Brands Require Organizational Buy-In and Patience to Grow

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Feb 22, 2017 | Making Brands Better

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.

What’s in a Name?: A Few Thoughts on The Future (and Present) of Brands

by Robert Mazzucchelli | Feb 7, 2017 | Making Brands Better

For thirty years now, I’ve been consumed by the craft of building brands.  Part art, part science, part gut decision making, the process of creating a brand has been a sought-after skill by many companies since around 1842, when the nation’s first two advertising agencies were founded, one by a Philadelphian named Volney B. Palmer, and the other by a New Yorker named Jon Hopper.  Since that time, brand building has grown in importance because the world’s most valuable brands have become massive, stable assets for their corporate owners.  According to a recent Forbes magazine article, the Apple brand is now worth $154 billion, up 6% from last year.  The Coca Cola brand is worth $58 billion, up 4%.  And the Amazon brand is worth $35 billion, up a whopping 25% since 2015.  These are all incredibly valuable assets that often comprise a large percentage of the brand owner’s total market capitalization.  Apple’s market cap is around $580 billion, so it’s brand, worth just over a quarter of its total market value, is the mighty asset that drive’s Apple’s business.  Owning a valuable brand is probably even more important for a small local business, like a restaurant, because fluctuations in its business, caused by a knock to its brand, are more likely to have an immediate and meaningful impact on the lives of its owners than a few percentage point change in the value of Apple will have on its shareholders.

Lately, I have been considering the state of brands and their importance in today’s world, and how they will fit into the business landscape going forward.  It’s true that they will remain a big asset opportunity for companies (because great brands offer the promise of future revenues and enhanced profit margins), but the way and speed at which they are created, and the volatility in the value of these brand assets is changing before our eyes.  As a result, I have steered many of my clients away from investments in traditional “brand building” activities in favor of tactics that build transactions with consumers in hopes that a positive experience with the product or service will build brand advocacy.  That way, they can let consumers tell their brand story and facilitate an increase brand value.  This is a relatively new (and, ironically, very old — word of mouth used to be a key to building brands before the creation of electronic media) approach for most brand marketers and consultants to take, and in many cases it requires us to develop new competencies and continually update our knowledge of the new marketing and data tools that seem to emerge every month.  But with consumers having so much control over the conversation, staying ahead of the game is imperative.  In many cases now, we have become, at worst, interested spectators in the creation of our brands, and, at best, trusted moderators of the brand conversation, a scary reality for marketers used to being in control in either case.

Since the advent of the internet and e-commerce in the mid-1990’s, the job of building and maintaining the value of a brand has gotten a bit trickier — better in some ways, harder in others.  With the proliferation of online media and distribution channels reaching epic proportions, and consumers now having the ability to instantaneously voice their opinions and feedback about brands, the speed at which a marketer can build a brand has never been faster and the margin for mistakes or failure never more thin.  It’s probably why CMO tenures are so short.  Consider this: if Zappos, a trusted shoe and fashion e-tailing brand changed their name overnight to Blazitt, and they still had the same service and selection of merchandise, would it materially change their business?  Within minutes, the news of the name change would be all over the world, and customers would be notified of the change, but the great selection of merchandise, pricing and customer service would remain unchanged, and business would likely continue as usual.  Okay maybe it would not be quite that simple and smooth, and some loyal customers might be skeptical until they have a few transaction experiences with the “new” brand,  but it wouldn’t nearly be as risky to make that name transition as it would have been in a pre-digital marketing ecosystem world, a world where the ability to communicate one-on-one, to mine online behavioral and purchase data, and to instigate instant transactions takes precedence over the slowly methodical relationship and trust building process historically required to build a lasting brand.  In fact, with effective SEO, data mining and media planning, companies can enter the market with a purely transactional/product offer model, make millions and disappear before most consumers have ever heard of them.  And this happens every day online.  I’m always amazed at all the people I meet that are making millions and millions of dollars selling something – a “no name” product – that I have never heard of before.  And I track A LOT of business categories through my work.

So as brand and business builders, our landscape has changed dramatically and the questions we ask when approaching the business growth and development process need to change as well.  Consider these questions before planning your next brand marketing effort:

1. Do you control you own distribution?  If you own your points of distribution, focus your energy and dollars on offering the best products, building traffic and exceeding customer expectations.  Those actions yield consumer advocacy and “brand fans” who will increase the value of your brand by reputation over time.
2. Do you have direct access to a significant audience of proven buyers?  If so, talk to them about how your product meets their needs better than any other brand’s products.  Differentiate.  Offer trial incentives (and not just for one trial, but for three or four trials to gain preference and loyalty). Remember, you didn’t have to spend lots of money finding these consumers, so spend it on winning them over and keeping them.  Brand loyalty will create brand value.
3. Are you innovating or entering a mature category?  Offering a new solution to an existing consumer need creates its own curiosity with prospective buyers. Consumers will seek you out to solve their problem.  So spend on SEO solutions, building trial and delivering satisfaction and a great brand experience.  Brand value will follow.
4. Are you planning to be in business for the long term (and define long term) or short term?  Some businesses aren’t looking to build a brand at all.  They want to build a steady stream of repeated product or service transactions for a finite period of time (think HSN or QVC).  If you have a product that is a fad or will have a suspected short lifecycle because its novelty or uniqueness will wear off, spend on traffic building and incentivizing immediate purchases.  Forget the brand, because by the time you build one the product will have no demand.  And capture consumer data with each transaction – it could be the most lasting asset you create in this scenario, and fuel your next venture’s revenue engine.

The world has changed and with it, the way marketers need to think and act.  As someone once said, “if you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward”.  Let me know your thoughts and stories related to marketing in our brave new world…