Creating and maintaining the health of a beloved brand is the Holy Grail for marketers and the companies that employ them. The recent bankruptcy of Sears demonstrates how painful it is to live through the demise of a long-established brand. Without the proper nourishment and innovation, even the most iconic of brands is vulnerable.
The environment for legacy brands has likely never been more challenging, with Sears’s troubles hardly represent an isolated case. Look at some of the instantly recognizable brands that have disappeared (or all but) just in the last couple of years: Toys R Us, The Limited, Hostess and Necco Wafers (the latter most particularly painful for us native New Englanders).
Media brands with a proud heritage have suffered more than their fair share of elimination and reduced relevance. Long and strong identification in major metropolitan areas wasn’t enough to save a series of legacy newspapers, including the Tampa Tribune, Oakland Tribune, Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer (still alive online). National magazine brands have endured at least relative to their newsprint brethren, but their difficulties are legion, from Conde Nast’s print shut down of Teen Vogue and Glamour (expected in 2019) to the stable of struggling former Time Inc. brands (now under Meredith Corporation) including Sports Illustrated and Fortune.
Intense financial engineering at the corporate parent level (including at print giant Hearst) can certainly prolong operations in some of these businesses (Sears is in the midst of its own), but where should the focus be to ensure the survival and growth for the brands themselves?
As a window into the proper nutritional diet for a long-established brand, I got some terrific insights last week from stewards of two quintessential media business brands: Jill Cress, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for National Geographic Partners, and Michael Federle, Chief Executive Officer of Forbes Media. They spoke at a Boston conference entitled Progress Connect, whose overarching purpose is contained inside of its name – to connect leaders of traditional and emerging media sectors and help forge innovative and successful pathways forward.
Invest in content
Riding on even the finest of coattails doesn’t work for any brand. Cress proudly pointed out Nat Geo’s recent and massive organizational commitment to what became a more than two-year-long inside story of a rare face transplant. That investment culminated in a 9000 word print piece entitled “The Story of a Face”. The New York Times similarly invested multiple reporters, editors and outside experts to produce its own similarly prodigious investigation of Donald J. Trump’s financial empire, resulting in a 14000-word opus (not that anyone is counting). For Nat Geo and The Times (not to mention Forbes), despite and even because of the proliferation of so many “news” options today, there is an incalculable value in enterprise journalism that helps maintain the brand’s ongoing value. It’s not cheap – but it is the opposite of a marketplace commodity.
Invest in tech
Federle stated that Forbes Media “almost can’t spend too much” on tech. You can’t be a laggard in understanding what consumers are looking for in the market, how to find them and deliver them content, how to enhance the experience of consumers in interacting with your brand and content, and how to synthesize what all of this information is actually telling you. The next frontier of tech spending for Federle is artificial intelligence. While even the most experienced of media hands are still grappling with defining AI, never mind deploying it, several speakers, including Anne Finucane, CMO of Bank of America, made it plain that the risk of waiting on tech is a lot greater than aggressive investment.
Welcome syndication of your content and brand
Everybody in media (like everywhere else I guess) likes to control their own destiny, whether through establishing and reinforcing your brand as a cable network, web destination, game or app. It is certainly preferable to be able to deliver that “pure” audience from your own platform and to retain the first party data that comes along with it.
But no matter how impressive your brand’s owned and operated neighborhood may be, it’s not enough to create the presence and impact your brand needs to stay ahead. Cress and Federle both noted the importance of Nat Geo and Forbes making their content available on multiple platforms. Nat Geo knew that relatively few people would read the full “Story of a Face” article, but by slicing and dicing it into a nine-part series it became digestible for a much wider - not to mention younger – audience that could experience the power of the Nat Geo brand’s storytelling on their own terms, not limited by the legacy Nat Geo platform.
Embrace new partners
In our ever-more-complicated media landscape, brands have to be open to a variety of new partners and business relationships. Nat Geo announced just last week a partnership with Wattpad, a company I’ve come to know through my strategic consulting work. Nat Geo has launched a multiyear initiative aimed at educating the world about the environmental threats posed by plastic in oceans, and is partnering with Wattpad on a global story contest. Why Wattpad, a company you likely have never heard of? Well, they have built a community of 65 million people, skewing young and female, that the Nat Geo brand can now engage with in a very different fashion.
Forbes Media has long been a pioneer in its business partnerships with BrandVoice, working with over 90 different brands as their content marketing partner and driving over 123 million page views. This is an area that many in the journalism world have struggled to get right. But Federle noted the success of the Forbes brand’s balancing act by pointing to a recent Simmons Research survey of Americans which found Forbes as the 5th most trusted news brand, ahead of NBC News, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As both Nat Geo and Forbes have demonstrated, you can do things in new ways and still maintain the integrity and relevance of your brand. Not a bad lesson there.
