Make
Sure You're Still Building Your Brand
It's
possible to willfully destroy your good name, like a certain president just
did. But even if your brand is strong, you can't sit back and rely on it to
restore business in the post-pandemic world. Give your customers new reasons to
return.
As we celebrate the long overdue departure of
the Insurrectionist-in-Chief, we can also observe how quickly and
comprehensively a brand (and a family) can be blown up and destroyed. You
probably don't suffer from Trump's self-destructive narcissism, but it's still
important for every serious business to take the time and the necessary steps
to protect, care for and bolster their brands and the delicate connection to
their customers.
While absence and distance may theoretically
make the heart grow fonder, in today's world, as we slowly start to emerge from
the pandemic, there are simply no guarantees that things will ever return to
"business as usual." Or, even more importantly, that your customers
will be there, ready, willing, and waiting for your return and reopening,
unless you take action now to turn that fragile prospect into a solid promise.
Wishful thinking isn't a great strategy and counting on old habits simply isn't
smart. Old habits may die hard, but the web and the pandemic have opened up a
whole new world of choices for even the most diehard fan.
The primary idea to keep in mind is that a lot
of what we commonly view as customer loyalty may simply be customer inertia:
the product of frequent use, convenience, ease of access and the absence of a
better alternative. Thinking that your former and current customers are going
to be blinded by and locked into their habits is a bad bet that sells them
short and takes them for granted in a dramatically altered marketplace. As
customers emerge from a long dark year of denial with, of necessity, radically
changed purchasing and consumption behaviors, they'll be better equipped and
probably somewhat anxious and excited to seek out novel and different ways of
doing things. That risk of migration is somewhat mitigated by the sheer volume
of choices, which leads quickly to decision fatigue. Brands are a shortcut --
an easy way to avoid the hard work and the time it takes to evaluate and try
something new. But brand connections aren’t unbreakable.
In some cases, the emergence of new
technologies and low-cost, readily available tools may simply provide
customers, prospects and consumers with better value and stronger built-in
solutions. Take the American Automobile Association (AAA) for example. As
winter persists, I often think of why I have religiously renewed my AAA auto
club membership in a time where Google, Waze and other on-board navigation
systems have completely eliminated the need for Trip Tiks (remember those),
where I can now buy cheap and easy car insurance online by the mile,
and where manufacturer-provided, no cost, roadside
assistance comes with virtually every decent vehicle. Direct
startup competitors are also entering the market. Most AAA members don't even
realize that the primary remaining use and value for that colorful little AAA
card in your wallet is to surrender it to the nice policeman instead of your
driver's license the next time you're stopped for speeding on the way to the
airport so that you can still get through the TSA screening. I'm sure that AAA
isn't exactly standing still, but it's clear that they're going to need to
supercharge their offerings if they're planning to hang on to millions of
customers who also, by the way, will be driving far less.
The bottom line is that your brand is an
ongoing promise. Great brands are earned every day and become shorthand and
shortcuts for your business's identity. If you are no longer delivering on the
promises you've made or haven't kept your offerings at least comparable to
those of the competition, your customers have no reason to hang around. And in
tough times like these, "good enough" really isn't. Cookie cutters
are for baking, not for branding.
I wrote recently that every brand needs to be
bolstered post-pandemic with overt and over-the-top elements regarding safety, security and reliability/redundancy.
With the advent of aggressive social media conversations and evaluations, the
"crowd" is sometimes more in control of your brand than you are. It
only takes a few nasty notes about health or cleanliness concerns to create
real problems for you. Listen carefully to your customers and work hard to anticipate their needs and
expectations. You've got to up your game, differentiate your products and
services, and give your customers compelling reasons to stay.
But please don't try to compete on price. Once
you head down that slippery slope and diminish your brand equity, you can never
come back. As we start to see faint glimpses of some serious retail resurgence
by late in the summer or early fall, it's easy to convince yourself that heavy
discounting and sales are the way to quickly build traffic and revenue, but
it's a very bad bet.
Discounts train customers to buy on price, not
brand or quality. This may drive one-time trials, but in the absence of real
substance and value, you'll just churn through these folks as they return to
their old buying habits. Buying volume (just like tricking traffic through
click-baiting on the web) is a short-term fix that's not sustainable. If you
want to hold new customers, you need to focus on delivering value and super
service rather than simply the lowest price which -- due to the persistent
real-time competitive repricing on the web -- turns out to be impossible
anyway.
One more thing: be careful of the first
"customers" back through the door. There's a decent chance that
they're bottom feeders and bargain hunters and the very last people that you
want associated with your brand and your business. Not only are they unlikely
to buy, and highly likely to return worn materials in short order, but they'll
also scare off the real and serious buyers that you built your business on from
the beginning. Or they'll have loads of cash and no taste. These are other
aspects of brand fragility as well that you need to carefully manage.
You don't want to become or be seen as a "Groucho"
club. As the humorist and actor Groucho Marx famously said, "I don't want
to belong to any club that will accept me as a member." Or be a place
that's so overrun with lookie-loos, that you have the Yogi Berra restaurant
problem. As the great New York Yankees catcher and locker room philosopher once
observed: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."