Here’s why building a strong brand is a journey, not a destination

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There is an aspect of brand building that makes it simple but equally complex: knowing that it is a journey and not a destination. Brand building is a journey. There are no doubts about it. If you believe you have reached your destination, your brand stagnates or starts becoming irrelevant. Even worse is when your competitors beat you fair and square because of their agility, nimbleness, and desire to keep moving.

Kodak believed it had reached its destination; we all know what happened to it. Blackberry decided to rest on its laurels a bit. Nokia believed that its first-mover advantage would last over its lifetime. (I am personally very happy that they have announced their re-entry into the smartphones business and this time without any first-mover advantage; they will be starting at the back of the grid of a race that runs faster than Formula One.)

Strategies over tactics

In a seminal article published in the July to August 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review, professors Leonard Lodish and Carl Mela argued the case for investing in building a brand’s long-term equity rather than focusing on promotions and discounts to drive sales. The article highlights the turnaround of Clorox as a brand in one of the more product-driven categories (bleach) through investments in advertising and brand building activities.

In short, there is a need to rescue brand building from the quicksand of short-term thinking. There is a huge dichotomy about how organizations address shareholders, institutional investors, and industry bodies on corporate and business strategy vs. how brand strategy is formulated and implemented. Actually, the word “strategy” is not even applicable for month-on-month marketing and sales initiatives that are implemented. These are simply “tactics.”

There are some common fallback options used by marketers to rationalize the overuse of tactics in their brand building plans: growth and profitability targets, shareholder pressure, senior management pressure, notoriously difficult to find growth opportunities, activism, civic society, stagnant markets, and depressed consumer confidence.

All of the above factors, in the first instance, may sound like plausible factors for short-term tactical thinking. In reality, all of them actually require medium and long-term thinking for effective resolution. Consequently, marketers’ short-term actions to eat the low hanging fruit of sales jumps invariably leads to a brand’s equity dilution, loss of distinctiveness, commoditization, and, last but not the least, perception as a cheap alternative.

In a 2009 article in Advertising Age, Al Ries discusses the impact of short-term marketing fixes on long-term brand equity, using Cadillac as an example.

Also, in 2016, The Motley Fool published a detailed analysis of General Motors’ plan to revive the Cadillac brand. While reading through the article, it becomes evident that their revival strategy hinges on the success of long-term projects and not short-term ones.

Building a strong brand

Let’s talk about the motivations behind building a strong brand (or in the truer sense of the word, giving justice to brand building). I am not an advertising man by profession, but I do give attention to David Ogilvy’s thinking behind brand building. One of his famous quotes on building brands that stand out in their respective categories goes:

There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines […] The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.

Building a strong brand requires building a strong personality to support it. If I were to take a human equivalent, building a strong personality requires the inculcation of strong positive habits. It’s also about delaying instant gratification; it’s about not succumbing to impulses and behaving in a knee-jerk fashion. It’s about creating and leaving a legacy that survives for generations to come. For a committed marketer, brand building never stops. It requires continuous value creation, strengthening of customers’ reasons to believe, and keeping the brand relevant in an age characterized by rapidly shifting consumer preferences.

If we were to create a hypothetical case study to illustrate some of the characteristics of a strong brand building mentality, it can take an interesting form and shape.

Conclusion