan, with bigger and broader objectives. Brand tactics are actions designed to achieve the brand’s strategic objectives. Example: A brand strategy could be to develop the best online service for cat lovers. A brand tactic would extend from that, such as evaluating all possible competitors to see their strengths and weaknesses and developing certain marketing goals from that information. An even more basic tactic could be forming an alliance with the best cat food manufacturer.
Brand strategy = big-picture plan. Brand tactics = day-to-day implementation that makes it possible to forward the strategic plan.
The cure
We read about it everywhere. Reinvention is an all-too-common term these days used in branding and marketing circles. Let’s look at the reality of this popular concept. Reinvention = purpose reinforced.
Well, if a purpose needs reinforcement (or refreshing like popping a breath mint), that tells us the purpose and mission of that brand went off the rails somewhere–all at once, or slowly through gradual erosion. It’s like forgetting one’s name, or career, or reason for getting up in the morning. Each results in a diminishing of both drive and clarity for doing what one is doing.
So let’s go earlier. A company starts out (hopefully) with a purpose: to solve X for some identified public. Things take off. Word gets out. Production demand increases. Day-to-day needs flood everyone’s plate. The brand goes on “automatic.” Everybody’s really busy–busy forgetting about brand presence, brand purpose, and the reason all this activity was started in the first place.
Well, nothing runs on automatic for too long. That’s why the world’s great brands–Nike, Apple, HP, IBM, Xerox, to name a few–all went through a “reinventing” process for their brand. What they really were doing was refueling their “lost” drive, their lost purpose, reclaiming ownership of what had been theirs to begin with. Keeping a brand alive involves a consistent and continuous assessment of the marketplace–the same type of assessment that was done when any enterprise first came into existence.
When this is left unattended, all of a sudden you’ll find everyone talking about the need to “reinvent” the brand. It’s a poor substitute for forgetting why one was doing what one was doing in the first place. And the cure? Keeping one’s brand alive, fresh, and consistently relevant.
David Brier is president/creative director of DBD International, a branding agency based in Menomonie, WI.
Also by David Brier:
Seven Deadly Sins of Branding
