Protecting Your Brand (Smart Monday/Process)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing.  Today we’re going to talk about brand protection.  You’ve worked hard to build a brand, now you have to work equally hard to protect it.

Look at some of the top brands in the world such as Coca-Cola, Nike and Google.  The reason they are the top brands is these companies create trust, a sense of loyalty and confidence in their brand.  Then they protect the brand in every way possible, ensuring that nothing will diminish brand confidence in the minds of their customers.

As a brander 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.  In the past several years they have not done a very good job protecting the brand.  While the University of New Mexico does have great basketball, soccer, baseball and track teams, a few years ago they brought on a football coach who was not able to achieve a winning season. The team won one game in each of his three seasons and lost more than 30 games.

Let’s discuss what happened during that time.  Consider the strategic aspect of not replacing the coach sooner: ticket sales, advertising revenue, television rights and recruitment of new athletes all went down.  Fans became apathetic.

UNM did replace that coach and brought on someone with experience coaching Notre Dame.  Now the question is how long is it going to take them to regain the brand stature they had only several years before?  That’s why it’s so important to always protect your brand.

Once you have your brand perfected and your customers know what to expect from your brand, it’s your job to make sure you protect it however you can.  That may mean subtle things such as not altering your logo, tagline or fonts and colors.  Those attributes are the extended identity that they recognize.  Ensure 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 considerable time to bounce back from serious issues like Lobos Football.  You can’t predict what that timeframe may be.  Be proactive and ensure that you are never in that situation.  When you see your brand faltering, focus attention on it immediately to correct cause of the degradation.  Then, as ways, continue to enhance the brand to the best of your abilities.

That concludes our Smart Monday.  Be sure and stop by tomorrow for Strategic Tuesday.  To discuss an online or face to face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.