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Radisson shows how to reinvent a poor brand

People who travel aren't surprised to know that the Radisson U.S. hotel chain ranks at  the bottom in consumer satisfaction.  So the Chicago Tribune’s travel writer asked if I thought Radisson can save its dilapidated brand with its new “upper upscale” Blu hotel line, the first of which will take up 18 floors in the city’s stunning Aqua skyscraper. 

Absolutely.

In fact, Radisson’s Blu represents the only real way a company can hope to reinvent a brand whose reputation for dull, poor experience has become institutionalized in the nation’s hyper-competitive marketplace.

"When rebuilding a brand, you have to go all out," I told the Tribune. "If you do it incrementally, you're asking for a lot of patience. You have to overwhelm them. You have to create a level of cognitive dissonance that hits the reset button. That goes a long way toward creating a new life for an old brand."

Can’t wait to see the place.
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(Photo courtesy the Chicago Tribune)

Toyota and Tiger: Brands never really get fixed

Pundits and news media are debating whether Toyota or Tiger Woods will bounce back more quickly from their respective scandals.

But it’s wrong to think a celebrity brand returns to where it was before the stuff hit the fan. There’s no repairing a brand image that has been demolished by bad behavior. There’s only repositioning a brand to succeed in spite of it.

Toyota and Tiger will never be the personas they were before.  That’s not to say they won’t again dominate their markets.  They might.  But they’ll do so on different terms, from a new starting line.  Consumers and the institutions that influence them will align their affinity in context to what went down and how it impacted them.  They may feel totally jaded or think the whole thing is overblown.  But they’ll definitely consider it. 

The 24-7 news cycle and the Internet’s indefinite shelf life means that scandal will be part of the Toyota and Tiger consciousness for a very long time.   Even if there were no more nasty headlines to come – don’t bet on it -- it could be a generation before the smoke clears.

For high-profile brands embroiled in controversies of their own making, it’s an important distinction:  Even the best-spun apologies and damage control aren’t the end of the matter. They’re the beginning.
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What Tiger Woods and other scandals really tell us about crisis management

PR and media types over-analyze the Tiger Woods mess.  There are only a couple of lessons here.  But they’re big ones.

Here’s the first: The threat of discovery doesn’t stop some people from behaving badly.

Tiger’s melt-down isn't the failure of a crisis plan. There wasn’t one. None of Tiger Inc.'s image handlers prepared memos outlining what to do if it came out that Mr. Woods enjoyed extramarital affairs like some people collect snow globes.  Damage control strategies started after the truth.  Not before.

Today’s Internet-driven reality TV culture means we’re following scandals more than ever.  We’re very familiar with the “PR angle” of every story.  This has created a belief that PR is the end result of itself.  For example: Say a professional sports star gets caught illegally playing partybingo online. The public debate over how the athelete responds to being found out will quickly become as big a headline as the issue of whether what he or she was doing online had any undue influence.

We assume that image is a universally valued currency to be saved or squandered.  But this confuses how we rationalize self-destructive behavior by prominent people.

Take for example a recent Harvard Business Review article on responding to scandals.  In it two researchers argue that Chinese executives who added melamine to milk sold in the U.S. might have acted differently had they only anticipated people's emotional reaction people to media coverage about dead infants.

The world doesn’t work that way.  Businessmen who poison food to increase profits are criminals.  And criminals are psychopaths that by definition don’t care what happens to others. They’re bad people, not bad public relations planners.

True story.  Many years ago I was in my hotel room watching the local news when suddenly the TV showed a mug shot of my client.  The government official at the center of our at-risk youth campaign had been arrested for soliciting a teenage prostitute. 

We had nothing prepared for this.  What we did have, however, was an appreciation of how things would get worse if people thought we were treating the scandal as primarily a PR problem to be resolved with spin and posturing.  That got us through it.

In the same way, Tiger’s self-destruction also reminds us of the second lesson: That effective crisis planning is having the ability to respond to situations nobody sees coming. 

In the real world, that has to include people in charge being caught doing very bad things.

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Getting caught is the new transparency and other realities of the coming year

Five truths for 2010:

The age of transparency is mostly about getting caught.

Ten years into the new media era, the institutions we love to hate – government, banks, big business, media – aren’t any more willing to tell us what they’d rather keep to themselves. The constant outing of reality TV frauds, tax-supported executive bonuses, front groups and scumbag celebrities is still a function of how Americans use the Internet to inform and entertain themselves.  Not the other way around.

Social media is getting less social.

Over time, millions of people will stop using social media sites because 1) their bosses lock them out during working hours, 2) they tire of all the commercial clutter or 3) they learn how those revenue-hungry companies are sharing their profiles, posts and friends lists.

The Rocky Mountain News is still dead.

For all the outraged hang-wringing and new ventures, media consumers in Denver and many other American cities are still only willing to support one local daily newspaper.  Barely.

Journalism, however, isn’t dead.  It’s just changing.

So-called “advocacy” media will flourish as more formerly ad-supported news outlets – or individual journalists and commentators -- become funded by interest groups, politically leaning foundations, single corporations and even government.  Whether you think it’s biased or not will depend on your point of view.

No company will ever hide its identity again.  Har.  Kidding.

Getting nabbed isn’t as certain as, say, driving through a DWI checkpoint with an open bottle of cream de menthe in your lap.  But some well-known brand out there is going to have a major PR problem when it draws the first high-profile enforcement of the Federal Trade Commission’s new transparency in marketing rules.
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Is your social media agency into social media?

Marketing cage-rattler and blogger B.L. Ochman had the audacity to suggest that companies shouldn’t hire social media experts that aren’t “thought leaders” in using social media themselves.

This generated an immediate protest from one agency executive who said they don’t need to show their expertise in social media to prove they get it.  “For an agency to build a large community of followers,” she wrote, “is more difficult than for a marketer as they don't really offer anything to the general public.”

This “we don’t sell to the public” line is an old, specious defense by ad agencies that avoid spending their own time and money on the products they want other companies to buy in mass quantities. 

It rings even less true given social media’s supposed game-changing capacity to build business.
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Bloomberg makes big jump into consumer media with acquisition of BusinessWeek

The enduring but ailing BusinessWeek has been sold to Bloomberg LP in a cash deal that depending on who’s talking will either beef up the magazine or result in mass layoffs.

Bloomberg executives say they plan on substantially increasing the number of editorial pages in the magazine, which despite its prominence in the consumer business media market lost more than $40 million last year. 

Up to now, privately held Bloomberg has made most of its $6.3 billion in annual revenues from leasing data terminals to investment firms and corporate customers.
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A business primer on the new FTC transparency rules

Representing its most sweeping action in 30 years, the Federal Trade Commission’s new rules governing endorsements and testimonials will change how marketing is done.

Here’s what the Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising say:

ACCOUNTABLE FOR BLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA.

The FTC already directs online reviewers to disclose if they’re being paid by advertisers. Under the new rules, however, every blogger, Twitter user or social network member must disclose any “material connection” with a company, product or service.

Taken literally, this connection could result in fines for bloggers who fail to disclose anything from getting a sample can of chili in the mail to having a spouse who owns company stock. While consumer advocates support the guidelines, some prominent bloggers argue that the rules in effect force them to disclose every business relationship they’ve ever had.

Enforcement is another matter. The FTC says it will primarily go after the advertisers rather than individual bloggers, though it will take into account how companies encourage transparency in their paid reviews and freebies. Beyond that, the agency will decide matters on a case-by-case basis – which basically means they’ll know deceptive advertising when they see it. What makes things even more convoluted is that the agency doesn’t say by what means it will handle these situations.

Given that the new transparency standards for bloggers are higher than what’s required of commercial news media and politicians, the FTC rules are generating considerable debate among marketers and social media proponents alike. Stay tuned.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR TYPICAL RESULTS.

Ads that feature individual consumer experiences with a product will have to state clearly what kind of results everybody else can expect. Soon to be history are those ubiquitous ads that whisper “results not typical” while showing some guy who lost 300 pounds drinking vitamin shakes.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR EMPLOYEES.

Employees that promote their company or its products online must “clearly and conspicuously” disclose who they work for.

The FTC urges that companies have social media policies as one way to avoid fines or other actions when employees pretend to be someone else – say, a happy customer or invigorated shareholder.

Keep in mind, however, that a recent Deloitte study found that a third of all employees don’t even consider what their boss might think before posting something online.

ACCOUNTABLE FOR CELEBRITIES AND RESEARCH.

A warning to every company that uses movie stars, retired quarterbacks and 70’s sitcom actors for promotional tours. Under the new FTC guidelines, both advertisers and their celebrity spokespeople can be held liable for making false claims as part of a commercial endorsement.

The ramifications are huge. Celebrities making the rounds of late-night talk shows, state fairs and Twitter feeds must disclose their business relationship with any company or agency that’s paying them to pump movies, books, products or even charities.

Companies that quote research must also disclose if they paid for the studies, or if they have any business relationship with the organization that did the research.

These standards go way beyond front groups and hidden clients. From now on, any failure to disclose corporate affiliations could be considered deceptive advertising. That’s going to hit a lot of marketing PR campaigns.
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Download a PDF of the revised FTC rules here.

More CEOs serving as TV pitch-people

I’m quoted in a Chicago Tribune story about the increasing numbers of CEOs who star in their own advertising.  General Motors, Sprint and Walgreen are among the companies trying the boss-in-front strategy.

In most cases it doesn’t work.  There were several unique reasons why Lee Iacocca clicked as an advertising spokesperson.  There are a million reasons why today’s chief executives won’t.

At least most companies aren’t treating their CEOs like zany sitcom characters.  That’s worth something.
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I'm...sitting...on...the...patio.

A Verizon Wireless commercial creates a classic catch-phrase that embodies the multi-generation goofiness of today’s social media phenomenon.

Score another one for the brand that also defined the mobile phone boom with “Can you hear me now?”

Industry expert asks if Toyota's image is getting a free ride

Auto industry veteran Frank Sherosky asks if Toyota’s stellar reputation for quality is more a result of good image management than what really happens on the road.

CBS News reported that a former Toyota lawyer has filed a federal racketeering suit against the company for “ruthlessly” conspiring to hide evidence about hundreds of roll-over accidents in which the roof caved in.  The potentially damming case was filed in late July but took more than two months to make the news.

“In that respect,” Sherosky writes in the Detroit Auto Examiner, “it's hard not to at least question the media for bias. Does Toyota own a free-pass card in the press, when American companies like GM, Ford and Chrysler get slammed all the time?”

Toyota denies the allegations and says its former in-house counsel violated attorney-client privilege with his lawsuit and in the consulting work he did after leaving his job with a $3.7 million severance package.

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