How Very Good Brands Became Bad and Forgotten in One Day
Playing the stay in the power game of business
I wouldn’t have to imagine that brands that have market dominance and a good number of users could actually go extinct just like a snap of the finger. What really happened and who is supposed to be blamed for this?
These are the peculiar incidents with brands and products I grew up to know. But over the years, nobody really remembers they once existed. After some research, I discovered what took them off the radar.
Traditionally before now, business to many people was of the sort of “buying and selling” rather than getting paid for “value.”
Often, I was given an impression that business means how many turnovers you made in a month or per year — that was how I was thought to judge business success.
Lately and conventionally, I know that a business in the actual sense is a vision that should outlive the visioner and it provides help too. That simply means there are both long-term and short-term plans which adds up for you to stay in power in your business.
However, these products and brands which I won’t be mentioning their names lost it as they grew. Only for us to miss out on the products which we once enjoyed when we were younger.
Some misconceptions or mistakes they made were:
A good product sells itself as “ideology”
I used to wonder why major brands and companies paid so much money for ads even though we have known them already. You see their products or services on billboards, on TV commercials, radio jingles, newspaper ad pages, promoted during major global sporting events, and more conventionally on social media.
I would really feel bad before now and wonder why such companies would transfer costs to innocent consumers who did nothing wrong rather than use their products because of these massive adverts. However, I forgot that business was about showing up all the time.
The wrong convention that killed some of these brands was the fact that they thought they have become so good that no one would forget them, or that they would never have rivals. They made a big mistake.
Adverts were what they used to communicate to people that they are around, and when they got the people’s attention, they stopped doing what took them to where they got to.
Gradually, they fell off the ladder without knowing, until they eventually fell.
This was how I knew that acceptance does not come by showing up sometimes, you have to be there always. I had to change my perception and narrative toward ads.
No matter how you feel your product is, you must not stop telling people about it. It is just as simple as that.
Process improvement
The older generation of what I would call a business failed to adjust and re-evaluate their services and products. And what people were saying about them. They failed and were forgotten.
As the brand grew, it would have been better to get an effective feedback system from its customers and also to have monitored their quality. When most of them realized this and tried to come back, they have already lost their customers to competitors and it was like a ‘wild goose chase.’
Your products and services as well as the ideas are about the people, failing to find their needs above what you wish to give them will not give you any success.
Good impact evaluation should be researched and studied judiciously. People buy things for a spontaneous reason, pride, due to need, aesthetics, and a show of class. All these reasons are emotional impulses — which of the emotional button does what you offer trigger?
This is what you should work on every day above what you want them to have. Leave it and be forgotten like those older brands I am talking about.
Be part of their satisfaction need
The truth is “we all want to buy, but we don’t want to be sold to.”
I hardly saw these brands leaving a note or requesting to know how their customers felt about their products and services; aside from age-long suggestions boxes scattered in their offices. But these customers' feelings that needed expression were way beyond that.
It is not like now when businesses send you e-mails to help them fill out a survey or even call you to know what you think about them and their services.
It was more about making the money or lack of knowledge than how the customer felt. Every of your customer has an emotion that should be appealed to, and once you get that done, you’ve got a brand ambassador without pay.
Being part of the customer success means you want your customers to drive joy with your products and services, and even make them feel a lot better.
You want to create an impression for them. Knowing that your profits will probably not come from the early days of business, but from a long-term relationship that would pay for it all.
Your customers need the maximum satisfaction they can get, do not short-change them of that. They will leave when they see another person offering what you are not.
The marketing of using what they know
I watched TV commercials when I was younger. Some were direct and easy to understand, while a few others sparked off anger and criticism. What made both differences?
The other spoke a language I know in a manner I have never heard it and got me interested, while the other one tried to tell me I knew little compared to what they know.
The best way to communicate with people is in the language they understand. They feel and see themselves in what you are saying. There is no need to feel that you said all you have to say, yet, you didn’t make a point.
When you want to market to people, ask yourself, “What do they know already?”
Usually, the answer is in the immediate environment, then think of how that will speak to them. Then turn it into a market mantra.
They will see and understand it as a genuine help. The feeling is just like meeting your countryman in a foreign land; you have been dealing with people but it feels different with this person.
This was a touch some of these brands lost, eventually. Even those that started well on this lost it at some point.
Make an offer
I saw little offers as I see now. What was common among businesses then, was a slash in price. But it became so regular that everyone got used to it and saw nothing special about it anymore.
Offers make your customers think you have done more than enough for them. They would always come back because of those offers.
Even if what you are giving them is not free, an offer is like giving them a reason they should buy from you — that is why you hear and see discounts, coupons, gift cards, and the rest, these are offers of some sort.
But never you make an offer you won’t fulfill, it will end up tarnishing your business image shorter than you imagined. And never also make an offer bigger than your business.
Offers would bring you new customers and make the old ones stay around.
Business deals more with customers’ behaviour of choice, taste, and time. And it should be followed up seriously, many of these brands could not take up with the wave of the new business language, so they lost it for good. Do not lose yours!
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