Battle of the Brands

Know how easy it is to destroy a brand. Don't.

It takes time and care to construct a brand, but it can be destroyed in an instant when scandal hits. If trouble strikes your company, deal with it. When D'Alessandro threatened to withdraw from Olympic sponsorship in 1998, other companies berated his public approach. But D'Alessandro says that he has no regrets: His brand was in danger of being found guilty by association. "As sponsors, we risked being criticized for supporting an organization that clearly condoned corruption. There was a pig in the middle of the table oinking, and nobody was willing to talk about it because of the IOC's and other sponsors' holier-than-thou attitude."

But what if it happens to your own company? In 1995, John Hancock was sued over deceptive sales practices. At the time, D'Alessandro was in the hot seat as head of retail: "I said, 'There's only one problem: We did these things, and we're going to pay. So how do you want to handle this? Do you want to litigate, get five years of publicity exposing hundreds of depositions, incur the wrath of the public and the media, and still have to pay $2 billion? Or do you want to admit that we did it and pay?' " In 1997, the company settled the suit for approximately $350 million. "I made that call," D'Alessandro says about the decision to settle rather than litigate."

Obscurity is not smart branding.

D'Alessandro is a major sports fan. His office boasts such top-flight sports memorabilia as Michael Jordan's shoes and Muhammad Ali's gloves and silk trunks encased in glass showcases. He has built his company's brand around sponsoring events like the Olympics and the Boston Marathon.

But his face registers disgust and he gets agitated as he talks about watching the past two Super Bowls. The games were fine, he says, but the dotcom advertising and branding were horrendous. "The ads were dreadful!" he says. "Companies were trying to out-subtle each other."

What, exactly, was subtle about Cyberian Outpost.com's ad, which showed a gerbil being shot out of a cannon? The ad itself was, simply, gross. But D'Alessandro said Cyberian Outpost and others made a fatal flaw when they decided that it would be cool to separate the brand from the product entirely. Sure, people remembered the gerbil. How could they forget? But they had no idea what Cyberian Outpost actually did, so how could they know whether to care about it?

"It was almost a badge of honor in the dotcom business to be remote from the message. Many dotcoms took a page out of Apple Computer's book," D'Alessandro says, referring to the famous 1984 Big Brother ad that ran only once and never referred to computers. The difference was that people already knew the Apple brand and what it stood for. D'Alessandro says that the dotcoms should have built brand awareness before deciding to get cute during the Super Bowl, when a raft of very expensive messages is diluted by dozens of other cute ads anyway. The rest, as we know, is history.

The best brand doesn't remove the need for a good product.

If you manage to create a great brand, says D'Alessandro, the last thing to do is relax. The pressure to sell a product that protects and enhances brand reputation has only begun. The worst thing is to become arrogant and removed from your customers.

One of the most biting stories in the book concerns D'Alessandro's experience working at Citibank, where people started pushing products because those products were from Citibank, not because customers needed or wanted them.

He relates the story of a senior executive who delighted in intimidating his underlings by telling them to "put the cup up" when he thought that they said something stupid. Each infraction cost the offender a nickel. Once a junior executive tried to explain why a product wasn't launching as planned; logistical problems were delaying the rollout. After making him "put the cup up," the senior executive said, "We're Citibank. This is a marketing problem, not a product problem" and ended the meeting.

For D'Alessandro, the anecdote illustrates what can happen when you let a brand become too powerful. "You can have the best advertising in the world, but once you turn off a customer, he won't want to come back to you. The best thing that you can do for your brand is to execute well. Customer service is our biggest struggle -- that and making good products and answering the phone on time."

Jennifer Reingold (jreingold@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Contact David D'Alessandro (rcollet@jhancock.com) by email.