LEAVING LUCK TO CHANCE?
YOUR REPUTATION can take a lifetime to build. Yet it can be destroyed in moments. Mostly, status is represented by the brand(s). You are likely to have devoted extraordinary energies, ingenuity and financial resources to fine-tuning the product and the way in which you want it perceived by the buying public. Your brand is the biggest asset that you own, a source of huge pride and reward.
You sell internationally? But are you maximising the payback from this asset? Are you protecting the brand: which means ensuring that every public interface, no matter where, is consistent?
If, in your industry or service sector, you use a distributor, dealer or stockist chain as the main means to market, particularly for exports, your brand’s immune system is under most serious attack – and the infection may prove fatal.
Responsible for a sound and substantial business, you check out credentials then tighten the nuts and bolts of the agreements with your agents. Minimum quantities, floor planning, margins, shipping terms, warranties and guarantees are sorted and signed for. And you’ll provide them with brochures, free, if pushed. Then, its over to them. Let the cash roll in.
You might as well hire in the marching trumpeters, daub “Jericho” on the walls of the brand and let demolition commence. Your brand has just been surrendered. You have marginalised that biggest of assets – unless you are exceptionally lucky. In business, luck can be a wildcard saviour. But should you leave luck to chance?
RELINQUISHING
It beggars belief that such a proportion of business is prepared to relinquish its brands to third parties, who cannot be expected to share in intellectual, or bottom-line, aspirations.
This is not to denigrate the sales efforts of distributors and dealerships, most of which are successful businesses in their own rights and know a good deal about developing and protecting their companies: about protecting their own brands. After all, that is what they are in business for.
Herein lies the crux of the dilemma. You have to accept that your percentage earners’ priorities revolve around their own businesses, that your product lines are a means to an end, along with the many other goods they represent. That should never equate to handing over the safe-keeping of your brand to third parties, just because the chain links say that others have done so and do so.
They will tell you that there are huge cultural differences, country to country, region by region. They will toss in that laws and regulations regarding advertising and promotions are equally diverse. And they are right, in many export markets.
Yes, you value their input highly. Yes, you want them to work in close co-operation with your own people and PR/marketing consultants. Yes, there can be a degree of flexibility, particularly at sales promotion level.
No, no, you do not accept that they understand more about the integrity and value of your brand than you do, nor that they will always (if ever) give it number one priority within their operations.
CRUCIAL
Instead, you are lease-lending them the means to make money for both parties. Because your brand is so crucial to your business – and offers tangible benefits to the dealer, when handled carefully – the way in which it is presented to market, plus after-market standards, must remain strictly under your control.
Consumers should be offered total brand experience, anywhere in the world. How a brand goes to market will either add value for its customers or snatch value from them. Increasingly, the real test of value lies not merely in what is being sold, but how it is being sold.
Marketing should be a service to the consumer. The key is that successful international brands feel like local brands in every market, yet look the same all over.
Which means that you control the look, shape and feel of the advertising. You manage all but very localised PR.
You work with the partner to produce relevantly customised literature, always with the unmistakable, undiluted look of your brand. You conspire with this partner to make sure that consumers can pick out the product, for they can only buy goods and services when they are readily available.
Having seen what is on offer, they should recognise it instantly and appreciate what it stands for. Perceived quality and status will be the signals to buy.
In short, you help the people to sell the product that you sell to them. They may not like that and are entitled to say so. You listen. But as the custodian of your brand, the guardian of your own future, you make it clear that you know best. It’s the only way forward for building an international presence.
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