Brands are like dinosaurs. They either evolve into birds and fly, or they stay on the ground and die.
For the last generation, marketing has been focused on helping businesses build brands by customer loyalty: focus on your core client group in any exercise of growth and sustainability.
And it worked. Very well. That marketing advice gave rise to some of the biggest brands in history: Ford, IBM, Xerox, Nortel, Coke. All of them built brands by making sure they understood their target, immediate demographics. And all these brands are in trouble.
These brands are collapsing. Many might not even be here a decade from now. Heck, some of them are already the walking dead.
And like the extinction of the dinosaurs, they never saw it coming.
If you’ve run a successful company for the last decade or so, don’t rest on your laurels. Your brand might be next.
Success in brand development for these companies came at a price: lack of investment in brand outgrowth. By focusing on their immediate client base, and current demographics, these brands failed to invest in the future. As a result, new brands captured the interest of new buyers, and many old brands are dying a slow –and inevitable death.
Just look at the car industry.
Lost in the arguments of fuel efficiency, union labour costs, and foreign competition was the stark reality that American auto companies and brand legends Ford, GM, and Chrysler failed to notice the ground shifting beneath their tires. While they were developing and maintaining brand protocols for their current demographic base (guys like our fathers), the failed to notice that a new generation (younger, savvier, and even FEMALE) was looking at cars in a different way. They were discovering brands in a different way. They were seeing products in a different way.
And this is happening everywhere: telecom, manufacturing, computers, food, drinks, toys, tools, pet supplies, cosmetics, electronics, television, and even politics. Everything is undergoing a seismic shift in brand awareness. Just like that asteroid that hit the dinosaurs.
Today, the very path that lead to great success for many companies –perhaps even your own company- might lead to certain future failure at a frighteningly fast pace. Companies need to enact new brand legislation, and new brand initiatives to connect with future brand champions and buyers.
Every single purchaser out there, from the CFO of a Fortune 500 company to the parent buying baby food for her new born, is going to be completely different in terms of brand awareness, brand evaluation methodology, and brand discovery processes than they were 5 years ago. Failing to recognize this can mean that very successful companies and brands today might be featured in the “Where Are They Now?” section of marketing textbooks in just 5 years.
It’s time to evolve.
Get your company exposed to the next generation of buyers BEFORE they become buyers. Let them become aware of your brand, so that when they are the ones making the decisions to purchase you have ALREADY won the brand war.
Ask yourself TODAY:
1) Are you positioning your brand for growth with future decision makers or just your current client base?
2) Do you know what demands are going to be made of your brand and your product or service line up in the next 5 years? The next 10?
3) What steps have you taken to grow your brand awareness to those under the age of 30?
4) Do you have a brand succession plan in place?
Brand extinction is real. It’s happening today. It ‘s happening to big companies and it’s happening to small ones.
Like the dinosaurs it is either adapt and fly, or die and go in a museum.
Yusuf Gad
President, a5MEDIA inc
http://www.a5media.ca
