Brand Biology - Evolution by Customer Selection

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 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and has been replaced by Netflix and other digital services.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”

Nssim Taleb

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.

Brand Biology (Define your species).

Brand Biology

“Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.”

Marty Neumeier

Brand biology is a metaphorical term that I will be using during this series of articles, to refer to different types of elements, factors, cognitive phenomena, and components, that gives a brand life and help the brand survive in the different environment of the market.

Your brand biology is your customer’s categorization, your brand’s DNA is your audience perception, and your clients market is your future environment.  The target market defines your species and their thoughts shape your organisms.

There is more than one element to the idea of brand biology and customer categorization, in this article I will review two elements, the first is related to customer perception and the second is cognitive behavior.

Customer’s perception is manipulated and persuaded by factors like brand color, name, personal experience and campaigns.

In a paper that was published by California State Polytechnic University, titled the Effect of theForeign Brand on Consumer Perception.  The paper empirically examines the influence of brand names (foreign versus national) on consumer perception.

The results support the hypothesis that the national brand elicits more positive consumer perception than the foreign brands. In this study, consumer perception is operationalized by four constructs: attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, advertisement feeling, and attitude toward the advertisement.

This is important in terms of brand biology; just the awareness of your species as mentioned in this study affects your survival. In future articles we will look at your brand survival tactics, brand environment, brand biotic and abiotic.

The second element that affects the categorization of the brand is cognitive behavior, as humans we tend to create mental short cuts, especially in the age of the digital worlds the choices of any product or service could be overwhelming.

Within social psychology, cognitive miser is an umbrella theory of social cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attribution biases.

 The theory suggests that humans, valuing their mental processing resources, find different ways to save time and effort when negotiating the social world. The term cognitive miser was first introduced by Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor in 1984.

 We tend to crate mental short cuts to ease the process of digesting, transforming and exploring data of any kind. The brain activity of categorizing data lies at the heart of cognitive economy. We treat things as being of a kind so we don’t waste neural processing cycles in details that are irrelevant to the core o the process itself.

When we go to the beach we don’t remember every grain of sand, when we look at the forest we don’t name every tree that we see.

And there is a very good evolutionary reason or this, it’s to prevent our brains from getting overwhelmed with data, making sure we don’t have too many brain tabs open at the same time or too many labeled products on the same shelf because too many choices are paralyzing in most cases.

The process of categorizing data in three main ways

the first one is the Gross or partial appearance which means if they look the same they are the same.
The second form of categorizing is functionality; appearance in this case is not the major concern if it can be used for writing it belongs to the writing tools section and sometimes we might call it a pen.
 Finally the third way of categorizing is conceptual and a perfect example of that is the tool box “If it fixes things it’s in the box”

In order for your brand biology to be compatible in such a harsh environment, in order or your kind to survive, the brand must master the skills necessary to stand out among your species.

First Study the industry before entering the market, understand the audience reactions to the existing, past and future products and services in your industry.  That will provide some needed input and insight into the customer’s perception.

Second define your species if your brand is serving an appearance, a function or a specific concept. Make sure you highlight those features build your campaigns based on how unique and authentic your brand is.

The elements of brand biology are many. Customer’s perception and audience cognitive behavior are two essential components of determining the DNA of your brand biology. 

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company or start-up

4 amazingly granted tips to destroy your company
or start-up

90% of start ups fail and 80% of product launches are not successful, and in this article you will know exactly how to join this number and fail your own start up as well.

In his book why do good companies go bad , Donald N Sull was able to determine what he called a dysfunctional mechanism or what we can call dynamic of failure.

The first approach to failure is strategic approach:

As human being we tend to have mental short cuts or cognitive schema in which we use to classify and categorize the world around us and business owners,

leaders and startup managers are no different than the rest of human beings, the way a start up or a business view the market and their own company is through mental schemes which are called strategic approach.

one of perfect examples to showcase such a concept is Firestone

“After seven decades of uninterrupted growth, Firestone reigned supreme in the U.S. tire industry in the 1970s.Then Michelin introduced the safer and more economical radial tire.

Firestone competed with Michelin head-to-head in Europe, but was blind to the threat to its core U.S. market, and so continued to produce conventional tires only. Firestone lost significant market share and was acquired a decade later.”

This is not just an example of business strategies this is an example of human thought as well, this methodology represents the fixed mind set process which deceives the human mind through ego-centrism that there is only one strategic approach to solve every problem and it’s  the only survival approach.

The second tip of startup destruction is the process:

At this stage you need to stick to the idea of transforming the process into rigid routines machine like and highly optimized a good example of this is McDonald’s.

“McDonald’s built its success on standardized processes, all dictated by headquarters. By rigidly following these procedures into the 1990s, McDonald’s lost market share to Burger King and Taco Bell, who were much quicker to meet customers’ changing desires for healthier foods.”

People in general are afraid of change let that be a change of situations, people, thought, change of hearts and for sure very afraid of change of process. Because when we as human know the sequence of things or the norm of specific process this gives us the illusion of control.

The fear of change is adaptive cognitive mechanism in itself; the fear of change is evolutionary in humans. Since times immemorial, man has liked routine. Our internal predispositions (heredity and genetics) teach us to resist change mainly to ‘always feel in control’. 

That’s one of the reasons people and businesses tend to stick to a specific process.

The main obvious downside to that these days is that we are living in a very dynamic environment and our ecology changes almost in a daily basis some of these changes are revolutionary to us as individuals and to our businesses.

I am almost certain that some of VHS, CD player store had a perfect process in terms of cleanness of the stores , customer care maybe loyalty programs yet this is all what it was. Just another process.

The third tip for the ultimate destruction is values:

I think this is self explanatory really how many times had dogmas or rigid beliefs destroyed companies, start-ups, life’s or a perfectly good cards game?

Bureaucracy  is a perfectly good example of a very important set of beliefs and values. The main idea is documentation of important events and rules that can regulate the work place to reach optimum efficiency,
yet what bureaucracy  has become is more of paper worship and it became a tool of destruction more than a tool to regulate and monitor.

By definition values are “the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”

So the values o a company or an organization is regarded as useful when that specific institution has started after all they were put in place for a reason and these values contributed to the institution process of the institution,

however values can be solid and rigid as much as you can yet the trends , the tools or the whole ecology of an industry or a business changes in a consistent basis.

Companies that stick to rigid values are sticking to destructive code.

The fourth tip for you companies doom is relationships:

Now in general relationships can form some kind of shackles that will tie you in and hold growth. This could be relationships with constituencies—customers, suppliers, employees. When conditions change, however, these relationships can restrict flexibility.

The Example that was given in the book I am referring to here was apple

“Apple’s vision of technically elegant computers and its freewheeling culture attracted the world’s most creative engineers. Once computers became commodities, however, the company’s health depended on cutting costs and speeding up production time.

But Apple’s engineers refused to change, and the company’s relationship with its “star” employees damaged its ability to respond to market changes.”

This is not the only case or the only form of shackling in terms of relationships for example it might make sense now if you’re a marketing or digital agency to partner with an offline events company, they make the events and you make the online marketing buzz.

However on the long run when you have different demands from different clients alignment between let’s say telecom corporate (your clients) and wedding planners (their clients) might lead to an un healthy relation.

And there you have it these are the 4 amazingly granted tips or your own start up destruction

1-      Turn your strategic approach to a solid frames of thinking

2-      Turn process into rigid routines

3-      Turn your values into dogmas

4-      Turn relationships into shackles

Can you add more points to the list ?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment and we can always talk more on

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