Why Brand Managers Fail (and How to Get Back in the Driving Seat)
Companies make huge investments in brand marketing — nearly $500 billion globally each year — to communicate as effectively and beautifully as possible.
Managing distributed content is expensive. It costs 10x more to manage and update content than it costs to create it. As a result, marketers operate more like brand “launchers” that lose control over their content once it’s “launched” or sent to others. That is, until now.
But as soon as they distribute their brand content to resellers, blogs, social media and other online outlets, the content becomes out-of-date, old content gets reused and/or new content gets misused. In other words, it’s one hot mess.
Why is this happening?
Managing distributed content is expensive. It costs 10x more to manage and update content than it costs to create it. As a result, marketers operate more like brand “launchers” that lose control over their content once it’s “launched” or sent to others. That is, until now. A new technology has been created that allows digital marketers to reclaim control over their brands online – even when sharing content on websites they don’t own.
Why Brand Managers Fail
To date, tools for controlling distributed content haven’t been available. Without automated tools, when a marketer wants to update content across 1,000 reseller websites, each reseller has to manually receive an update and then make modifications to their site.
For companies with a broad product line – this could mean over 100,000 updates per year or more. What tools do marketers have to automate the distribution, updating and compliance tracking of this content? None.
This problem isn’t isolated.
Most companies suffer from problems with online brand consistency. One survey said that most marketers see consistency getting worse, not better. Delivering online brand consistency is difficult for even the largest brands to achieve.
A recent test showed that only 37% of Pepsi logos online are correct and only 8% of Dolby logos are correct – even though the logos were redesigned over 5 years ago. This is definitely a big issue everyone needs to address.
Equally frustrating, not controlling the online brand presence has ripple effects on other areas of marketing and business operations:
- Productivity suffers. Who wants to waste time? No one. Yet, that’s what happens when partners have to be convinced to update content manually.
- Trustworthiness drops. An inconsistent brand image sends the wrong message – especially when partners are becoming more important than ever.
- Search gets cluttered. Old content gets in the way of marketer’s new messages. Out of date content often gets ranked higher than new, more relevant messages.
- Legal hot water. Expired promotional or regulated content that still exists on partner sites can put companies in jeopardy or force the company to honor out-of-date offers.
- Poor story-telling. Brand messages get delivered in fragments, forcing the customer to “connect the dots” for a bigger brand story on their own.
- Blind to ROI. Real content tracking and ROI remains elusive. Little usable data on where and how the brand is available to marketers.
Clearly, marketers have been set up to fail.
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