– Chuck Sanchez, BatesMeron Sweet Design
Comcast. Electronic Arts. AT&T. Walmart. Dell. Time Warner. Fox News. McDonald’s.
Chances are, at least one of those company names kind of pissed you off just now.
Despite this likelihood, each of these brands is immediately recognizable due to widespread financial success in its respective industry. So must a brand be liked in order to be successful? Obviously not. But while likability is a subjective notion, it can still impact a business’s viability in the marketplace.
Consider this: a light dislike of a brand can earn it a dark horse, underdog or even bad-boy image that might even play into the product or service offering. Example: AXE Body Spray, the popular jerk of the personal products category.
A middling amount of brand aversion can split opinions, pitting a rabid core of brand loyalists against opposing outliers. Example: Apple, the too-cool-for-school hipster that even self-defined “PCs” pick for their mobile preference.
Brands that gather enough ire however, can fall victim to far more than public disdain or outcry. They often feel the pain of falling stocks or, in the worst of cases, permanently closed doors. Example: Ed Hardy, the tattoo-inspired frat boy of the fashion industry whose star burned brightly before burning out in an inferno stoked with the hatred of a thousand suns.
How do some big brands become so universally disliked?
Harkening back to a golden rule of Marketing 101, a company may only be successful at one or two of the following three aspects of its product: Quality, Service or Price. Only one, sometimes two, but never all three may be present for a company to thrive. It’s easy to see how some companies earn their bad reputations by focusing on quality or price, leaving service in a distant third.
As a result, brands are quickly learning that service is not as easily ignored as it was when word of mouth was the primary consumer access point. But while part of it is that big brands represent the corporate giant we love to hate, the other is that we’re reaching more of our peers with more effective platforms. The advent of online reviews, rant forums, Facebook status updates and Tweets have seen to that.
Yet, in an age in which branding can make or break a company’s future, far too many businesses put branding on the back-burner by forgetting that such a wired world is influential in maintaining a positive public image. Resist that urge. In the words of my agency’s namesake Becka Bates, “love your brand and it will love you back.”