Hello there, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing. Today we’re
going to talk about brand protection. And what I mean by that is you’ve worked really
hard to build a brand that you want you need to work equally hard to protect it.
When you look at the top brands in the world, companies like Coca-Cola, Nike, Google the
reason they are the top brands they create trust, they create a sense of loyalty and
confidence by their users in their brand. Then what they do is they make sure they protect
the brand every way that they can. So they make sure in the minds of their customers
nothing is going on to diminish that confidence in the brand.
You as a brander, as you are developing your brand, you have to be the brand police. You
have to make sure you protect your brand as well.
Let’s take a look at the University of New Mexico’s Lobo football team where I don’t
think they did a very good job protecting brand over the last few years. Now the University
of New Mexico has a great basketball team, soccer team, baseball team, track team but
a few years ago they brought on a coach and that coach proceeded to lose. And the team
won one game one year, one game the next year, and one game the next year so over the series
of three seasons they lost more than 30 games.
And what happened during that time? Let’s talk about it. Ticket sales went down. Advertising
revenue went down. Television rights went down. Recruitment of new athletes went down.
And the fans became apathetic. So strategically what’s going on here? Well they did fire
that coach and brought on a new coach with experience coaching Notre Dame. But the question
now is how long is it going to take them to regain their brand stature that they had several
years before? That’s why it’s so important to always protect your brand.
Once you’ve got your brand dialed in, and your customers know what to expect from your
brand, then it’s your job to make sure you protect it however you can. And that might
be subtle things like you don’t play with your logo, you may now play with your tagline,
you may not play with your fonts and your colors. Those things are the extended identities.
You may make sure that customer service is great, that pricing is what they want and
so forth. But once you get that brand where you want you protect it.
It may take time sometime, real time, to bounce back from serious issues like the Lobos. I
don’t know how long it’s going to take. But you want to make sure that you never get
into that situation. When you see things going wrong with your brand you get everybody on
board and you work hard to stabilize the brand and continue to enhance it the best of your
abilities.
Be sure to join us tomorrow for Strategic Tuesday. If you need branding support, please
contact me to discuss an online or face to face service engagement. That information
can be found at the end of this video. I am Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a
Day Marketing and we will see you next time.
