Introduction
The goal of every brand is to be the brand of choice, to be loved and respected more than alternatives. Not all succeed, and some fail quite miserably.
Given the years of experience, the millions of dollars and rooms full of smart people, one wonders why this still happens. There are a myriad of reasons: insufficient budget, inexperienced or unqualified stewardship, egomania, bad timing, bad choices, and bad luck. This very day, numerous people are making decisions that are going to damage their brands.
But even so, few brands are ever completely killed: the come into favor and fall out of favor as regular as the seasons - and with this in mind, the goal of the present book is to consider legacy brands that have persevered, brands that rose, faltered, and regained their footing.
What This Book Will Do for Your Brand
To be clear, the author doesn't intend to present "a collection of horror stories." You can examine the missteps of others to learn to avoid making the same mistakes - but more importantly, this book intends to describe what was done after making those mistakes, and examines what was done to recover. Some examination of the causes of failure is necessary, but don't miss the main point: it's not to avoid falling down - that is going to happen in spite of your best efforts - but to learn to pick yourself up.
(EN: The author then provides an outline of the book with brief summaries of each chapter. I'll skip that.)
Probably the most important things you will need to turn a brand around are not skills that can be learned, but qualities you must learn to have: patience and perseverance. It takes time to resurrect a brand, and progress can be slow. The brands that have died were not killed by their wounds, but by failure to tend to their wounds: firms gave up on a brand and decided to scrap it and start over rather than invest the time and budget in saving it.
(EN: I think the author's point here is that a brand can always be saved, which is likely true. However I accept that there may be instances in which it's not worth the effort - it's not weakness of character that leads a firm to drop a brand, but merely a financial decision that it starting over is better than trying to mend a mangled brand.)
Defining Terms: What Does Brand Mean?
The term "brand" has become clouded, and there are different opinions of what the word means. To clarify, the author considers brand to be "a mental impression that is earned through time" - and to be specific, it is what the market thinks, feels, and expects in regard to a product and the firm that produces it.
Your name, logo, tagline, and other elements are not your brand - they are tools. They can be important contributors or serious liabilities, but they are only a means to create an impression on the audience, not the brand itself.
A strong brand is a valuable and even vital asset in a competitive marketplace - where there is more than one affordable option, brand is the factor that leads a customer to buy one product rather than another.
Branding in an Exploding Universe
Brand was not useful in the distant past, when there was only one option available: if you wanted flour, you went to the mill and bought it, there was no other option except to do without. With the growth in transportation and retailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, multiple vendors competed for business, and brand became important. In the modern marketplace, brand has exploded.
Not only does a customer who wants a product have a broad array of options to choose from, the information he is able to get about brands comes from many sources other than the producer. The recent rise of social media means people are teaching and learning from one another rather than getting information from a few sources that the producer could largely control.
This completely turned marketing on its head, from being in control and pushing products to consumers to being at the mercy of informed and empowered consumers who choose what they buy, and are very demanding of suppliers who are increasingly desperate to win their business and their loyalty.
Advantages and Drawbacks of the Present Age
The goal of branding is to communicate "This is who I am, and what I stand for. Remember me." The most technically sophisticated digital branding campaign and the face-paint of a primitive are both communicating that same message - and for all the distractions and complexity of the modern market, that remains the goal of our efforts.
What has changed is largely incidental: the techniques that are used and the number of voices competing for the attention and credibility of the audience. However, these factors are overwhelmingly complex and make the actions we must take to achieve the simple goal difficult to perceive and execute.
But the singularity of goal also means that all firms, large and small, are working toward the same end. And increasingly, technology is leveling the playing field by making the means to communicate and reach an audience more accessible: super bowl commercials and full-page magazine ads are for the few giant firms that can afford them, a blog and a Facebook page can be started by a one-man firm.
The Scope of the Problem
In a later chapter (EN: moved here), the author lists some of the "brand bombs" that went off, just in the spring of 2011 - it's a very long list of celebrities, nonprofit organizations, and businesses who have been exposed for doing the most outrageous and stupid things. One wonders if they have been paying attention, as the major media has been aggressively selling scandal, the more salacious the better, for the past three decades.
And yet, people in elevated positions, with the savvy to know better, still keep falling on their faces. It seems that cannot be stopped, which means its all the more important to learn how to recover if, or perhaps when, such incidents occur.