Stressing or Impressing – how brands fare in troubled times

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We can’t sugar coat things, some brands did pretty abysmally during the pandemic, from political parties right the way through to your local favorite beverage manufacturer or even your corner store.

The pandemic put a bunch of people out of work, ejected millions from the relative comfort of the office or place of work and put many of us in closer sustained proximity to friends and family than would normally be the case.

Three lines of business that did exceptionally well under the circumstances were those that managed to keep us connected to the office, our place of work and our colleagues; and those that kept us and our families entertained.

While the fallout from the SARS COVID-19 pandemic is still being assessed and calculated and there is the likely risk of further variants, the reality is that for many who would typically be office-bound; the effects of being forced to work from home had mixed results.

IT organizations likely had more anxiety around having so many more remote workers than ever before. Many sleepless nights were spent putting in the further infrastructure to create network resiliency. Of course, this was not limited to the corporates, schools, and educational institutions had to do exactly the same.

There were some outages some disruptions and some technical challenges but by and large transitioning to an administrative back-office function that was almost 100% remote was surprisingly smooth. Perhaps far smoother than it would have been if it had happened just a few years ago.

Of course, some brands tanked and some businesses were completely annihilated or at least very severely battered and bruised. Aviation, airport companies, pleasure cruises and many in the travel, food and beverage and hospitality industries are still licking their wounds and will continue to do some for a long time.

On reflection, the brands that consumers will have related most closely to would have been the infrastructure providers and the retail brands. This would be because those would be the brands that they would have had to rely upon the most. So the question, is how exactly did those brands do, during the pandemic and how would you personally assess them in terms of your relationship with them?

An oft-overlooked aspect of brands is the perception of how they take care of their employees. In some countries, furloughs alleviated the financial burden on employers with a significant portion (often more than 50%) being provided by the public purse to ensure that people didn’t go hungry while their jobs were put on hold.

The question, then, is did this in any way impact your perception of the brands you favour and has it influenced your post-pandemic allegiances, shopping or eCommerce habits?

How did your business fare?

Most importantly, if your business is one of those that are unsure of how you came out of the pandemic in relation to customer sentiment, how would you ever be able to determine whether your customers are still in love with your brand or have moved on to a competitor or completely changed their interests?

Brand successes and failures depend on the “bond” with the customer. This encompasses the brand image, promise and positioning. The customer gets to decide the fate of a brand irrespective of the effort your brand goes through in marketing, PR and all the other communication and brand-building levers that might get pulled. The relationship your customers have with your brand is an emotion-based one that is heavily bound up in consumer-brand perception.

Brand agency, Visualfizz cites a couple of interesting crashes from 2019 as a result of ad campaign failures and then pulled a couple of beauts out in 2020 and again in 2021. It will be interesting to see who makes the list for 2022. For brands, certainly looking at the most recent brand challenges, a lot of the topics seems to be closely related to social issues and the relative “wokeness” of brands.

Accordingly, companies that are still clinging to their business activities in Russia, like those cited in the NYPost article might emerge severely damaged outside of Russia even if within the confines of the Russian border their brand is reinforced as having solidarity with the Russian government and perhaps a segment of the general population. Airlines too likely will have to reconsider their approach to providing flight credit rather than a full fare refund, and the same is likely to be true to package holidays.

From the Pretectum CMDM perspective, there isn’t a lot you can do to avoid some of the mishaps that some brands suffered during the pandemic but on a very personal and individual level, you can make a difference with each individual consumer that your brand deals with, either through sales, service, billing or support, by thinking carefully about what the data is that you hold for each customer, and how that data can help or hinder your business in giving each customer an optimized and personalized experience when dealing with your brand either through a website, an application or an interaction with one of your associates.

Strong brands tend to recognize that a good familiarity with, and knowledge of existing and repeat customers gives them a distinct advantage over competitors because they already know something about those customers. Quite apart from what your business does in marketing through the use of platforms like CDPs; a customer master data management platform like the Pretectum CMDM gives you a leg-up to provide a more customized interaction experience.

Learn how you can use the Pretectum CMDM to your advantage by contacting us today!

Building and defining your brand

healthy marketing man love

Build a brand that is loved

Your marketing team, your founders, the industry analysts, and of course your share and stockholders likely view your organizational brand as one of the most valued assets your business has.

That’s assuming you have a brand that is easily identifiable and discernable from the rest of the pack.

When your customers interact with your brand they may have different kinds of emotional experiences and they may be excited. What you don’t want, is for that excitement to be boiling blood or end on a low.

As individuals, we have a brand too. It could be our fashion sense, the way we speak, the way we engage with others. For some, the personal brand is a carefully curated aspect of their identity. Likely something distinctive, memorable, and potentially long last. You may or may not work hard on your personal brand but as a business, you cannot afford to neglect it.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business that hasn’t been around for a long time, then the chances are that you are trying to establish your brand and identity in which case there is no better place to start than with thinking about exactly what it is that you want to say about your business.

A successful brand has a powerful purpose behind it which is articulated in how it interacts with customers and prospects and how it presents itself. One of the reasons, for example, that some people choose to always stay at the same hotel group, is that they enjoy the same experience wherever they are in the world. That can be boring to some, but to others, it produces a comforting monotony that they might need as a safe haven. Similarly, individuals who make an extra special effort to travel with particular airlines or rent from particular car-hire companies, is that they are looking to get some kind of special treatment or reward over and above the kinds of treatment that ad hoc customers have.

A brand, for an organization, is something that ensures, day in day out, and delivers on a particular promise of an experience consistently either through products or service.

You can think of these aspects as closely tied to brand purpose and you will often see it in how businesses describe their mission or business ethos.

For consumers and customers, according to Nielson 59% of consumers prefer to buy new products from brands familiar to them. so there should be little doubt in your mind that it is important to build and maintain that unique and recognizable identity.

As a part of defining your brand, you’ll want to consider why your business exists, what the value of it is to your audience, what makes it different from the competition and why your audience should care.

You’ll then encapsulate all those aspects into a logo, a slogan or tagline, a value proposition, your tone of voice in messaging, customer stories and narratives, and so on. To understand more about Pretectum, consider why we are the way, who and what we focus on, we are, and what we consider as distinctive about our business identity.

Borrowing from British-American author and inspirational speaker Simon Sinek, we consider the Golden Circle. The neuroscience behind the Golden Circle theory is that humans respond best when the business messages communicate with the parts of the audience Amygdala and the Hippocampus which are part of the limbic system. These aspects of the brain control emotions, behavior, and decision-making.  They’re involved in rapid and unconscious impacts on motivation, emotion, learning, and memory.

While this is a more primitive part of the human brain when compared with the forebrain, they also manage fight or flight responses to threats.

Sinek argues that the ‘Why‘ is probably the most important message that an organization can communicate – this, in turn, will stimulate some sort of decision or reaction from the audience. Sinek elaborates on this concept in his 2009 book Start with Why.

You might consider using the Golden Circle concept to help your business in identifying the purpose behind almost anything.

The Golden Circle

The three parts that make up the Golden Circle

  • Why  โ€“ the reason you are passionate what you offer and why your business exists
  • How   โ€“ the things that differentiate your business from others
  • What โ€“ the products or services you offer

Pretectum believes that your communication can be best achieved when you know more and understand more about your customer and strengthen your brand. To do that, you need to have comprehensive and correct data.

To create and leverage such data you need to have a centralized repository of customer master data – that’s where the cloud-based Pretectum Customer Master Data Management platform fits in. Contact us today to learn more.

Customer data and business goodwill

brown wooden blocks on white surface

The accounting profession has long held a balance sheet item called “goodwill” but what is it exactly – it may even be something you have never heard of yourself?

In accounting, “goodwill” is classified on a balance sheet as an intangible asset.
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This asset arises when an existing business is acquired and the market value of the inventory, plant and equipment and other assets is less than the value paid for the business.
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So, “goodwill” on the balance sheet represents assets that are not separately identifiable.
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Per a nice description in Wikipedia – technically, it is not “identifiable assets that are capable of being separated or divided from the entity and sold, transferred, licensed, rented, or exchanged, either individually or together with a related contract, identifiable asset, or liability”.
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Many readers might be familiar with the concept of asset-strippers or corporate-raiders. These are typically investors that buy companies for their assets and not for the goodwill. They’ll then systematically liquid parts or assets within the company they acquire because the sum of the market value of the assets is greater than the balance sheet value. You could argue that there is negative goodwill in such organizations because the value of the business is greater when liquidated than running it as a unified going concern.ย 
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Goodwill also does not include contractual or other legal rights regardless of whether those are transferable or separable from the entity or other rights and obligations. Per accounting standards, goodwill is evaluated periodically for any possible impairment in value.

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Private companies in the US for example, may elect to expense a portion of the goodwill periodically on a straight-line basis over a ten-year period or less, reducing the assetโ€™s recorded value. This charge is called an amortization expense.[1]

Goodwill is the only asset that competition cannot undersell or destroy.โ€ โ€“ Marshall Field, Founder Marshal Field and Company

So why, do we care about goodwill? Well, just like branding , goodwill represents the reputation and the respect that your company or organization has within its audience. Similarly, your customer master represents a piece of your goodwill whether you explicitly account for that or not.

In the textbook “Introduction to Business” – authors Gitman, Daniel and Shah et al describe an aspect of business related to using Public Relations to build Goodwill.

Like sales promotion, public relations can be a vital part of the promotional mix. Public relations is any communication or activity designed to win goodwill or prestige for a company or person.”

Let’s unpack that concept of “publicity”. In this context, this is any information about the company or product that appears in the news or is not directly paid for by the company.

They say, that “there’s no such thing as ‘bad’ publicity”. So that means that publicity can can be good or bad but ultimately it is all about building awareness.

But Public Relations (PR) also includes many other kinds of activities, such as lobbying, event planning, press agency, corporate or internal communication, crisis management for communications, creating product awareness and dealing with investor communication.

At the center of all of this communication has to be an understanding of the brand itself but also an understanding of the different channels of communication. Who you want to communicate with and what you want to communicate and why.

So why does all of this matter?

Unlike PR, advertising distinguishes itself by being purchased or paid media.  They’re commonly confused for one another particularly when you see or hear “paid promotions”. Advertising also tends to be a monologue whereas PR is ideally a dialog – two way communication, wherein the company listens and responds to the questions or comments or challenges pose by the public at large.

Advertising is done principally to promote products or services, with the objective of inducement to buy.

Part of the challenge with building goodwill is understanding who decides what your business goodwill looks like. Often the decision to establish goodwill on the balance sheet only happens when the business is sold but it can also happen when you acquire another entity and combine it with yours. If you considered selling your business, you would likely struggle to be able to argue that the customer master database has a value with an accountant, though an investor might see it otherwise.

Per a piece in the CPA Journal, by  Virginia Collins, CPA/CITP, CFE and Joel Lanz, CPA/CGMA/CITP/CFF, CISM, CISSP, CFE – CPAs have a special appreciation for the strategic use of data.

Accountants after all, use data to do their work. Without data their work is less useful and potentially unreliable. Master Data in particular, holds characteristics akin to those of financially reportable assets because it likely yields some future economic benefit to the business. Similarly, bad or wrong data or data that shouldn’t be held, represents some sort of risk to the business if it is used inappropriately or results in negative outcomes when decisions are based on it.

Most businesses have processes and procedures in place to manage physical assets or any other assets that appear on their current financial statements.

However, because data is an intangible asset that is not recognized as an asset by modern accounting standards, it is often not managed as an asset, it isn’t even managed the way perceived value of the brand (goodwill) is managed.

Accountants in general agree, that there is no good reason not to measure and manage data as the asset it is, particularly customer master data, even if you’re not accounting for it on the balance sheet.

Whether you use it to improve communications, either through public relations or advertising or whether you use it at the point in time when you transact with the customer or start a new customer outreach campaign or even just a conversation. The consensus seems to be that organizations should begin managing data, and customer master data in particular, as well as any information derived from it, just as if it were a real set of business assets as if it were shown on the financial statements.

Pretectum believes that the best way to manage your customer master data assets is with a centralized master data management platform like the Pretectum cloud-based C-MDM.