Sustaining Successful Brands
Kevin Lane Keller, E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing
As one of the foremost experts on branding, Kevin Lane Keller has helped some of the world's most recognizable companies create and sustain successful brands. He's also seen many companies fail.
"Brands fail for a number of different reasons," he says. "But one of the biggest is that people fail to grasp the importance of a well-articulated brand that customers can identify with." In his view, a brand isn't just a name or a logo design, it's a relationship between a product and a user.
"Just as people have to connect on multiple levels, brands have to connect with their audience in different dimensions," Keller says. "In order to have a successful relationship, it's got to have breadth as well as depth."
Keller continues that strong brands are reliable, yet they're also dynamic by nature and must evolve in order to stay relevant. The quest for relevance is key, but changing a brand in the wrong way and losing its relevance is one of the primary reasons successful brands fail. "It's a fine line," he says. "You've got to evolve in order to remain successful, but you've got to do it in such a way that you don't destroy all the equity promise. Break that promise and you risk everything."
So how do you keep a brand fresh without alienating its core constituency? The most important thing is to move incrementally.
"How many people propose on the second date?" asks Keller. "It just doesn't work that way. Companies need to approach the idea of shifting their brand strategies with the same kind of caution. You don't spend 10 years appealing to middle-aged women and then suddenly turn around and start trying to connect with 25-year-old women. You're almost certainly going to alienate the people who have an investment in your brand, and there's no guarantee you're going to be successful with the new group."
By the same token, Keller is not suggesting that brands wait for the world to change before they evolve. "Your audience is a constantly moving target'changing needs, changing motivations, changing hot buttons. If you're not changing with them, you're on your way to becoming irrelevant."
Kevin Lane Keller is E.B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business.
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