My two favorite quotes about paranoia are “Only the paranoid survive,” from Harold Geneen, once head of the once mighty ITT, and “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” which I first heard from Dr. Charles Jarvis.
It’s no fun walking around worried and paranoid, seeing evildoers lurking in the bushes everywhere you turn. We all prefer comfortable complacency. Most do not prepare for the walk across the shopping center parking lot having their Mace® or other weapon at the ready, taking care to walk closer to the middle than the rows of parked cars to avoid being easily yanked between autos by a waiting attacker. Most do not have a fire extinguisher on every floor of their homes, smoke detectors and heat detectors, preplanned escape routes. A small percentage of homes have “safe rooms.” Most do not ask for hotel rooms on lower floors. Now, the younger people who’ve grown up living their lives online have little concern over privacy and think nothing of publicly displaying their lives, their children, their homes in social media and storing all their financial and personal information in some distant “cloud,” despite hackers’ theft of data being in the news on a near-daily basis.
A friend once told me, “You never really learn to always pull into your garage and wait until the door closes behind you before getting out of your locked car until you find yourself standing there facing three thugs who were waiting in the bushes, have a bag put over your head and your hands tied behind your back, and are shoved into your house to lie on the floor while they rob the place, rape your wife, and threaten your children.”
A famous sales video in the fire alarm business was titled “Another Man’s Family” because everybody thinks of things like fires and home invasion robberies and tall trees toppling over on them and teenage sons peddling drugs, etc., as happening only to other people’s families.
The same embrace of comfortable complacency occurs in business, especially with companies with famous and powerful brands. All sorts of dangerous emotional states occur, from the boardroom in the office tower penthouse down to the store manager and secretary: the sense of inevitability. A sense of entitlement. Disdain for upstart competitors and odd, new ideas. Taking customers and customers’ loyalty for granted. Resenting the need to work or sell or innovate.
Most people who think of Facebook as a permanent part of our lives have little or no memory of MySpace. Most people who think of Walmart in the same way have no memory of Woolworth’s. Diners Club and Carte Blanche were once elite and successful credit card brands. I still have a Diners Club card, but it is really just a Mastercard. Carte Blanche, gone. Everybody knows McDonald’s but Bob’s Big Boy is a fading memory. Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson’s once dominated the freeway-exit motel industry. It was briefly believed that People’s Express was the airline destined to take over the industry. Kinney Shoes. Montgomery Wards. The graveyard of dead national brands and the once giant, even dominant companies they fronted is unimaginably large. There are more dead than alive in just about every category of commerce and industry.
Brand is absolutely no assurance of success or longevity, nor insurance against sloth or stupidity. Brand as protective armor for the business battlefield is illusion. Legacy brands certainly exist and some thrive. Dating way back but still alive and valuable today, in my field, Dale Carnegie comes to mind. In the very busy diet industry where fads come and go and few survive as brands, Weight Watchers, once a client of mine, comes to mind. Tupperware. Disney, discussed in Chapter 17. The Rolling Stones are still on tour. But these are more notable exceptions than rule. If you create or come into possession of a valuable brand, you must then sleep with one eye open forevermore. A growing number of barbarians gather at your gates, surround your fortress walls. Barbarians because they lack respect for their elders, they are rude and brash and coarse and bold, they do not fear, and they will kill you and eat you and leave only bones behind without a twinge of remorse. Most brand owners who are destroyed first sow the seeds of their own destruction and create their own vulnerability. In many cases, they deserve to die.
Brands lose their luster and power many different ways.
• Poor, worsening product quality and/or customer service and often a level of “don’t bother me” arrogance about it does in a lot of big brands. I would hang that on Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson’s. It’s what opened the door for the Japanese invasion of the auto industry in America. If you are under age 50, it’s probably hard to imagine that people hated, reviled, and shunned the person in their neighborhood who dared to buy a Japanese car. These cars got keyed and vandalized in parking lots. And Japanese cars were widely viewed as pure crap. Now it seems no company can make cars. Rarely does a week go by without some company—from Ford to Hyundai—announcing a recall of 50,000 to 500,000 of their cars suffering some sort of defect. I owned one Ford Explorer that had four different recalls over five years. Cadillac and Lincoln once owned the aspirational buyer. They were the symbols of upward mobility and success in America. Producing defective and dysfunctional products, delivering poor service, serving up gruel and telling customers to eat it and like it creates great vulnerability. And no brand can long protect itself from such bad behavior.
• Failure to be interesting puts brands at risk. Way back in the 1950s, the folks running Proctor & Gamble realized that no matter how perfectly their flagship laundry detergent, Tide, performed, housewives simply got bored with it and bought other brands. Some returned periodically to Tide. Some were lost forever. They created a strategy, still used today, of making some minor “new and improved” tweak to Tide every 60 to 120 days—adding a scent, taking out all scent, adding fabric softener, changing the bottle, changing the cap, and so on. Some of the innovations have come, gone, returned, gone, and returned again many times. They have also created a number of different versions of Tide, so a consumer can move about within the brand’s product line. They also created Tide in different bottles with different names to compete with themselves and still get the bored and wayward consumer’s money. Surf, as example. An unimaginative substitute name for Tide, but one that sold well nonetheless. The fast-food chains each have their basic, fundamental menus, but just about all of them have borrowed Disney’s strategy of limited release, then back in the vault, and periodically re-release a food item for a brief time then take it away—McDonalds’ McRib Sandwich is a good example. Taco Bell has had a huge hit co-branding with Doritos, producing taco shells made from Doritos chips, and featuring them for a limited time.
RESOURCE
* There are two other equally important questions: What’s next?—which has to do with either sequential progression or ascension. And, my copyrighted, proprietary Unique Selling Proposition question: Why should I choose to do business with you versus any and every other option available to me? If you would like a Free Special Report on “Ten Smart Marketing Questions to Discuss with Yourself,” visit www.NoBSBooks.com and search for the resources tied to this book.
One of the three most important marketing questions in business* is: What’s new? There is damn little curiosity about what’s the same as the last time the consumer visited, heard about, or read about a business. Un-curious, bored customers cannot long be held by a leash braided from brand.
A brand business can do a lot to keep itself interesting without real, groundbreaking innovation. Innovation carries risk, because it can take you away from what customers like best or trust most, but even with those risks, it’s hard to avoid it entirely over a long term and still thrive. A lack of legitimate innovation leaves the best of brands vulnerable. All the pizza brands left themselves vulnerable to upstart Dominos because none of the established companies bothered with any solutions to the slow and unreliable delivery of cold pizza. Kodak, one of the most iconic of American brands, became virtually worthless by ignoring the digital revolution in photography. I am personally not much of an innovation guy, and I’m definitely, determinedly not a technology guy, but I have made a point of surrounding myself with, partnering with, and utilizing people and companies that are. One of the three chief motivators in play when I sold the publishing and information marketing business I’d built to Bill Glazer was the recognition that a great many things related to online media for marketing and product deliverables were fast becoming essential, and I wasn’t willing to do them or helm them. This allowed me to continue focusing on—and even innovating in—aspects of this business I enjoy and that utilize my highest and best skills, but prevented the business as a whole from becoming stodgy and stale.
A brand can even become too well known. To a degree, Weight Watchers has long suffered from this. People widely credit it as the only diet program that actually works, but they also feel they know what it is about, how it works, and, unfortunately, that it is difficult. I’ve twice rescued a client from this fate in a niche market. Each time he had achieved for himself and his company what many would envy: four out of five in his market of some 90,000 people, if asked, would say only complimentary things, but could then list the five things he taught and was all about. So, no mystery, no curiosity, no interest. All kinds of credibility, but more a burden than a benefit. For this reason, twice, with my assistance, he has had to totally reinvent himself and his message, yet hold onto the credible and influential status of his well-built brand. He has had to become the extremely experienced, most trustworthy elder authority who has found and brought forward a legitimate, new, radical breakthrough in the field. It isn’t an easy trick, marrying such a brand to new mystique. But it can be done.
My friend and colleague Sally Hogshead, wise in brand-making, but also smart about direct response, is the “guru” of fascination. In fact, she’s the first and only person to develop research-based science for making yourself, your company, and your brand fascinating. I recommend her first book: Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. There is also a Fascinating Marketing System with modules she and I collaborated on, which you can get information about at: www.HowToFascinate.com.
Many people erroneously think of brand-building as a journey or sprint to a finish line of brand-achievement. The very idea that arrival counts for little and they must still and forever get out of bed every morning paranoid and hard at work at newly fascinating those now familiar with them seems obscenely unjust. As unhappy as these people are when they confront this nasty reality, they are even more unhappy when all they believe they’ve built so solidly dissolves like a sand castle at the first high tide. Fascination is not an accomplishment; it’s a mandate.
Most big, famous, credible, popular brands do not die overnight, from a sudden burst of gunfire or bomb blast or single, epic error. In fact, good brands can have surprising resiliency. When a Carnival Cruise Lines ship in Italy crashed, tipped over, and ultimately sank, endangering and stranding passengers, I raced to buy some stock in the company. Despite a subsequent, even more news media spotlit disaster at sea, with an entire ship of passengers stranded for days on a powerless boat, with depleting food supplies, nonworking bathrooms, and uninhabitable conditions, that stock I bought has gone up in value and the company remains well afloat. Tylenol survived a poisoned product disaster. Taco Bell survived a toxic beef and beef-that-isn’t-beef problem.
It’s rarely one big thing that does in the big brand—or even the small business.
It’s more death by a thousand tiny cuts, a bleeding in droplets, not gushing flow.
In my book, No B.S. Guide to Ruthless Management of People and Profits, I lay out many of these cuts, most self-inflicted wounds, that slowly bleed a business of its reputation and influence, its strength and resilience, and its economic power. In it I refer to a terrific book, Broken Windows, Broken Business by Michael Levine, based on the Guiliani turnaround of New York City from crime-riddled garbage dump to newly hospitable city and restored mecca for tourists. If you want to support and safeguard a good brand and the profitable business attached to it, both these books are must-reading. And they are not to be confused with the entire genre of quality and excellence books. Most of those are lofty and inspirational, but mostly theoretical and impractical. I won’t name names, but you’ve probably read a few. The most famous elder of that breed embarrassngly features quite a few brand companies crowned by its author as excellent that are now extinct. The newer, popular entries in this field are loaded with happy talk, mission statements, and team-building psycho-babble. If you want quotes for wall posters, they’re dandy. But the protection of a brand from 1,000 cuts is hard-nosed, tough-minded business. My book and Levine’s are hard-nosed and tough-minded.
Forgetting What “Brung” You to the Party
There is a line in the song “Luck Be A Lady,” popularly sung by Sinatra: “. . . a lady doesn’t wander all over the place, blowin’ on some other guy’s dice.” But the world is full of ladies who aren’t and gentlemen who aren’t and foolish entrepreneurs who do just that. They are invited and brought to the party or game by one escort, but leave him or her standing alone in the corner holding two martinis when their eye is attracted by a sleeker, shinier, sexier siren strolling by.
That graveyard I mentioned, the one over-full with once mighty brands, has a big section of the dead who are there because they forgot or turned their backs on what made them mighty in the first place: direct-response marketing.
A friend of mine once wrote all the copy for a series of full-page and two-page newspaper and magazine ads for an upstart weight-loss product company. The ads rapidly raised the company from obscurity to, at first, profit via direct to consumer selling, but soon also having its key products sold in the biggest chain of health-food stores, discount stores, drugstores, and countless catalogs. Sales soared through millions to tens of millions of dollars, with hundreds of millions in sight. The Wall Street crowd of go-public promoters, investment bankers, and private equity fund vultures began circling. Madison Avenue ad agency rainmakers came calling. The owners were wined and dined, and ever so gently but firmly shamed for their tabloid-style, sensationalist, P.T. Barnumesque direct -response advertising. Soon, they called my friend the direct-response copywriting wizard to a meeting of the minds at the mansion in the Hamptons, organized something like an intervention for a drug addict. He was surrounded and told that the time had come in the company’s maturation to tone down its flashy dress and unrefined used-car sales-like patter and become just a bit more image-conscious and professional in its advertising, in order to safeguard the now prominent brand. He was asked to make only a few changes—like giving up a huge amount of space in the ads to the logo and slogan; replacing the benefit headlines with the company name; dialing back the aggressiveness of the copy; replacing the soap opera celebrity with a white-coated doctor; and replacing the dramatic before and after photos with new “lifestyle photos.” Oh, and removing the butt ugly coupon at bottom right. It would be ever so nice, though, if he could sustain the financial performance of the ads. He said only two words, one of which shouldn’t be repeated in polite company. And walked away from about $50,000.00 a month in royalties.
The company then moved from one fancy-pants ad agency to the next, each doing more damage than their predecessor. Soon the company was sold, then sold again, for less each time. Its products disappeared from shelves. It no longer exists. A big brand in the making, briefly one of the best known, most popular brands in diet products, soared too close to the image sensitivity sun and then crashed to earth, dust back to dust, and is no more. If I named it you wouldn’t even know it.
I have seen this disaster film replayed hundreds of times, by small and large companies in many fields, and I’ve had my own experiences much like those of my copywriter friend with a number of clients in the big, dumb company category. There is a very famous domain name registry and services company that built its brand with the jet fuel of super-sexy, scandalous Super Bowl commercials that is in the throes of this crash to earth by plucking its own feathers as we speak. I saw its founder interviewed on a financial news network, bravely defending the new guardians of his brand to whom he’d sold the majority of the company and their decision to scale back on the scantily clad babes and sexual innuendo in favor of a more professional approach befitting a company to be taken seriously. I could see his heart wasn’t in it. I hope he got paid in cash, not stock. The end is predictable, and it won’t be pretty.
It’s important to remember that the further away from the building of businesses you get, the higher up the floor numbers you get in the Wall Street towers, the more names there are on the ad agencies’ doors, and the more peer awards there are on their walls, the less anybody knows about direct response. They all have opinions—but they rarely have facts. When ad man David Ogilvy said that only those direct-response people really know what they’re doing, he wasn’t kidding.
As your business grows and your brand shines brighter, you, too, will find yourself surrounded and romanced by the sleeker, shinier, sexier sirens, the seemingly smarter and more sophisticated professionals. Don’t forget who brung you to the dance.