8. Do What's Right For Your Brand, No Matter What The Market Is Doing
This is the eighth in a series about the Entrepreneur Magazine article “What 70 Airbnb Stays Can Teach Anyone About Running Any Business”.
In your business, your brand is your livelihood. You planted it as a seed, watered and fed it, and have cultivated it into the beautiful flower it is now. Poisoning your brand, or digging it up, would be a bad idea if it is flourishing. This is not to say change isn’t good, and refreshing a tired brand can have a good effect. But what if your brand is working? Stay the course and don’t change your path just because the rest of the market is doing something.
Case in point: everyone seems to be redesigning their brand, simplifying down their graphics to their essence, and changing their wordmark to a sans-serif font. There always some reason why, yet the truth is this: everyone is doing it, and “we look tired and old if we don’t change too”. Designers will help you change if you want to, but it’s the rare designer that will actually do the research and say “don’t touch a thing” if it truly doesn’t need to be changed.
In the craft beer world, there are tons of breweries opening every day. They all are trying to stand out, and shelf & tap space is limited, so what do they do? A lot of their salespeople use pay-to-play, a tactic that is illegal in almost all states, but some look the other way more than others. It’s a tactic that doesn’t work well in the long run. It may not mean giving away beer, but maybe promotional products, buying the bar a cooler they need, etc…all illegal. And short-sighted. But some craft breweries are refusing to play that game. One such brewery, Stone Brewing from San Diego, out-right refuses to do anything of the sort, and in fact punishes their distributors if they do it with their products. It may have hurt them in the early days, but they focused on the quality of their beer and have grown into a top 10 US craft brewery as well as expanded into a brewery in Germany. They did what was right for their brand and refused to play the game that so many others have played and lost. They let the market work in their favor, as their fans wouldn’t go to places that didn’t have their beer because the taps were full of pay-to-play brands.
AB-InBev is one of the biggest companies doing this, and they have to raise prices every year just because their share is going down every year and they need to offset the losses for their shareholders. When a 6 pack of Bud Light becomes just a little cheaper than a craft beer 6 pack, instead of very much so, the budget buyer may just spend that extra dollar to check it out…that seems to be happening now, if you dig into the numbers a bit.
Do what is right for your brand, no matter what everyone else is doing. Watch what they’re doing, make changes that make sense, innovate, yes…but don’t jump of a bridge just because your friends are.
This has been a fun series to do and was good for me to help flex my thinking muscles a little bit about this business stuff. Tomorrow, back to “dog blog”.
