Common (And Not So Common) Brand Problems

As I was doing my research for an article that I am writing on brand problems, I realized that I had written much about common (and not so common) brand problems in this blog. So rather than write yet another post on this, I thought I would provide you with links to all of the previous posts in which I address brand problems. Here they are...

• Common Brand Problems
• Common Marketing Problems
• Is This a Branding Problem?
• When a Brand's Problem is Not a Marketing Problem
• Don't Wait Until It is Too Late
• Three Common Brand Problems
• Eight Common Brand Problems
• Brand Problems of Their Own Making
• Branding Issues for Mergers and Acquisitions
• Brand Problems: Small vs. Large Companies
• Branding as a Solution to All Organizational Problems
• The Most Common Problems with Brand Extensions
• Common Problems in Brand Equity Measurement
• Growth Strategies for Risk-Adverse Organizations
• Marketing & Common Sense
• Common Brand Problems

If you need help solving your brand problems, give me a call or send me an email message. I am extremely likely to have encountered and helped overcome those problems. You can find me at www.brandforward.com.

 

And to read more about common brand problems, you may want to read Brand Aid, available here.

Common Brand Problems

Over the past twenty years, I have helped more than 200 brands in a wide variety of product and service categories. Here are the most common problems that brands seem to encounter.

• A disruptive technology has made the brand's core product obsolete. Example: Kodak.
• The brand's level of service and product innovation has not kept up with the competition. Example: Burger King.
• Stuck in the middle. The brand is neither low cost/high convenience nor does it deliver a high-end or unique customer experience. Example: Sears.
• The brand has extremely low customer awareness. Example: many start-up brands.
• The category has matured and all of the brands in the category seem to offer the same product quality, functions and features. Example: this has occurred in many categories.
• The category has been infused with new life through investment in advertising/marketing, but the brand in question has not participated in that investment. Example: any insurance brand that has not begun advertising at a fairly high level.
• The CEO or other organization leader has created a dysfunctional culture. Example: more brands than you would think.
• The brand's leadership is risk-adverse and so the brand (and its products and services) has not been proactive about reinventing itself. Example: numerous brands, Hallmark being one of them.
• A venture capital firm buys the brand, strips out costs and assets, dresses the company/brand up for sale but has not really invested in the long-term viability of the brand. Example: I have encountered many examples of this. I do not want to name them.
• Profit-focused management driven by Wall Street demands has gradually reduced the quality or increased the price of the brand's products (or both) until the perceived value is noticeably diminished. These actions can also be influenced by retailers such as Walmart that have huge leverage over manufacturers and how they price their products. Example: Newell (Rubbermaid). 
• In the effort to increase sales significantly, a more upscale brand broadens distribution to a mass channel, significantly diminishing its brand cache. Example: Columbia (vs. Patagonia or North Face).
• A brand walks away from or ignores its primary differentiating benefit in an effort to broaden its offering and gain more sales across more customer need segments. Example: Volvo (safety).
• A premium brand extends its product line down to the mass market but in so doing risks decreasing the social status associated with the brand. Example: BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Jaguar have had to grapple with this tradeoff as they try to extend down into the aspirational or mass luxury market
• Through rapid expansion and wild success, the brand becomes ubiquitous increasing the difficulty of maintaining uniform quality standards and feeling more commonplace in peoples' minds. Examples: Nike and Starbucks.
• The company and brand have been complacent for a long time, so much so that they have not kept up with evolving customer needs or the competition. Examples: Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.
• The brand's product or service is so new, revolutionary or complex that people really don't understand what it does or how it works. This is a communication problem. Example: I have encountered this with several high-tech start-up brands that are based on new product concepts.
• Management does not have a good understanding of who their target market is, what they really want or what messaging or product configurations would work best for them. Example: I have encountered this more often than one might think. Stuhrling (watches) is one example of this.
• The brand has a ill thought through pricing or distribution strategy that does not support the positioning of their brand. Example: I have had a few clients that have had these problems. 
• The brand's founder, leader or spokesperson has encountered personal problems that reflect negatively on the brand. Examples: Anita Bryant and Sunkist and President Donald Trump and the Trump brand.

Hopefully, none of these problems seem familiar to you or applicable your brand. If they do, you need to take action before it is too late.

  

Is This a Branding Problem?

I have been a brand strategy consultant for 18 years and have worked with over 200 brands. And I have been approached by many other brand owners who were seeking help. Here is a dirty little secret - not all of the problems I have been asked to solve as a brand consultant have been branding problems. 

While seventy to eighty percent of the time, the problems have been branding problems, the rest of the time they have been other problems that the management teams thought could be solved by repositioning their brands or giving their brands new identities.

Here are the other types of problems that I have uncovered in the course of my brand strategy consulting:

• Inferior products
• Sub-par business models
• Significant flaws in customer service training
• A divisive CEO
• Extreme management team in-fighting
• A toxic organizational culture
• Disruptive technologies that have made their products obsolete
• Customer-facing computer systems that undermine delivery against the brand promise

And even if the problem is a brand-related problem, when asked to refresh the brand's identity, often the problem extends well beyond a brand identity problem. These are some of the brand-related problems that I frequently encounter:

• An out-of-control and confusing brand architecture due to multiple mergers and acquisitions
• A unique value proposition that is no longer unique in the industry
• A "me too" product and brand strategy
• Poor brand identity controls
• A lack of understanding of the customer and his or her needs
• Market share being taken away by an increasing number of niche brands
• Focusing too much on functional needs rather than emotional, experiential or self-expressive needs
• Inefficient and ineffective marketing spending
• Marketing department skill set gaps
• Incompetent marketers
• Poorly performing marketing agency partners
• Need to recover from a brand crisis
• Inadequate marketing spending and extremely low brand awareness
• Salesforces running amuck in improperly positioning or messaging their brands to make a sale
• Inconsistent positioning of brands across geographic markets
• Brand extension failures
• Inconsistent target markets for the same brand
• Financial decisions that substantially compromise the customer brand experience

So when someone jumps to the conclusion that a new logo is required to revive the brand, dig deeper. The problem is likely to the much more complicated than that.

Common Marketing Problems

I wish I could say that these problems were rare, but they are not. I run into these problems quite frequently. Admittedly, it is usually when a person who is not trained in marketing is at the marketing helm of his or her organization. Apparently, people responsible for choosing a marketing head (in some organizations) think that little skill or experience is required to do the job well. But that is a topic for another blog post.

Here are the most common problems I have witnessed:

• There is no brand positioning.
• There is no brand architecture.
• There are no brand identity guidelines.
• The logo is not functional for all uses.
• No one has established a hierarchy of target customers.
• There is no communications plan or media plan. The marketer responds to the most compelling media pitches, often resulting in a completely ineffective and inefficient mix of publications and media vehicles. 
• Organizations only target and interact with their current customers, not new ones.
• Organizations rely exclusively on social media for their marketing efforts. 
• Organizations forget to solicit email addresses and other contact information at trade shows and other outreach efforts.
• Organizations assume that a good website with good SEO efforts is all they need to build brand awareness.
• Advertising focuses exclusively on functional (versus emotional) messages.
• They load marketing communication up with multiple complex messages of brand benefits thinking that will make the communication stronger.
• They conduct deeply flawed marketing research. Maybe they solicit the wrong people for their responses. Maybe the survey instrument is designed in such a way that there is significant biasing. Maybe the sample size is not large enough to conclude anything definitively. Sometimes the analysis (and its underlying logic) is flawed.
• The marketing program consists primarily of price discounts and other price promotions because it results in a (temporary) sales lift.
• They have little to no marketing budget because they don't believe in the power of marketing or because they believe the product should sell itself.
• They never stop to think about the customer's beliefs, attitudes, values, hopes, fears, shopping behaviors, product usage behaviors or anything else that would help them design successful marketing programs.
• There is no "integrated" marketing. It is all conducted ad hoc as opportunities arise. Nothing is designed to work together. 

I hope you do not have these problems. And I hope this makes you feel good about your marketing abilities. I wish you great success with your marketing efforts.

Most Requested Areas of Brand Help

We see and respond to a lot of RFPs and we work on a lot of branding projects. Because we focus on brand strategy, we do not typically receive requests for more tactical initiatives such as social media or direct mail campaigns. However, we do receive requests for a wide variety of brand research and strategy initiatives. Here are the areas in which we have received the most requests in the past two years:

• We need help repositioning our brand.
• We need a stronger point of difference for our brand.
• We need a better brand elevator speech.
• We want to better tell our brand's story.
• We need to create a name and a new identity for our merged organizations.
• We need to create a name and new identity for a new product or service. 
• We want to build more emotionality into our brand. 
• We need help with our brand's strategy and our business model strategy.
• We need to radically transform our brand and store concept. 
• We want to measure the equity of our brand.
• Our brand architecture is a mess. We need to simplify it.
• We want to take our brand out to new customer segments without alienating our current target customers. 
• We need help merging our organizations (combined through merger or acquisition), including creating a new combined brand and a new combined culture.
• We need to reenergize our employees in support of the brand. 
• We need to get the leadership team back on track regarding alignment with our agreed to brand strategy.
• We need to transform our business and brand from a transactional approach to an engagement approach.
• We need to become a marketing-driven organization. 

Maybe you recognize some of these needs as ones your organization has. Anyway, I thought you would be interested in the types of requests we have been receiving regarding brand strategy.

Three Common Brand Problems

I have excerpted these three brand problems from thirty-five problems that I list in my Brand Aid book. Here are problems twenty-two through twenty-four from that book:

Problem 22. Following challengers because it’s easier and produces more immediate results, rather than creating new ways to meet consumer needs

Analysis. If you are the market leader, this is an easy trap to fall into. If you are ahead, just match the competition to stay ahead—that way they can never catch up. That is a fairly common sailboat-racing tactic. The problem with this strategy is that you begin to play by your competitor’s rules. It is easier to win at your own game than at someone else’s. It may be a more natural reaction to match competitive moves, but as you are doing that, you are distracted from doing what you do best—playing your own game. And, remember, other competitors that are playing by different rules may not be far behind.

Problem 23. Not applying the latest product and service innovations to your flagship brand because it is getting too old and stodgy (a self-fulfilling prophecy)

Analysis. It is a tragedy to walk away from a brand you have invested in— and that might be investment of millions of dollars, over time. It is better to reposition, revitalize, and extend an aging brand than to ignore it. You should carefully monitor consumer opinion to ensure the brand is perceived as relevant and vital. Also, track the brand’s consumers to make sure they are not a shrinking or aging group. Often, new subbrands can make the parent brand more relevant to new consumer segments.

Problem 24. No central control of the brand portfolio (so that each brand team is free to apply the best differentiating features of one brand to each of the others in the portfolio).

Analysis. Certain attributes, features, and benefits should be off-limits to certain brands within your portfolio. When the business is organized and run by product category or channel of trade (as opposed to brand), there is more pressure to apply the best ideas to all brands regardless of each brand’s positioning or intended point of difference. If the business is organized by brand and most people understand brand concepts, this is less likely to happen. P&G might offer several different brands of detergent, but each has a distinct point of difference. One might make clothes whiter, one might work best in cold water, one might take out tough stains, one might be gentle on the clothes, yet another might be hypoallergenic, etc. Since P&G manages by brand, the company really understands that points of difference are central to a brand’s success, whereas somewhere else (for example, in a company organized around product development or run by engineers), people might feel more pressured to add the best features they come up with to all their products. A highly placed brand management group or council should have the authority to ensure that brand teams, product development teams, business units, divisions, and subsidiaries don’t blur the lines between your organization’s brands. This council should guard against a “silo” or short-term approach to the business.

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition. Copyright 2015 by Brad VanAuken.

Eight Common Brand Problems

In my fifteen years as a brand strategy consultant, I have interacted with the managers of several hundred different brands. This is often in a client/consultant relationship. At other times, it is in the context of an educational workshop or conference. Either way, I have been made aware of many brand problems. Here are the brand problems that organizations seem to encounter most often:

1. The competition has gotten intense and we have not kept up. Our products are no better than anyone else's and our brand no longer delivers a unique value proposition.
2. We have grown through multiple mergers and acquisitions and now have a very large and messy portfolio of brands that is confusing to our customers and expensive to maintain. 
3. Our new owner is changing the strategic direction of our business. Our current brand position will no longer work for the business' new direction.
4. Our new CEO has a new vision for the business and needs to change the brand to match that new vision.
5. We are launching a new product, service or business and it requires a brand strategy and identity.
6. We are expanding our brand to include new product or service categories or new customer segments and the old brand strategy or identity will no longer work. 
7. A disruptive technology has made our business obsolete. We need to change our business model and our brand.
8. Our new marketing vice president or CMO wants to refresh the brand based on his or her vision for the brand.

Common Brand Problems

Problem 8. Overextending your brand into different categories and markets so as to completely blur the brand’s meaning and points of distinction

Analysis. You can always make more money in the short term by licensing your brand out for use on a variety of products or by extending your brand into a myriad of new categories. The long-term effect, however, is detrimental. People no longer will be able to tell what your brand stands for. It will lose its meaning and its point of difference. Extend your brand based on a clear understanding of its essence, promise, archetype, and personality. And make sure your consumers “get it.”

Problem 9. Frequently changing your brand’s positioning and message

Analysis. New brand managers and marketing executives often feel as though they need to make a name for themselves to continue the climb up the corporate ladder. Don’t succumb to this temptation by changing the advertising campaign or the brand slogan, especially if the current ones are working well or haven’t been in place long enough for you to assess their effectiveness. Consistent communication over time is what builds a brand. After all, Hallmark has used its “When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best” slogan since 1944; the Marlboro Man has been Marlboro’s icon since 1955; Absolut Vodka has featured its bottle’s shape in consumer communication since 1978. Since 1921, General Mills has used Betty Crocker as its face to the public. Her portrait has changed in subtle ways eight times since then. If you do make changes, make them gradually in an integrated fashion, based on sound consumer research.

Problem 10. Creating brands or subbrands for internal or trade reasons, rather than to address distinct consumer needs

Analysis. There is nothing more inefficient or wasteful than creating a new brand or subbrand for a purpose other than meeting a different consumer need. Brands and subbrands exist to address different consumers and consumer need segments. It is expensive to launch a new brand (and very expensive to maintain multiple brands that meet similar consumer needs; it also adds unnecessary complexity to your organization). Worst of all, it dilutes the position of your original brand. This problem often results from egos and organization structure. People head up divisions or business units that deliver specific products or services. They create a name and identity to put on business cards and to rally their employees around, without considering whether the products or services are similar to products or services other divisions create. (This tendency has resulted in Hewlett-Packard having multiple printer lines: DeskJet, OfficeJet, OfficeJet Pro, LaserJet, DesignJet, DeskWriter, and PhotoSmart. It is unlikely that consumers understand many of these distinctions. They are likely to think of them all as HP printers.)

Sometimes, companies create separate brands or subbrands for trade reasons— for instance, to offer something different for specialty stores vs. mass channels of distribution. (Hallmark created the Expressions from Hallmark brand to offer mass channel stores while specialty stores continued to carry the Hallmark brand. These two brands don’t meet different consumer needs, and I’m not sure consumers perceive differences between the two.) This problem can also result from mergers and acquisitions in which the brands are neither rationalized nor strategically managed after the enterprises are combined.


Three of thirty-five common brand problems excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition, available here.

The Most Common Problems with Brand Extensions

Some of the most common problems associated with brand extension are:

• Extending into a category in which the brand adds nothing but its identity (i.e., its products or services are not significantly different from current products or services in the category)
• Extending through opportunistic brand licensing without regard to its possible impact on the brand
• Extending into lower (and, sometimes higher) quality segments
• Not fully understanding brand benefit ownership, transfer, or importance

Unsuccessful brand extension examples: 

• Bic perfume: How do you leverage the “small disposable pocket items” association?
• Levi’s tailored classic suits: What is Levi’s primary association? (casual clothes)
• Campbell spaghetti sauce: Why didn’t “tomato sauce” transfer from Campbell’s soups to spaghetti sauce?
• McDonald’s Arch Deluxe burger (for adults): What is McDonald’s primary association? (fast-food for kids)
• Bayer Aspirin-free: What is Bayer’s primary association? (aspirin)
• Volvo 850 GLT sports sedan: What is Volvo’s primary association? (safety) What is a Volvo’s primary proof point? (boxy armored-car styling)
• Colgate kitchen entrees: What were they thinking?
• Or, my all-time favorite, New Coke: What is Coke? (“It’s the real thing”—with a long-time secret formula.)

Excerpted from Brand Aid, second edition, available here.