10 WAYS TO REALLY DESTROY YOUR BRAND: (FROM PERSONAL OBSERVATION OVER TWENTY YEARS!)

By Helen McIntee, director, IMM Graduate School of Marketing

• Keep changing your positioning
  As marketers, we know that a brand's positioning is “the place the brand occupies in the mind of the customer, relative to the competition”. Therefore in order to use this rule effectively you will need to continually change the dominant attributes of your brand. In marketing a bank, for example I suggest that your initial positioning should be on ‘convenience of transacting', then rapidly change it to become a ‘full service' financial institution, follow that quickly by becoming an ‘online, high tech bank of the future' (don't laugh it has happened!). This will confuse the customer enough for them to start looking for a bank that is more consistent in their delivery.
• Implement a 'non-integrated' marketing communications programme
  This is a favourite – if you want to really mess up your brand's intrinsic qualities then have all the messages from your advertising, sales promotions, publicity campaigns, brochures etc. say different things to different people. In one of my early marketing jobs we had a washing powder brand which simultaneously used an above-the-line advertising campaign featuring a well-known afrikaans ‘huisvrou', a sales promotion for distribution outlets involving a ‘collect a card' game of popular black soccer stars and an customer in-store competition in which the customer could win a trip to the Bazaruto Islands (very rustic with no electricity and sleeping in a reed hut). Need I say more?
• Ignore customer service Many companies are intent on destroying their brands through poor customer service. If you want to lose customers by the truckload, develop an in-house strategy that says ‘customers are a nuisance, please let them go away and let me get my job done'. Tactics to follow to ensure the success of this strategy are:
• make sure your customer queues are a long as possible
• do not respond quickly to customers
• be rude and inaccessible
• at all times assume the customer is stupid
• Pay no attention to the competition
• We all know that competitive brands are not as good as ours, so in stands to reason that should we should just ignore them. To this end, develop an organisational mindset of arrogance and refuse to believe that competitors have anything different to offer. Of course, customers will not try a competitive brand even if it does perform the job better, is better value, is more fashionable etc. I mean how could customers want a re-sealable container or a substitute for sugar or a disposable razor?
• Adopt the "customer is always wrong approach"
  This is key to any unsuccessful brand's service recovery strategy. Having accepted that sometimes things can go wrong it is imperative that you never accept the blame for the problem. We know it cannot possibly have been an error on behalf of the organisation (as we said before the customer is stupid). Your organisation has spent huge amounts of money on training and up-skilling its employees, it is unfathomable that they could have made an error but in the unlikelihood that something went wrong it must have been because the customer is too demanding.
• Don't be available when the customer needs you
  A few years ago I needed new windscreen wipers for my car as I was going out of town in the rainy season. As I work during the week I had to shop on a Saturday morning. Being a brand loyal person (not wanting pirate parts) I went to the spares centre of my local dealership. Well, I could have bought a new car but on a Saturday I could not purchase windscreen wipers. So if you want your customers to go off your brand rapidly, don't be available when they need you! It would also be useful to be out of stock in the stores when they are open, especially at month end.
• Keep lowering your prices
  This is something I have seen often. When your brand is not selling fast enough, just take it for granted that it will sell loads more if it is cheaper. The customer does not equate quality with price and they will therefore assume that the product is high quality at a cheap price (‘mythical positioning'). Whilst you may sell more initially but if you keep squeezing your margins you will succeed in not making profits and also position your brand as a cheapie!
• Sponsor a disastrously performing team or sport
Ensure that your brand is visibly linked to a sport or team that is surrounded by controversy or embarrassingly underperforming. If you are lucky the consumer will associate your brand with all the negative perceptions and press coverage and therefore your brand will be dragged through the mud too. This is always a good option to go for if you have a limited advertising budget.
• Do not perform any market research whatsoever
  Knowledge about your customers, marketing environment, competitors and so on is really just a waste of important financial resources that you could be spending elsewhere (like sponsoring that controversial team). If your brand is well known then you obviously ‘got it right' at the launch phase, it is then absurd to think that customers' needs changes, people grow up or improvements can be made. Lack of market research is another guaranteed way to destroy your brand.
• Believe that technology is not important
  My marketing mentor always believed that good lecturing could be delivered via the ‘chalk and talk' approach and the overhead projector was his best friend. Last year he confided to me that the students were demanding the use of laptops and data projectors, he had to change and ‘convert' to using technology. This point is e-commerce and e-marketing via the worldwide web, cellular phones and other digital electronic media exists but only if you want your products to be seen as up to date, your organisation to be efficient and your brand to be sustainable.

HOWEVER….

If you want your brand to stay on top and to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world there is only one way to go:

Never take your eye off the customer (or the competition)!