Brands need to constantly cultivate and nurture.

Jul 14, 2010•Blog Posts• by jclark

Brand management is always a fickle thing, and I’m never more amused than when I hear the comments that “companies don’t make brands, the customer makes the brand.” Well… yes and no. Over the last couple weeks we’ve watched some interesting gyrations with a couple of big brands- Best Buy and LeBron James. (If you don’t think James is a brand, then we should have a separate conversation but when one man can command an entire hour on ESPN to muddle over one ‘decision’ then that counts in my book.)

Both James and Best Buy found themselves in a hard place for completely different reasons and causes, but the impact upon each just goes to show that brands can self-inflict damage in a real hurry by misjudging the audience. Google the term ‘Brian Maupin’ and you’ll get about 1,780,000 results. Seems like a lot. You don’t need to go past the first two to get to the bottom of Best Buy’s problem. After Maupin (a Best Buy employee) created a video mocking a customer looking for the new iPhone, Best Buy decided to shelve Maupin’s career at the electronics giant. (For what its worth, the video is really about how we blindly follow brands and was never intended to be a commentary on Best Buy or its customers). Regardless, a groundswell of sympathy erupted on internet for Maupin and his video which had over 3 million views before being pulled down. So much so that Best Buy backtracked, issued a hasty and somewhat ill-conceived PR release to explain why they let Maupin go, and eventually offered to re-hire him. A classic “David versus Goliath misstep.

James on the other hand, learned that a little hubris can go a long way, and lack thereof can be reason enough for people to burn your jersey and tear down your likeness. Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock you know the story of LeBron and his one-hour “Decision special” so there is no need to recount that episode. His defenders will point out that Ad exposure was off the charts for the special (true) and that we’re still talking about it so he’s won the battle for buzz (also true – James literally knocked the World Cup and BP off the news headlines). However more importantly, his jersey sales are now at an all-time low, his image is at an all-time low, and people are questioning the integrity of the league he plays in to the point that the commissioner had to explain with a grave face at his own press conference that perhaps James show was “ill conceived” and  “the advice that he received on this was poor”. Its going to take some time to recover from this and there is no guarantee that he ever will. He might have inadvertently donned the proverbial Black Hat for the foreseeable future.

In short, never underestimate the power of little ripples to turn into large waves and take care not to let your message get lost in the method.