We’ve covered celebrity brand woes and the impact of personal scandals on [...]]]> Justin Bieber has become the latest celebrity brand spokesman to find himself in brand trouble. Advertising Age wrings its hands at the damage his prank could do to his power as a celebrity endorser for brands such as Best Buy, Proactiv, and Google Chrome.

We’ve covered celebrity brand woes and the impact of personal scandals on national brands at length. Britney Spears shaved her head leading Pepsi to cut her off as a spokesman. Martha Stewart, Tiger Woods and Michael Vick also suffered lost endorsement deals when their immoral or criminal acts dominated the headlines.

Justin Bieber’s prank, trying to return a Wendy’s shake to a Burger King store, hardly rises to the level of scandal that hurts brands. Furthermore Justin Bieber’s brand is that of a cute teenage boy. The prank fits within his brand equity. Advertising Age does point out that being a jerk is part of being a teenage boy. And “teenage boy” is brand equity that sells pre-teen girls.

Note: This prank has gotten very little press mention, further blunting it’s impact on the selling power of Bieber as a pitch boy.

More on celebrities and brands:
When a Brand Is a Person
Nike Endorsement Deal Signals Michael Vick Brand Comeback
Michael Vick’s Potential as a Brand: Lessons from Martha Steward and Tiger Woods
Nancy Pelosi Enlists Steven Spielberg to Fix Her Personal Brand

While the hacking has slowed down the business side of News Corp., most notably in its bid for BSkyB, and criminal charges for top execs [...]]]> Will the News of the World fiasco hurt the News Corp. brand? I doubt it, for the same reasons that brands like Martha Stewart and Michael Vick have bounced back.

While the hacking has slowed down the business side of News Corp., most notably in its bid for BSkyB, and criminal charges for top execs remain a threat, the News Corp. brand will bounce back because:

1) The public already holds media in low regard. When the New York Times is guilty of wrong facts, slanted reporting and made-up stories and CBS News, the icon build by Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, wears a thick coat of tarnish, illegal hacking is hardly a death blow.

2) In an industry not held in high regard, integrity was never a key part of the News Corp. brand DNA. This is the company, after all, that invented the “Page 3 Girls” and used bare breasts to sell papers.

3) The core audience for the “news” aspect of the News Corp. brand distrusts government, does not idolize the elites that the hacking allegedly targeted, and doesn’t listen to the outrage of moderate-left to fully-leftist critics.

4) News is only a small part of the News Corp brand. Over 70% of the brand revenue comes from TV networks, TV programming, movies and satellite-TV services operations contributed. As Ad Age noted, “Is anyone really going to stop watching ‘American Idol’ on Fox or boycott 20th Century Fox movies over phone hacking by a British newspaper?”

It is “thank you & good bye” for News of the World, but onward and upward for the News Corp. brand.

Consumers pretty much always hate change–witness the initial flack when the [...]]]> Gawker.com fans were in full rebellion. Some threatened to never visit the site again. The Twittering class hated Gawker’s redesign launched February 7th. On February 9th, that all changed. Gawker.com broke the story of the “classy” Congressman showing off his flabby torso and traffic boomed.

Consumers pretty much always hate change–witness the initial flack when the new Starbucks logo launched last month. For Gawker, the reaction to their new design was as hate-filled as it was predictable. From Twitter:

FruitMuffin The new gawker redesign is terrible! @Gizmodo and @Lifehacker, I’m sad to say it, but you just lost a reader, it’s too annoying to use.

Zombie_Rights Wow, ok. Who decided to let Satan himself redesign all the Gawker sites, anyway? I was wondering what the big deal was about, and yeesh

norahpdx gawker‘s site redesign makes my face hurt. what a disaster.

Wise companies use design for strategic purposes that may or may not initially please the masses. In Gawker’s case, their new design makes it possible to put their important stories first. The old design locked them into a a reverse chronological order, making an important story disappear off the home page as new material was posted after it. Strategically, the move made sense.

Consumers don’t always understand strategy–they are driven by familiarity. The wisdom of Gawker’s redesign hit two days after the new site look launched. The icky pictures of a congressman who imagines himself hot proved irresistible. Traffic was still up by 22% as of yesterday, the latest available Alexa stats as I write this post. And this hot story is on the Gawker front page (though a Tom Cruise/Scientology Slave article–with an equal creepy factor–has nudged it further down towards the bottom.) The new design makes it possible for Gawker to squeeze this story for all it is worth in terms of site traffic and time on site–and that makes strategic sense, whether you like the design or not. Likeability is a direct function of familiarity.

Design is important to brand, but in the end, product is more so. A great logo and great packaging can’t save a crappy product. In the case of Gawker,  supplying “gossip from Manhattan and the Beltway to Hollywood and the Valley,” is something they continue to do very well.

As for the Gawker redesign haters, they can chill a bit. The new design will grow on them. Most brand redesigns do.

UPDATE: The company has posted a 12 percent decline in profit and a 5.5 percent decline in sales for the fourth quarter 2010.

The December, 2010 recall of Rolaids is more than a new cause for heartburn at Johnson & Johnson. Coming on the heels of a year of unprecedented recalls, this latest problem could tip [...]]]>

UPDATE: The company has posted a 12 percent decline in profit and a 5.5 percent decline in sales for the fourth quarter 2010.

The December, 2010 recall of Rolaids is more than a new cause for heartburn at Johnson & Johnson. Coming on the heels of a year of unprecedented recalls, this latest problem could tip the balance towards permanent brand damage. Beginning with the January 15th recall of Tylenol and expanding through the Spring and Summer with recalls of such consumer icons as Motrin, Benadryl, St. Joseph’s Aspirin, Mylanta, DePuy hip replacements, and prescription drugs like Epogen and Procrit, the Johnson & Johnson brand has suffered from a pattern of manufacturing and quality control failures.

Loss of More Than 27% of Brand Value
Grant Thornton’s September 10, 2010 report on declining brand value calculates that the Johnson & Johnson brand lost 27% of its value. And this analysis was done before some of the major recalls of the summer and fall. Moreover, the damage to the recalled product brands themselves has to be much, much greater. And possibly permanent. Consumers are being forced to switch to competitive brands and generic replacements. Convincing them to come back to Johnson & Johnson brands will be no small feat. That the company has been dragged before Congress and is the subject of an ongoing Department of Justice criminal probe does not help.

Johnson & Johnson Can’t Yet Take the First Step to Brand Repair
Restoring share of market and brand reputation will take plenty of money and even more time. Of course nothing can be done until the first step in brand repair can be taken, and that is: fix the problem–something that month after month of recalls, plant shutdowns and management shakeups haven’t been able to address. That the recalls are so broad-based across so many divisions in so many countries, and that they seem to just keep coming, does not bode well for the Johnson & Johnson brand that  so long has stood for trust.

A side note: Johnson & Johnson and its brands do not have either a Twitter or Facebook presence. As we have covered here and here, companies can’t wait until they are in a crisis to try and make effective use of social media.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due [...]]]> More and more Web sites are offering the “Connect with Facebook” option.

It appears Facebook Connect is succeeding where others have failed (most notably Microsoft’s Passport product). They are becoming the default internet ID card, saving users from having to create user names and passwords for every site they interact with.

Facebook Connect’s success is partly due to the fact that many people don’t understand Facebook’s many security flaws, partly because people really do want to share articles and commentary with their friends, and partly because site owners are happy to outsource their identity login systems and push Facebook Connect. Microsoft’s Passport never enjoyed these adoption drivers.

Yet how far will Facebook Connect go before it hits the same brick wall that stopped Microsoft?

Trust will be the ultimate limiting factor. Facebook makes constant security blunders. Just this last weekend, they enabled third party partners to access users’ private information without giving users clear notice and without explicitly allowing users to control access. ZDNet reported this latest bungle with the tongue-in-cheek observation, “I know I want the likes of FarmVille, and all their partners, to have my home address and phone number.”

More than likely, Facebook Connect will work fine in social settings, but won’t gain any traction in commercial settings. It is one thing for a hacker to break into your Huffington Post identity, but quite another for them to access all your bank accounts. The Facebook brand just has too many well-deserved trust problems.

(If you seek to thwart Facebook attempts to exploit your private information, read ZDNet’s advice in their Definitive Facebook Lockdown Guide.)

Read more on Facebook brand trust problems

Steve Jobs [...]]]> How much of the Apple brand equity is Steve Jobs? Is the brand at risk with Jobs’ new medical leave? When a major brand is closely tied to a single person (think of Yves St. Laurent, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump), brand value can rise and fall on the fortunes and failures of that person.

Steve Jobs is an iconic figure in technology and culture. When he holds up a gadget at any event, everyone oohs and aahs. Yes, the Apple brand is about cool design, but it is also about the guy that invented computing as we know it in a garage in Cuppertino. Jobs’ spectacular successes and instructive failures have given him status and credibility that can’t be matched. Apple without Steve Jobs has the potential to remain a cool company, but it could just as easily fall to the low profitability, declining sales and sinking stock price of the John Sculley era.

MarketWatch talks of the “Jobs Premium” in the share price of Apple stock. Apple shares fell 50% in 2008 when it was rumored Jobs’ pancreatic cancer had returned. They suffered a similar fall in January 2009 when he took a leave of absence for a liver transplant. On the immediate heels of his latest announcement of another medical leave, share value dropped 6.45% and has been shaky since.

What can Apple do? I certainly hope that Steve Jobs comes back from medical leave fit and healthy. Yet Apple, like any valuable brand, must face the fact that we all face the same unavoidable end some time. Here are three options:

1. Institutionalize the legacy of the person. Coco Chanel has been dead for decades, but her personal brand has become iconic and her spirit still infuses Chanel. Calving Klein is attempting to make the same transformation in his own company, while he is still alive to enjoy it. Orville Redenbacher has become a character, much like Colonel Sanders.
2. Find a successor. Frank Purdue found another tough man behind a tender chicken, in the person of his equally winsome son. Perry Ellis was succeeded by superstar Marc Jacobs.
3. Diversify.  Build on a strong personal legacy by adding additional attributes. Martha Stewart is less and less about Martha and more and more about design. She no longer appears on the cover of every issue and additional designers, like Kevin Sharkey, are sharing some of the spotlight. Condé Nast Publications continued and even thrived after the death of founder and driving force Condé Montrose Nast by focusing on high-end, glossy publications that set the standard for their categories.

More on brands tied to people–Celebrity Endorsers

The brand [...]]]> Burson-Marsteller released a study that claims 76% of blogs were off message. They analyzed more than 150 messages sent out by companies listed  in the Financial Times Global 100 and discovered a large gap between the official brand messages and how they were reflected on blogs, in tweets, and on other social media posts.

The brand message problems stem from a number of deficiencies by corporate marketing operations including:

1) Having no clear plan or objectives for communications on the social Web. An example here: Ziploc: Boring Doesn’t Work as a Social Media Engagement Strategy

2) Failure to understand that how social media is used is as important as what is said. More detail here:  Social Media Brand Engagement Rules:  Toyota vs Chevrolet

3) Failing to have a social media policy. A great library of social media policy examples from companies large and small that you can freely access, download, and adapt can be found here.

4) Not providing communicators outside of the marketing department with writing guidelines to explain how to write freely, but still stay “on brand.” This example from Diebold explains the brand’s voice. Diebold’s Branded Voice Guidelines. At Merriam Associates, we also include example messages so that people can see guidelines come to life (and re-use pre-written, pre-approved content.)

5) Lack of adequate control–things get “published” without enough oversight or double-checking. Once something is “out” it can’t be pulled back “in”. This article Viral Marketing Making Your Brand Sick is one example as is this mistake from Target from Halloween.