Time To Fire Your Brand

Congratulations: You have a brand. So does every grand, mediocre and miserable company on the planet. The question is, does the brand have teeth? Is it red hot? Does it sing? Is it an aphrodisiac? Does it move people or put them to sleep? Is it internally wired to go viral or is it lost in the static constraints of the pre-Google stone age?

There is much more at stake here then an academic Q & A: It goes right to the heart and soul of business success…or failure. That’s because today a powerful brand – an electric one - is so much more than a color and a logo design. It meets the acid tests of: ? Generating measurable business results ? Seizing a competitive advantage ? Driving genuine brand equity

Is your brand performing at these high levels or is it a useless and dated piece of quasi art. Does it shoot with real bullets? Is it battle ready every day or hiding in a cubicle ready for the long-overdue pink slip? In other words, is it time to Fire Your Brand?

Let’s put this all-important branding issue in greater context: The time has come for branding to catch up with the 21st century cyber world that surrounds it. For generations, branding was an aesthetic exercise focused on logo designs and PMS colors. It worked fine for the likes of Coke, Ford, McDonald’s, Disney and thousands of local companies. All would design a pleasing look, back it with millions of dollars in advertising, command mind share and often build global enterprises in the process. What often passed as “ingenuous branding” was really just evidence of the power of colossal-budget advertising. Create a Marlboro man or a Microsoft Windows, paint it all over the media, bring it into millions of households nightly and whammo, the branding (or so it appeared) created an iconic presence and a geyser of black ink.

But that was before the world in which the brand performed its magic act underwent revolutionary change. Over the course of a few brief decades and in rapid succession, brands were bombarded by a tidal wave of sweeping changes: ?The rise of the Internet ? The emergence of e-commerce ? The tsunami of social media ? The speed, spontaneity, immediacy and unpredictability of communications ? The omnipresence of mobile platforms

Suddenly, the brand could no longer remain a static symbol, simply plastered onto print pages and TV screens. In the 21st century of Viral Fever, it would have to be: ? Flexible ? Elastic ? Malleable ? Agile ? Built For Multimedia ? Multigenerational *Increasingly bullet proof, protected from hackers, hostile critics with a secret agenda and competitors who would seek to manipulate, embarrass or destroy it.

Quietly but powerfully and inevitably, all of the practices that went into establishing pre-viral age brands had to change, creating in their place living, liquid and battle-tested icons for the businesses they represent. Today, the gloves are off. Companies of all sizes must adapt to the viral age, firing or radically changing and expanding what their brand signifies, how it communicates, the languages that it speaks and the firewalls designed to protect it. One thing is certain: the artist-driven legacy process of brand development and guardianship cannot survive in today’s 360-degree asymmetrical and highly viral marketplace.

Viral Branding requires that companies place their brands through a set of filters that serve as challenges to see how they perform not only when they can be tightly controlled (as in broadcast campaigns) but even more important, when they are subject to the vagaries of ever-changing formats, viral dissemination, social abuse and even sabotage by hostile bloggers and product/service rating sites. In the polite and respectable era where brand guardianship ruled the day, the marketers simply needed to be certain that the proscribed aesthetics of their brand guidelines were uniformly applied--as in the blue border surrounding IBM ads and the familiar blue box and white ribbon that is Tiffany’s imprimatur.

Today, guarding the brand is not nearly as important as infusing it with the brains, the electrodes, the wireless sensors to make certain that it can constantly read its environment and make continuous changes in the space of seconds. The fact is, everyone says they want their brands to go viral--until they get smacked in the face by Yelp. Then what? Welcome to the challenging, fascinating, high-speed world of Viral Branding, where science trumps art. Where red hot brands prevail, vanquishing the competition.

I ti s time fire artsy brands in favor of brands that can actually drive the growth of business.

To achieve this, key components must be wired into a brand’s structure:

1. Anticipate attacks from cranks, hackers and legitimately or serially unhappy customers and build a legion of loyalists, in advance, to fend off the assault. This can be accomplished by: ? Cultivating a core fan base that is kept close to your business through friends and family discounts, loyalty rewards and sneak previews.

2. Play war game scenarios anticipating all manner of viral threats that can materialize to jeopardize your brand. Not for the sake of gamesmanship, per se, but to uncover possibilities that would not otherwise come to light. And most important, develop plans to address each eventuality. In doing so, you are prepared to act ahead of the curve.

3. Bundle your marketing initiatives--such as PR, advertising, webinars—so that they reinforce one another and converge on key social media platforms.

4. Recognize that a winning viral strategy is based on a fusion of discipline and opportunism. This requires the establishment of a compelling umbrella theme --and the determination to keep all of the cyber content aligned with the theme -- instead of engaging in the slap-dash postings that are driven by daily events as opposed to the holistic brand vision. Be assured that if you and/or your team cannot define your viral strategy in a single sentence, your customer base will be equally flummoxed.

Is it time to fire your passive brand and go viral.