When Rainbows and Unicorns Burst into Flames: Risk Awareness in Branding
Is there ever a cloudy day in the world of branding. Do things ever go wrong? Horribly wrong even? Yes, yes they do.
Seeing all that branding effort go down the drain is painful to watch, and something painful for the organization in question to experience. The mere mention of a champion brand name—Chanel, Hershey, Crate & Barrel—causes an immediate mental picture of a product, experience or desire. So how does it work in reverse? Well, what do you think of when you hear the name Enron? How about Halliburton or Monsanto? Maybe more locally, do you do your grocery shopping at Whole Paycheck, or are you more value minded and shop where you can pick up a couple bottles of Two Buck Chuck?
Branding is associative. The entire goal is to try to set the table for positive brand experiences to collect in the minds of your market and influence perception of value, initiate desire or to secure a long-term choice preference. It’s only logical that consistent messages contrary, incongruent or disruptive to these efforts create brand headwinds to struggle against.
Where do these contrary messages come from? There are a number of sources of brand risk that we’ve come up with that are worth considering.
Product Risk: Here, the product doesn’t live up to standards advertised—or assumed—though the product is under control of the brand. Over-promising and under-delivering is a sure-fire way to earn a check mark in the negative brand experience column. Here, things are completely identifiable and fixable. (Do we want to include examples of each type of risk? A good one for product risk is Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Then maybe we’d want to use that “burst into flames” title instead.)
Supplier Risk: A component of the product, or experience, fails and is beyond control of the brand. While you’re not your own worst enemy, you still dropped the ball and failed to keep your supplier in check. Problem is, the consumer doesn’t know who caused the screw up, they only associate the poor experience with your brand. (This happens a lot with food vendors that receive contaminated product—Subway, Jimmy Johns etc.)
Event Risk: A singular event that brings the brand into focus in a negative light. This negative information starts and spreads quickly, and while it’s uncontrollable it can be considered. At any given point, ask yourself “what could go wrong here and how strong is my link to the event?”
Executive Risk: This could be looked at as a single person being so associated with the company that their departure impacts the brand, or as an executive being caught in some act that contradicts the brand. There are numerous examples of CEOs getting out of line, but when their last name is the name of the company, or they are so publicly recognized that a tweet can send the value of their enterprise up or down… look out.
Employee Risk: Where an employee, or group of employees, act or speak in a manner contradictory to the brand. This where a bit of internal branding attention can pay off. No business owner wants their employees spreading word that the product sucks, that it’s overpriced and that they company pays little but demands a lot. The risk goes up even more when you have uniformed staff or a fleet of vehicles. Imagine a group of uniformed employees get sauced at the bar and then cause a multiple fatality wreck on the way home in their delivery trucks? The nightly news will not be kind.
Retail Risk: Where the overall brand experience is negatively impacted by the retail environment where the purchase is made. If a consumer purchases your product at a retail outlet—probably not under brand control, say a big-box retailer—that is disorderly, minimally stocked or otherwise unpleasant the experience of purchase is now tied to the product and difficult to shake. While the experience certainly impacts the store brand, it also rubs off on all products purchased there.
Association Risk: When a company sponsors / supports an event/group that is later seen as unsavory or questionable. This doesn’t necessarily need to be political in nature. Simply being strongly associated with something like a construction company that is found to cut corners, or cobranding your fertilizer with an herbicide that is soon proven to cause health problems with the local pet population means that the negatives rub off on you.
Sponsorship Risk: Securing naming rights to a building/event that lowers the stature of the building / event or creates resentment in the community. Granted, this one is really only a problem for large companies that have the money to procure such a sponsorship, but nonetheless, you probably don’t want to be the first company name to go up on the side of an historic building no matter how badly the building needs the money or how visible your logo will be to the entire city.
Competitive Sponsorship Risk: Being closely associated with poor performance via sponsorship of a bad team, or non-competitive athlete. No one likes a loser, especially a loser that gets beat badly week in and week out. Sponsoring that MMA fighter may be a deal, but when he gets his face pounded in and bleeds all over your logo which is prominently plastered on his trunks, you may question the wisdom of this deal. True story, by the way.
The idea here is not to paralyze your branding efforts, or even highlight a specific action to take immediately to lessen these risks. What this list is intended to do is to give a little more volume to the voice in the back of your head that asks “Should I be doing this? And if I do, what kind of potential downside is there?” when you’re considering things like sponsorships, employee events and promotions.
Branding should be thought of as a different animal than advertising. While a great number of ad impressions is what you’re looking for in advertising, the quality of the impression matters greatly when it comes to branding. Keeping a wary eye out for potential problems ahead is just as important as investing in building your brand. Call it brand stewardship, call it brand management, call it reputation management or even call it PR. Just don’t be blind to it.
Which leads us to the big, important questions:
Are there external considerations to building your brand? Are the discussions on this risk open and transparent? Has your competitive landscape changed enough to prompt a re-evaluation of your brand exposure? Where and when can you address these brand challenges? Flipping the discussion, have your competitors left themselves exposed for you to take advantage of the situation?