On building a robust nest

How much care do we take to present our companies and brands in a thought through manner in our day to day interactions.

I thought of this a couple of days back at a supermarket. While walking through food products aisle with my wife, I completely dismissed a brand which is heavily advertised as a healthy add-on to rotis made at home. The brand is well respected, it spends a large amount of money marketing itself and in recent times it’s done a very good job of riding a wave of health consciousness.

There were three, at first glance unconnected reasons for my dismissing the brand:

1. Over 10 years back, I had a short interaction with that company when my client was conducting a joint promotion with one of their brands. During the course of the promotion, the then Marketing Manager of this company showed himself to be quite inept. He kept changing his mind ever so often (which happens with many clients) and lied brazenly (less common). In the process he botched up the promo we were running and shoved the responsibility on my client and on everybody else in his own company. To top it all, the company delayed our payments by over six months.
2. Separately, about two years back, during my interactions with some other well respected experts in the food business I was told how the company short-changed its products and relied on advertising hyperbole which they found easy to get away with given the lax regulatory standards.
3. Last month, one of my colleagues was talking about her experience with an “innovative” product in a different category that the same company had launched. Her experience was terrible; the product didn’t work, it leaked and the retailer refused to take it back.

It was Jeremy Bullmore I think, who said many years back that people build brands the way birds build nests, from scraps and straws we chance upon. If that is true, the scraps and straws I picked up about this company were very fragile.

I wonder if we leave behind similar impressions, maybe unknowingly on people we come in contact with. And 10 years later, will we have one more unfavourable ambassador for our company or brand who will go about undoing the conversions we painfully tot up on presentations. After all in today’s multi-avatar world, each of us plays the role of a consumer, a marketer and an evangelist, often all together.