10: How to Regain Relevance
The first step to regaining relevance is in admitting that you have lost it. It is difficult for an organization to accept that, even more than it is for a person to accept their flaws, because the organization is built on the assumption that it is desirable to customers and even when the signs are clear, there are those within an organization who will fight against the obvious. People will blame product quality, service issues, their employees, or the economy before they finally come to understand that their brand is simply no longer relevant and they are, simply stated, unwanted.
That behavior is not all that hard to understand, especially when you consider that companies become irrelevant as the result of being inattentive over a long period of time. Long before the customers decide to leave, the firm has simply stopped paying attention to them, to the marketplace, to the industry, and to the media. It takes an insular culture and arrogant leadership to be so painfully ignorant. But there it is.
She alter offers companies a method of saving face, by suggesting that in some instances they become so inundated with the day-to-day business that they fail to consider long-term concerns. (EN: I'm not particularly satisfied with that excuse, as becoming buried in the daily details is often a means of avoiding dealing with bigger issues - and in any case it should be clear that the flock of small problems that demand constant attention is an indicator of something more systemic that is being ignored or neglected.)
Checking Relevance
Coville returns to a list of statements that customers make about brands that are relevant, and suggests that you can monitor your relevance by combing social media for statements such as these:
- This brand stands for the values that are important to me
- Using this brand makes me feel better about myself
- I want people to notice that I choose this brand
- This brand meets my needs
- This brand makes my life easier
- This brand is for people like me
She suggests that if people are saying at least two of these things about your brand, you might have a chance.
She briefly mentions the problem of technology in creating an impersonal barrier between customers and suppliers. When you serve a customer face-to-face, you get a direct impression of how they feel about you. When your interactions are done through a Web site, you do not get a sense of whether they are really satisfied.
Being Attentive
Coville mentions some of the trends that can easily be observed. For example, younger customers do not keep the same schedule that their elders did, and enjoy shopping and dining at odd hours. You may have noticed that more and more fast-food restaurants are touting that they don't close until 2 am or later, and many stores are keeping their doors open around the clock - which should be a sign that any retailer who maintains limited hours is in danger of being left behind.
(EN: it's been noted that restaurants and retailers who remain open late often are breaking even or running at a loss during the "extended" hours - but gain more loyalty and share-of-wallet from the stragglers in general. I don't recall that ever being proven, but it seems a plausible theory.)
Aside of following the crowd, it's important to look at those who seem to be going against the tide. It is very common for those firms that do things that others are not doing to be dismissed as outliers who are pursuing bad ideas that deviate from well-established industry standards. But these are often the very firms that succeed where others fail - Amazon, Zipcar, and Netflix were all "maverick" firms, who were often dismissed as being too unusual to succeed by the industry giants whom they left behind.
The assumption that the customer will do things your way in order to do business with your firm is obsolete, and adopting that position is a certain path to irrelevance. (EN: This is a particular issue for standard and premium brands. Economy brands do enjoy some power to make customers jump through hoops to get a discount price, and luxury brands have significant power to control their customers.)
Ideally, if you are paying attention to the market you will never need to "regain" relevance because you will not lose it - but brands that "slip" may be forgiven by their customers if they recover quickly. However, it's something that must be handled delicately. It's ironic that a brand "refresh" is such a major event for firms - it is often a declaration that they have slipped and are struggling to regain their market and call back those who have drifted away. It should be an embarrassment more than a celebration.
When to Quit
It is unrealistic for any brand to think it will remain relevant indefinitely without changing, and still rather optimistic to believe that it is possible to remain relevant indefinitely even if a firm is attentive and attempts to keep up. Brands and products have lifecycles: just as they grow to maturity, so will they inevitably decline.
It is easier to conceive that a product will fall from popularity, generally driven by technology: nobody needs, and very few desire, a fax machine, manual typewriter, or a console television, and for a manufacturer to insist that they will come back in style would be ludicrous. In some instances, brands who made these devices moved along to newer technologies, but sometimes the brand died with the product:
This does not occur by accident, but by severe and prolonged negligence. For example, IBM evolved from typewriters and adding machines to computers, photocopiers, and other kinds of office equipment, and lately unto business consulting services. Smith Corona, meanwhile, stuck to typewriters and eked out a small profit on parts and supplies. If it attempted to revive itself as a computer manufacturer, no-one would take the brand seriously - and it would be so laughable the firm would be better off selling products under a different brand.
In essence, when your market dries up and your name is more of a liability than an asset, it's time to retire the brand.
(EN: There are some exceptions, given the nostalgic elements in current culture, and there are a number of "retro" brands that had a brief revival. However, I am not aware of any that re-established a permanent foothold. For example, Indian Motorcycles was a brand that went out of business in the earl 1950s, and wile they were revived in 2006 they have not taken a significant market share or come anywhere close to regaining their former glory.)
"Sort of" Relevant?
The author refers to the old saying that you can't be a little bit pregnant - you are or you are not. Relevance is much the same on the level of the consumer - you either are or are not.
For some brands, "sort of" relevance is simply a way of suggesting they have a niche market: they are relevant to a small number of people (such as enthusiasts of a given hobby, or people in a given area). But that is a clean break - they are not "sort of" relevant to all people, but relevant to some and not to others.
Similarly, a brand can be relevant in some situations but not others: a person may buy clothing for the office at one shop, athletic apparel at another, and casual apparel at a third. Each of these brands is relevant to certain contexts and not to others.
And similarly, certain brands may have relevant at certain times in a persons' life: a company that makes diapers is very relevant to a parent until their child has been potty trained, at which point the brand is irrelevant. And again, this is not "sort of" relevance but a definite relevance for a certain period of time.
(EN: All of this seems a bit nitpicky, though it occurs to me that many firms are a bit too broad in their marketing in that they attempt to reach people "in case" their brand might become relevant rather than focusing on the customers to whom it is. There is some sense in that, though it does seem that there is some argument as to how wide to cast one's net - there is likely a boundary where a given prospect is not sufficiently likely, or that it may be too far in advance - and the danger of doing this is in diluting the brand.)
The Speed of Change
There's much said about how quickly the world is changing these days, and it's common wisdom that if the rate of change in the external market is faster than the rate of change within a firm, it is doomed to fall behind. Many companies were built, and are still managed, in the methodologies of the time when things moved more slowly, and it can be crippling to innovation.
Corporate culture is, in fact, what causes many firms to fall from relevance. It's likely that "someone knew" that the firm was moving in the wrong direction - a market researcher, a strategist, or even a store clerk - but it takes a lot of time for top management to get the message, and then authorize someone to investigate what it will take to make the necessary changes, and then authorize the resources needed to do so, and then gather a team of workers to address the problem. And by then, it's too late.
Here, she returns to the example of General Motors, whose Oldmsobile brand is dead, Buick is dying, and Cadillac is struggling. Back when it dominated the market, it arrogantly assumed that it could steer customers through its brand family - using Chevrolet as the brand for young people who couldn't afford much, Buick and Oldsmobile for older middle-class families, and Cadillac for the affluent. It was simply unable to compete with other manufacturers, particularly foreign ones, who sought to gain life-long customer loyalty to a single brand. The "not your father's Oldsmobile" campaign was an attempt to break out of its former mode of business, but by the time it launched, it was too late.
(EN: This particular example ignores the change in generations - Baby Boomers avoid brands that are associated with the elderly, and that Generation X actively shuns the previous generations' trappings of success. It's a particularly bad time in history to attempt to uphold a brand based on nonfunctional values such as tradition and esteem.)