90% of startups fail, 80% of product launches are not successful and 60% of the fortune 500 companies in the 1970’s do not exist today.
Your species (brands) are dying in an alarming rates.
In face of such grim truth brands and brand managers should seek survival tools. In this article I will cover two survival tactics and strategies of those who were able to survive the wild of the markets, those who were heard among the white noise and stand out from the crowd.
“If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.”
― Mario Andretti
1- Survival of the fastest:
One of the reasons of extinction for brands is refusing to adapt or not adapting fast enough to new technology, even tho their markets and their customers has adapted to it.
The simple and most obvious example of that is websites adapting to mobile technology even tho:
- Google is now penalising websites that are non-mobile friendly.
- Two-thirds of smartphone users say a mobile-friendly site makes them more likely to buy a company's product or service.
- 61% says that if they don't find what they're looking for (probably within about five seconds), they'll click away to another site.
We are still faced with the fact that 91% of small business’ websites are not optimized for mobile use.
Adapting fast to technological shifts is a key tool to a brand’s survival.
Borders didn't think they need to adapt to amazon fast. Blockbuster video didn't think that Netflix was a threat and that digital was a threat that needs to be eliminated fast.
Borders closed all of its retail locations and sold off its customer loyalty list, comprising millions of names, to competitor Barnes & Noble for $13.9 million. Borders' locations have been purchased and re-purposed by other large retailers.
Saddled itself with over $1 billion in debt and was unable to make the transition to digital. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and has been replaced by Netflix and other digital services.
Fast adaption is a survival tool as customers don't select slow brands, they let them slowly perish in a non digital world for maybe a nostalgic to revive them in a casual conversation.
“It’s easy to predict the future, just remove the fragile elements from the present”
2- Survival of the Antifragile:
“Fragile” if you read this word written on a box that is delivered to you, normally other words that associate with this box are handle with care,easily broken or caution.
The Oxford dictionary defines fragile as ”easily broken or damaged”.
In his book “Antifragile” Nassim Taleb asks, what is the opposite of the word fragile?
What would be written on that box if the item inside is the opposite of fragile.
Words like strong, robust and solid doesn't really mean anti-fragile. Because a fragile object is very risk sensitive where those words describe more of a risk neutral case, where the pressure or risk doesn't really harm the items yet it definitely doesn't benefit it.
If there is an antifragile item in that box the words on that box could read as please mishandle, add pressure or the item inside gains from risk. In this case the objects actually benefit from risk and pressure.
Some brands were able to find a lifeline, a cure from fragileness and a process to becoming an antifragile brand. Introduce risk in fractions so your brand can survive, this process is called 70 - 20 - 10.
Where 70% of the Brands investment is in “Now”, or established and successful programs; 20% goes to “new,” or emerging trends that are starting to gain traction; and 10% goes to “next”.
This concept can be applied to any brand’s activities where 70% of the activities are safe, familiar and cash cows, 20% of the activities are for the stars, trendy and new and finally 10% is for the risky more dangerous activities. This process seeks sustainable growth and most importantly antifragility.
Customers tend to abandoned fragile brands and leave them to the memory of textbooks and academic studies of worst case scenarios.
These are two branding survival tools in this series of articles. We will be unlocking more branding ecology mysteries and other survival mechanism in the coming articles.
No comments:
Post a Comment