Would You Like to Make A Famous Brand?

As popularity becomes the ‘it’ statistic for many marketers, have you considered how your brand would do if all your desires came true? If your brand plan is to gain popularity, examine these elements as you search for attention.

For many firms striving to break into competitive marketplaces, being a household name is only the goal that keeps them going. Instead of solving problems, popularity creates new ones that are just as difficult, if not worse. How you manage it depends on how and why you become a recognized brand. Success has many definitions nowadays.

Famous By Design

These companies are most likely to handle a surge in visibility and popularity because they were built to become this large. Their designs were built for flexibility, scalability, and response. The best strategy is to create a brand that is lucrative at each scale—start-up, local, national, regional, global—but flexible enough to adapt to new needs.

Naturally, building a brand that will “reach profitability” is tempting. That’s OK if you have patient investors. However, I prefer to embed healthy margins from the start and turn growth into a reward for consumers so that as the company grows, its name strengthens, and it operates at scale, consumers can find more ways to bring the brand into their lives and bottom-line returns increase. How can you reward longtime customers while attracting new ones to the brand that’s on everyone’s mind?

This strategy recognizes that renown may become too expensive and forces brands to choose between boosting profile and top line or keeping a particular size and using supply/demand dynamics to sustain profitability. Subaru is currently dealing with it.

Now Famous

Today’s market makes it simple to confuse popularity for fame: to think you’re on top of the world when you’re only top of mind, but that time will pass. Fashion boosts self-esteem. People want you. Your social media stats are astounding. The world demands more than you can provide. Web orders are backed up. Attention comes with big expectations and hazards. Scaling to fulfill that demand needs considerable upfront expenditure. Media exposure that likely got you here might also place you under intense scrutiny.

Tommy Hilfiger and others learned the hard way that you might gain great popularity with a global audience, like the hip-hop culture, only for it to go, leaving you to rebuild your overstretched company. In order to fulfill the increased demand, you may become too familiar, diluting your brand value and lowering same-store sales if customers decide you’re too excellent or something else has caught their attention.

One of the toughest decisions a brand must make is whether they have arrived or are blipping. Brands trying to evaluate their popularity should examine what’s driving growth. If your celebrity is media-fueled, it will be more fleeting than if you satisfy a market need or if macro-demand is rising. To identify what’s occurring, why, and who’s driving the shift, examine market growth. What brought that transformation to the world’s notice, and what will keep it from disappearing? Spike and long tail decline—the best trend structure. That will boost sales in the short-medium term and maintain them while you create and deliver what’s next.

Once Famous

Any brand, particularly a top one, finds it hard to recognize that its heyday is gone and it is declining. The struggle back to popularity begins with redefining not what made you famous but how you can reconfigure and re-present your essence so customers find a compelling new sense of relevance in what you stand for. According to Jim Collins, over 80% of brands will fade from view after reaching the top, therefore most renowned businesses must find the energy and concentration to re-establish leadership. Playboy is battling with this, in my opinion.

Currency—knowing which parts of your narrative to keep, which to drop, which to add to, and which to reinterpret—is key to helping people connect with you in a meaningful and engaging manner. Chanel and Burberry have leveraged their histories. Unfortunately, too many businesses in this situation try to trade on their history in hopes of being rediscovered, being valued, or having done enough to go ahead. Over time, they understand heritage does not guarantee equity.