Time to Reinvent Your Branding

Call it what you want, but few pop stars and fewer businesses have understood the intricacies of Madonna’s genius of reinvention and the inevitable end of the business cycle. Learn from the branding expert. While Madonna soars, everyone else seems to stumble, bumble and disappear down a deep, dark hole.

So, what is it about Madonna Incorporated that has allowed it to consistently reap profits for more than 18 years on the trot? And is there something we in business can learn about branding from the chameleon of pop music?

Gasp! That’s what the audience would do, every time Harry Houdini cheated apparent death. Except that death was a deliberate stroke of genius to keep the name of Houdini alive forever.

Madonna seems to have used the same bag of tricks. Reinventing herself in almost clockwork fashion, she has transmogrified herself successfully into material girl, boy toy, media maven and working mom. And she made big bucks all the way.

With green-fingered precision and lots of tender loving care, she plays along with Mother Nature. In every phase, Madonna has realized that things change with the season and accordingly dug deep to replant new shoots. Summer plants die; it’s a fact of life. You can whine and whimper but if you understand the basis on which Mother Nature works, you can pretty much put it to work in your own business.

Most businesses experience growth both intellectually and physically, yet every business seems to run on summer growth. Never changing, never evolving, they hope Jack Frost will give them a wide berth when the cold days roll along. That doesn’t always happen and when the business peters down, it’s “let’s blame the economy” time, when all they’ve done is failed to plan for the end of a business cycle.

Take for instance a big law firm in Auckland, New Zealand. Lots had changed within the firm. It had grown considerably over the years and believed that its outdated logo was the hallmark of the firm.

Simple research showed otherwise. The clients hated it; Fuddy-duddy, they called it. Yet, it had nothing to do with the law firm. The partners and the lawyers were as competent as ever, if not more than before. A simple logo change, some internal and external fix-its and voila! They could do little wrong.

It had nothing to do with the firm or the quality of its lawyers. They had simply failed to track public opinion that had gone against them. Once they realized it, they could mend it. Once they fixed the logo (among other things), they were reborn.

Madonna’s outward reinvention is her most dramatic feature, but at the same time. she’s plugging away at her new spiritualism and lifestyle and hopefully it reflects in the lyrics as well.

Take the cases of a few other artists. Billy Idol has wound his rock roots down dramatically and enriched his music to encompass several genres and languages. It’s a quiet, manicured reinvention that his fans lap up in eager anticipation.

Sometimes the reinvention is loud and sometimes it’s soft, but it’s never non-existent. Pop stars are good examples because it can often take one album to make or break them. You can serve 20 shoddy meals at your restaurant and still get away with it, but they can’t. Even the stars who appeared to exude stillness like Frank Sinatra were actually living very close to their brand image.

At the end of the day, the calories are the proof of the pudding. If you don’t stand and deliver, you can reinvent to death without any change in your bottom line whatsoever.

Sean D’Souza is chief brain auditor at Psycho Tactics.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

For your business, there are several avenues that you need to magnify and reinvent. The main areas that you need to look at are:

Communication: Logos, newsletters, emails and more. Do they really meet your clients’ needs? Have you become so busy doing things that you’ve forgotten to reflect your true worth to your clients?

Customer Loyalty: Are you stretching these parameters? Are your customers becoming more or less loyal? And either way, why? What do you need to reinvent and reanalyze? And do you have a customer loyalty program at all?

Failure Analysis: This is a biggie. If you’re not analyzing and welcoming failure, you’re going to be stuck on your island for so long that you’ll sink. If you want to double your success rate, you’ve got to double your failure.

—S.D.