Keeping Your Brand Resilient

Today’s brands are more valuable than ever, but they’re also more fragile. With saboteurs lurking around every corner (inside and out), organizations need to manage risk, be ready to defend against attacks and bounce back fast after a hit.

How can you protect your brand? By playing active and consistent defense.

Tune into the latest episode of Deloitte Insights learn more about brand resilience.

Speakers

Jonathan Copulsky, Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP

Transcript 

Sean O’Grady, Host, Deloitte Insights: Hello and welcome to Insights. Today, we are boning up on a new book called Brand Resilience: Managing Risk and Recovery in a High-Speed World, and it was written by this guy. His name is Jonathan Copulsky. He also happens to be a principal in Deloitte Consulting. Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us today on Insights.

Jonathan Copulsky: Delighted to be here, Sean.

Sean: Thank you sir. My first question is what is brand resilience? What is this book all about?

Jonathan: Sean, it’s about two things: it is about risk and it is about resilience. It is about managing all the risks to your brand and then about helping companies to recover rapidly and effectively once they face those risks.

Sean: Now, I had the opportunity to check out the book and you wrote that “Marketing (to quote you) is no longer about building a brand.” There is a need for “brand defense.” Tell me a little bit about that?

Jonathan: Sure, so by any measure that we have looked at, brands are much more valuable than they have ever been before, any measure, but at the same time, they’re also a lot more fragile, which means that you have got to be mindful of the risk that brands face. Every day, brands that we see face a barrage of potential attacks from what we have called saboteurs in the book. And you have to think about these saboteurs as like an insurgency. You don’t know who the people are. You don’t know what they are going to do next. At every time you think that you have got things mastered, they come up with other ways to attack you. So, when we think about brand risk, we think about intelligently managing those risks and the only way that we think that people can do that is through playing active and consistent defense.

Sean: Very interesting metaphors sir. We have a couple of illustrations from the book. We have popped one up on the screen for the audience and it is about outside and inside threats. Tell me a little bit about this graphic and the threats to a brand from both the outside and the inside?

Jonathan: Think about a competitor. Competitor may see that you have got a little bit of a problem with one of your products. Maybe, it doesn’t work quite the way you thought it would work. Now, all of a sudden, they pounce on you with an ad or think about that same competitor who poses as you on the social media. That’s an example of an outside one. Think about an individual who happens to have a million and a half followers on Twitter and all of a sudden decides to post something to Twitter because they are having a bad hair day and maybe they are a little unhappy with you. And so they write about your brand and some of the negative experiences that they have had or think about a customer, a loyal customer, who buys hundreds of dollars’ worth of product from you every day, but all of a sudden they have got a problem and they have made 10 calls to your customer service line, and they can’t get it resolved, and all of a sudden decides to set up a Facebook page, and the next thing you know they have 50,000 followers on that Facebook page. So, those are examples of outside ones. Internally, could be your employees, could be your senior executives, and it would even be the brand ambassador who you think represents you to external communities, to your consumers, and to your various partners. So, think about that employee who has maybe a little bit too much of drink, comes home that night, decides wouldn’t that be nice to describe their day at work at your company, naming your company, and post that to the Facebook page. Those are all internal threats.

Sean: It would be a dangerous presence online for some organizations. We have another graphic from your book. It is up there on the screen now for the audience, and this one shows the seven steps to brand resilience. Can you explain me why you think organizations should follow these seven steps?

Jonathan: Oh, absolutely. In today’s world, as we said, managing brand resistance is like, you know, fighting a war of counterinsurgency, and so we think about all the different steps, but the one which is most important is the step that we call learn and adapt. Now, when we wrote this book, we found a great source to look at and that’s the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was written a couple of years ago, sponsored by David Petraeus, and he provides a number of activities and suggestions and so forth, which we have adapted for the book. But what they talk about in the book is when we think about a world of counterinsurgency, you always need to prepare for the unexpected. So, your organization’s capability to be resilient is about learning and adapting. In fact, they say war today is a learning competition and the side which learns the quickest is the one that wins.

Sean: Well, I certainly hope that folks have learned a lot from this segment. Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us today here in New York City.

Jonathan: Thank you, Sean.

Sean O’ Grady: You’re welcome. Alright, we have been talking about the new book, Brand Resilience: Managing Risk and Recovery in a High-Speed World, with author Jonathan Copulsky, a principal in Deloitte Consulting. If you would like to learn more about Jonathan, the book, or any of the topics we discussed on this program, you can find that information and much more by visiting our Web site. It is www.deloitte.com/us/podcasts. For all the good folks here at Insights I am Sean O’ Grady. We will see you next time.

As used in this document, “Deloitte” means Deloitte & Touche LLP, a subsidiary of Deloitte LLP. Please see www.deloitte.com/us/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.