Is your brand dying?

Branding companies.

There are common denominators in every brand casualty. What they are missing, rather than what they do: Purpose, direction, value, energy, humility, liquid cash, discipline, structure, imagination, innovation, differentiation . . .

You are failing, declining and dying when:

1. Your new product or service just crashed and burned. If that’s a recent pattern and not just a one-off, then you lack relevance to your audience. You’ve failed to hold their interest or been superseded.

2. Customers are voting with their feet. You haven’t noticed, or you don’t care.

3. Branding companies. You’re getting more and more questions about your value.

4. You’re being asked to shave off, do a deal, promote or discount just about every business deal. You accept you have no choice, but you smile sweetly.

5. You don’t have an engaging, differentiating or compelling story.

6. You keep knee-jerk diversifying. Changing, morphing hoping attract more business, but all you’re really doing is piling on more cost and diluting your proposition.

7. You keep convincing yourself that you have an awesome story, but it keeps morphing to fit your latest campaign.

8. You can’t or won’t diversify. You stand for one thing at one price point. Or maybe you did diversify, but you haven’t done anything with the diversification that’s at all meaningful.

9. Your product is comparatively weak; delusion prevails; everyone is convinced at your place the customers who don’t appreciate or “get it”.

10. You keep investing expanding your resources, your expectation simply that sales have to catch up at some point with your capacity. But it hasn’t happened.

11. You’ve backed the wrong product (obsolete) – falling sales and increased marketing spend remind depressingly every quarter.

12. Brand Value Perception. You’ve been overtaken. Left in a cloud of you competitors dust, by someone else’s better technology, service, proposition.

13. You don’t have a growth plan. You just have an existence fight for survival plan. (Perhaps you don’t even have that.)

14. External costs are crucifying you. You can’t live with them, and you can’t survive without them. So you just merrily carry on.

15. You have a growth plan, but you don’t have a robust or relevant business model (or at least one that people are prepared to see through).

16. You’re way too slow (don’t apply the hare and the tortoise analogy).

17. You act without thinking. You think without acting.

18. You’re steadily losing momentum and velocity. You’ve run out of energy.

19. Everyone feels too tired or too unmotivated to fight.

20. You nonchalantly dismiss every new development as a “trend” that “won’t catch on”.

21. You’re too in love with saviour trends – you’re always looking for the next ‘hip’ wave to latch on to for a faux progressive impression. You look like a ‘me too’.

22. There’s an increasing disconnect between what you actually communicate, your direction of travel and what your research shows your customers actually want.

23. Brand Value Perception. Your brand architecture has become a confusing maze of cleverness, conflicting names, logos, taglines, sub-brands, etc.

24. Your business ethics deeply concern people; it’s all they talk about.

25. You cut plenty of corners. Health and safety, on marketing, on supply chain, wherever you think you can get away with it and where you think, no one is looking or will notice.

26. You behave badly. You fail to absorb blame. You write a positive ‘smoothing over’ press release.

27. You ignore negative feedback or comments on Social Media.

28. You don’t think social media is important in the slightest as a way of reinforcing and creating engagement with your brand.

29. You’re missing budget all the time, but no-one’s alarmed because your strategy is focussing on the bigger picture and building “long term potential”.

30. You are still blaming the recession.

31. Everyone’s focused on hitting budget. It’s the only thing people care about.

32. Brand Value Perception. There’s no reason to prefer you. Nothing that you have secures you an unfair competitive advantage.

33. You’re much less connected with your customers than you used to be. You competitors are gleefully engaging in your gaps.

34. Your distributors increasingly hold the relationships; the tables are uncomfortably turning. They’re treating you inversely like the supplier rather than the other way around. They introducing house brands that undermine your margins.

35. Branding companies. Brand Value Perception. You’re past your hay day. There’s a lot of talk about history and the “glory days” of the business and/or the sector. Of course, your website has a large history of the company section, stuffed with faded nostalgia.

36. Branding companies. You’re paying way too much attention to the wrong data and metrics.

37. You don’t know as much about your buyers as you need to. Who are these people? What do they want?

38. Your customer base is stagnating. So is your market share. Everyone’s comfortable, there is no desire or pressure to change.

39. You marketing spend has gone up and you are just standing still, or still going backwards.

40. You’ve lost the spark, flair and drive that’s got you this far. You’ve run out of good ideas.

41. You’re riding a big confident wave (but that’s all you’re riding). It’s about the hit the rocks.

42. Brand Value Perception. Your sales team complain of having to discount, price match drop or be a cheap alternative.

43. You’re fading like and old photograph. Your competitors are less intimidated by you (and less respectful of you) than they used to be.

44. You’re being successfully cloned, copied and bettered by those you would once have regarded an inferior challengers.

45. You respond to customers on your terms, not theirs.

46. You price-gouge your current IP rather than innovating. But patent advantage is drawing to a close.

47. You copy the market leader and bank on undercutting them to win customers.

48. Your product or a core component of your product/profitability, is one short regulatory step away from being outlawed or substantially restricted. That of reckoning is coming. Everyone knows it. You don’t have a backup plan. You’re depending on lobbying to stave off the inevitable.

49. Your reputation is now dominated by what you can’t do, haven’t done, won’t do or did badly.

50. You’re lying to try and win business. Everyone knows.

51. You have meaningless mission statements.

52. You have no focus. You’re easily distracted into side projects that detract from your brand.

53. There’s no consistency in your customer experiences nor your brand’s touchpoints across media or cultural borders.

54. Your brand strategy is a revolving door. It changes as new staff come and go.

55. You’re giving away IP or leaving money on the table because you haven’t licensed your brand for maximum effect.

56. You messaging is stuffed full of deluded superlatives like “market leading” or “Number on in . . .”, “committed to excellence”. Yawn.

57. Brand Value Perception. You’ve lost touch with what makes you special. You have 100 ideas looking for a home, which are not going anywhere fast.

58. You’re boring. You’d rather stick with the tried and familiar than reinvent.

59. You squabble internally or with your competitors or investors and those wars consume more and more of your time and energy.

60. You lack zeitgeist. You can’t stay relevant – or at least you can’t stay as relevant as others seem to be.

61. You’re tied to a partner who is dragging you down, and you can’t/won’t separate from them.

62. Branding companies. You keep confusing your current customers and yourselves with new strategies.

63. You’re caught in an identity crisis loop. You can’t decide who you want as customers. You keep holding onto the market you know, but that market has moved on, and you’re reluctant to look for the new customers.

64. Your CEO or MD cannot convince articulate what your brand stands for and is not capable of being the ultimate brand champion.

65. Brand Value Perception. The media have lost interest in your brand; press releases rarely get published.

66. You’re inconsistent or unreliable. No-one knows where they are with you.

     

Branding companies. Here’s the good news. brand value perception. you can run this list up against many of the brand fades in recent years and find perfect matches on one or several points. it takes and ambition from the top, open and decisive minds to take back control, act to turn things around and shift consumers perceptions of you. it’s all there for you to take if you want it.

Mayflex case study

The slow killer business stranglers

The rise of the terrible brand clones

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