Brand Bastardization due to ineffective People and Channel Management

We all know some well established brands and have a personal perception of what that brand stands for. This perception is based on a few things …

• When you encountered the brand and the products and/or service they provided - Your personal customer experience or perception.
• What it was known for at that time you encountered the Brand and how your interaction with the brand matched up with your perceptions.
• How well the Brand is currently living up to its expectations, based on your interaction in the past.

Ultimately, a brand and its market perception are based on how well the product and/or service meets the customer needs and interaction with said product and/or service. Most importantly it is how consistently the perception meets the reality, of how well the product or service meets the customer needs. The brand recognition and value, all build over time and can improve or degrade depending on how well the customer is served.

However, maintaining Brand value within many organizations is often incomplete, and in turn limited to logo recognition, ensuring brand guidelines, its association with other brands and increasingly with socially popular issues. This becomes even more so when the organization has acquired multiple brands over the years and must deal with multiple perceptions and go to market strategies.

When a service is also provided alongside a product to be useful, the brand is further impacted heavily by the attitudes, personalities, quality, and professionalism of the folks providing the service. This applies whether they are direct employees or not. When people activities are involved in providing the solution, it becomes even more important to pay close attention to who is delivering the service and the customer experience.

Companies that provide products AND services, must pay very close attention to the customer experience and journey as well as who is delivering their products, and how they are recruited, trained, and managed. In addition, they need to be very aware of the loyalty of the individual delivering the service to the brand, and in ensuring that they live up to and deliver the perception and customer experience that their brand stands for.

Many industrial giants, in a quest to gain market share and/or grow, acquire other brands within their niche, as well as neighboring similar products. They then make the fatal mistake of attempting to provide all their products through all and/or multiple channels within similar regions, without paying attention to the subtle differences between the products and customer experiences that are unique to each product.

This then leads to Brand Bastardization (BB) and commoditization due to Interbrand competition. Brand dilution occurs when a Brand loses its value. Bastardization on the other hand occurs due to actions by a company, that destroys employee and partner loyalty to the brand, that in turn leads to a less than ideal customer experience. ???

Interbrand competition and cannibalization will occur between different brands from the same organization as well as the same brand via different channels. With each channel creating a unique and different brand experience, depending on how and who delivers the product, the brand consistency goes away and brand value gets diluted.

How does this happen? Well, it is a journey of inadvertent human emotions and reactions. The channels compete against each other, losing brand loyalty, and each entity will quickly devolve into a “low price” driven winning strategy for their survival. This results in less than ideal individuals or channels being engaged and resultant customer service levels dropping. Furthermore, perceptions of product reliability as well as solution quality drops, which pushes the brand into becoming a commodity that doesn’t provide any value past the base product and its use, thereby losing its brand value along the way – Brand bastardization!

If the end goal is commoditization, this strategy works. However, if the goal is to be a solution provider that strives to expand customer offerings, gain share of wallet and long term customer loyalty, then be very cautious on people and channel management decisions that might inadvertently lead to Brand Bastardization and lead you into being a widget maker that will shrink your way to a commodity.

To grow through the synergies of multiple brand and product acquisitions, then do the following at a minimum

• A thorough understanding of the product and/or service, go to market strategy, customer experience and brand value must be established early on. There isn’t a “one size fits all” approach to people and channel management when it comes to products that serve different purposes.
• Do not mix up existing channels from multiple products, except when engaging in common customer touch points – you must also be crystal clear and deliberate in ensuring that there aren’t any channel conflicts that will create mixed messages for the customer.
• Most importantly do not flood geographic regions with multiple channels that do not have significant differentiating factors that enable them cater to different customer segments and needs.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what else should be done to maintain brand value and prevent bastardization.