Are you guilty of making assumptions about your brand? Or not really looking at the long term picture? Here’s our thoughts - and how our Brand programme can help.
Although he’s set to walk away with $100m worth of earnings after his four year tenure as CEO of Nike, there seems to be little sympathy for John Donahoe, whose less than successful stewardship of this iconic brand resulted in a succession of shock revenue downgrades this year- culminating in stock market reaction which led to a 20% drop in share value. As a consequence, the Nike balance sheet was £21 billion poorer. Yes, that’s 21 with 9 zeros after it.
Such a dramatic downfall has, inevitably, put both the brand and Donahoe’s strategy under close scrutiny, but the painful lessons learnt from the last 4 painful years at Nike, can also be applied to companies and brands operating on a much smaller scale..
In a nutshell, Nike’s errors were based around making assumptions about the product and customer, relying too heavily on a digital direct-to-customer approach, and seeing the online sales bubble caused by Covid as heralding the start of a new digital eldorado. It was anything but.
Brand - how we help challenge your brand assumptions
Critical to the success of any brand is to know exactly what it stands for, and exactly who your customers are. And the flip side of this, is to know the opposites - what your brand isn’t, and who you’re not interested in targeting. The sharper the focus, the stronger the clarity of the message.
As with all brands, it’s very easy to become complacent about the integrity of your products and services (and their consumer appeal), and your position within your marketplace. But it’s at these potentially lazy points in a company’s marketing life cycle where the chink in your otherwise resilient armour allows the disrupters and new kids on the block to gain a foothold - and start chipping away at your market share.
Our Brand programme sits with 4 areas of expertise that we offer to our clients, and arguably the one that provides us with all the insights we need to fully understand your brand.
It’s through these facilitated sessions (either your place or ours) where we interrogate all the assumptions you may have about your brand; where we understand the motives and drivers that inspire the products and services that you offer; and where we explore how you see yourself forging a path past your competition.
For instance, we look at:
What makes your business tick - the real reasons.
What values does your brand live and die by.
What are people really buying from you.
How to give yourselves a voice and figure out how that might sound
How to make your employees your brand’s biggest fans.
One of Nike’s recent errors was to pull back on innovation and the creation of “stand out” products that got it noticed in the first place. It also homogenised much of its product offering, so that many of its distinctive products aimed at specialist segments of the sport market were dissolved. As a consequence, the customer became confused too.
From being an industry disrupter with a strident approach to innovation, Nike slipped into the over-crowded middle ground - offering something for everyone. And nothing exciting for the people who once championed it.
Brand - a facilitated process of provocation and discovery
Through our Brand process, we aim to sense check every assumption and value you attribute to your brand. Everyone who takes part in the process may not agree with each other (to begin with) but through facilitated provocation we can arrive at a mutual consensus of the truth hiding within.
A great example of this is how we worked with Pearce Signs, the oldest signmaker in the UK and now a global business entrusted with many of the world’s most respected brands. When they approached us to reposition them as a worldwide brand implementation business, we took them through our Brand programme.
And despite their inherent brand literacy (working with names as familiar as McDonalds, UPS, BT, Tesco, Barclays) they also knew they needed an external organisation to question every part of their assumed thinking. The usual adage - never do your own dentistry.
Working closely with them we were able to find the right equilibrium between a company with enormous heritage, and a wealth of innovation, with one that is now leading the way on issues such as sustainability. You can read Pearce’s own take on how we repositioned their brand in their own case study on the project.
Avoid short term tactics - take a longer view
Although Nike wasn’t helped by the unprecedented arrival of a global pandemic, there’s also the viewpoint that Nike wasn’t alone. Millions of brands faced the same enormous challenges, and many survived.
But the pandemic aside, Nike didn’t look at the bigger picture. Ironically, it actually ramped up its ad expenditure but this was primarily focused on digital campaigns at existing customers, with a price point message aimed at creating a spike in demand - rather than a consistent upward trajectory.
The big billboard campaigns aimed at a wider audience with emotive brand engagement messages fell by the wayside, and so did all the excitement. As a consequence, their customer sales fell off a cliff too.
£21 billion is a massive figure. But even on a much, much smaller scale, the impacts of complacency, assumptive behaviour and short-termism can, very quickly, lead to negative impacts which, incrementally, build up to have significant consequences.
It does all sound very dramatic. And on the scale of Nike, it clearly is. But it’s a timely reminder, even for our own business, that we must always stay alert to where we want to go, rather focus on where we’ve been.
To talk about our Brand programme, or how we can help your business to achieve its true potential using our marketing strategies do get in touch and start a conversation.
