I’ve worked with hundreds of brands in my career, and I’ve only seen TWO organizational behaviors that are certain to make any brand building effort fail. Lack of organizational buy-in, from the CEO through to the store clerks, and lack of patience to let a brand plan succeed will kill even the best strategy before it gets started.
I’m guessing that anyone who advises brands has seen one of these two scenarios, or both. Neither is fun to experience.
1) The Reluctant Approval
The CMO at a small CPG company and his team, along with his agency partners, devised a great innovative strategy and campaign for the brand. After months of long nights, the new campaign was presented to everyone in the company, from the senior management team to the customer-facing staff that interact with the lifeblood of the business every day – the retail buyers and consumers. The marketing team was methodical about getting buy-in from all the key managers in the company, and enthusiasm was generally high. Except for one manager who oversees the entire sales team in a key region of the country. She is skeptical about marketing in general, and showed a tepid response to the new campaign. But with some prodding, she acquiesced, saying if everyone else likes the plan, she’s fine with it. FINE WITH IT. Red flag words.
So the marketing team, anxious to launch the campaign they worked on for months and absolutely loved, moved full steam ahead with their plans. They had a smooth launch, they got rave reviews by their industry peers and all seemed positive. The integrated plan was activated, millions of dollars were spent and all that was left was to track the results in terms of brand awareness, distribution gains, sales lift and all the other key performance metrics that would demonstrate success or indicate failure.
Things were going smoothly after the campaign launch, and many of the key metrics were tracking up, except one. One just seemed not to be responding to the new campaign. Sales lift in one key region was flat, and almost declining. A bit of digging showed that the retailers in that region were not supporting the campaign with increased store presence, ad features and promotions that could leverage the new campaign. In fact, in that region, they were running some program completely unrelated to the campaign.
After further investigation, the CMO learned that the manager in charge of that region was the same one who said of the campaign, “I’m fine with it” during the internal sell-in process. Furthermore, it seems that she did not encourage her team to enthusiastically get behind the campaign, so instead they did not aggressively push their accounts to support the campaign at retail. They waved it at the retailers, but backed down when the retailers pushed for a different promotion, and instead ended up running an unrelated program during the critical early post-launch period of the campaign. Consumer awareness for the campaign was high, but it was not being activated in the stores (in fact consumers were seeing something unrelated to the campaign and may have been confused), so the impact was lessened and sales were flat.
We call this scenario the Reluctant Approval, and it can derail a campaign’s success and waste millions of dollars and countless hours of staff time because one or two key people are not fully on board.
How do you avoid having the Reluctant Approval derail your efforts? Make sure you have enthusiastic buy in from all key managers throughout the company. If some people have concerns, or seem likely to just be going along to get along, spend extra time to understand why they are not enthusiastic about the plan and convert them. Make changes when possible, without sacrificing the quality or impact of the work, but also make a note to monitor the staff under the reluctant manager to make sure he or she does not infect other people critical to success with the same indifference, or worse, negativity. One weak link in the chain of a campaign is all it takes to turn potential success into failure, while wasting time, money and opportunity.
2) Unreasonably Impatient Leadership Syndrome
The marketing team worked diligently, at the direction of the CEO, on a new strategy for the brand. Out of that strategy, a year-long plan was developed with the help of the agency partners and a few consultants. The entire organization bought in to the effort after contributing their specific components to the plan , and once everyone was comfortable, the team set a schedule and budget.
One of the critical elements of the plan was an effort to reframe the brand with consumers through a combination of social media and in-store activities. The brand was experiencing moderate awareness with consumers, but much lower relevance. While actually quite relevant to many consumers, the company had failed thus far to drive the right brand message home, preferring to focus on unemotional product attribute satisfaction rather than emotional lifestyle connection in its communication. Everyone on the team had discussed the need to let this program run for at least nine months before they could assess its success or failure. They all agreed it was worth the time and investment, and identified the key metrics they would track throughout the life the program.
Shortly after launch, the head of marketing was reviewing the program with the CEO, when the CEO suddenly dropped a bomb. “I don’t think this program is working for us,” the CEO said. The marketing head almost fell out of his chair. It had been two months since the program launched, the key metrics were on track and the reasons the CEO gave for the program not working were not even related to the metrics that would determine success or failure. After a little back and forth about the program, the CEO just said to cancel the program and gave new direction to the marketing team.
A few days later, while talking to another executive who had been at the company for years, the head of marketing learned that the CEO had a history of starting and stopping marketing programs prematurely, almost irrationally, without letting them run long enough to have any chance of assessing their impact on the brand. It seems that no matter what key metrics were chosen to be measured for a program, the CEO always just looked at bi-weekly sales data and made decisions based on that. Of course, most brand marketing programs would be doomed under that scenario, except perhaps the one’s fortunate enough to be launched during a lengthy uptick in bi-weekly sales.
As a result of the CEO’s behavior, the brand achieved modest sales growth using promotions each year (enough to keep his job!), but never really built the kind of brand equity that could have significantly increased the brand’s asset value to the company. By contrast, it’s competitors, with more patient leadership, enjoyed greater brand awareness and loyalty each year, while building brand platforms on which they could grow for many decades.
How do you succeed when your leader has Unreasonably Impatient Leadership Syndrome? Brands can’t be built overnight. They require consistent communication to enough consumers over a long enough period of time to let the brand messages sink in and resonate with consumers. Programs are doomed to fail if enough time is not given to let them yield results (reasonable time, not unlimited time). If you find yourself working for someone with Unreasonable Impatient Leadership Syndrome, ask yourself if you really think you can to succeed at your job. If the answer is no, get out quick so as not to waste valuable career building time. If you think the leader has the capacity to change (maybe they just don’t understand how brands get build or why they are so important for the long-term health of a company), help educate them about building brands and why it is so important. Show examples of successful programs, complete with timelines and results. Show how brands with loyal customers keep them longer and get them to buy more than brands who are just churning customers with the latest sales gimmick. This is a tough scenario to overcome, but I’ve seen it done.
The job of building brands is tough enough, as any of us doing it knows all too well. Make sure the deck is not stacked against you by people who, while meaning well, will derail any chances you have to succeed before you start.
Good luck.
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