How to Fix a Broken Brand II

Jennifer Rice adds her own take on the recent FC Now discussion about brand turnarounds. To whit, leaders need to:

• Listen to customers and understand what they want.
• Determine how your customer experience measures up to what they want.
• If it doesn't measure up, fix it. If there's a list of things to fix, start with what's most important to customers.
• Do you have a meaningful point of difference from competitors? If not, create one using the understanding from #1.
• Create a focused, durable brand position that meshes with the previous 4 items.
• Communicate that brand message consistently over time throughout every customer touchpoint.
• Break down internal silos to ensure that all departments are working together to build the brand.
• Create mechanisms to gather ongoing feedback from customers.
• Make sure your employees understand how they can build the brand, and make sure they're happy. Happy employees make happy customers.
• Happy customers generate referrals. Measure your buzz factor.
• Now that you've built your brand from the ground up, its worth spending more money on advertising.
• Have discipline to follow and continually reevaluate all the points on this list.

Items six and nine also tie into previous discussions of brand training.