A Direct Marketing Agency - Helping Brands Acquire and Retain Customers

A healthy brand innovates and reinvents itself constantly to remain relevant to shifting consumer desires. This is a key component of brand building, but how do you know when it's time to change and what to change?

A recent marketing-accountability study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers identified some very concrete indicators:

• When customer conversion or repeat rate vs. competition slips
• When the percent of consumers rating the brand as "excellent" slips
• When factors rated highly by customers differ from the company's goal
• When the company sells more on promotion or price reduction than it does at premium
• When a brand's net promoter score slips (net promoter score is a widely used marketing metric that's derived by subtracting the number of brand detractor from the number of consumers who say they would recommend the brand to another)

Brand reinvention in these cases should include

• Product innovation
• Refocusing marketing efforts on growth
• Exploring new targets
• Analyzing the root cause of the deterioration
• Completing a deep qualitative study on brand issues

Notice that hiring a new ad agency is not the solution. As Don Sexton, professor of business at Columbia University states, "Sizzle alone won't do it. You have to have the steak as well. Great advertising makes a lousy product fail faster."

Strong brands start out with a point of differentiation and an understanding of why that difference is relevant to their customers. When a brand begins to slip, it's crucial to go back to the beginning and be sure all efforts are grounded in the core values that made that brand strong.