A Marketing Lesson Courtesy of The White Stripes
YOU'RE WORKING HARD.
But your regular scheduled programming has been interrupted. The stock market is in a free fall. Restaurants and bars have closed their dining rooms. Travel is being limited left and right. And you can't find decent TP within 10 miles of your house.
But as they say, the show must go on, even though our business operations will look very different in the coming months. Those fortunate enough to continue working will do it remotely from home.
Moments like these put our work in perspective. You might be looking at your brand now and wondering what happens next. What should we be talking about? How do we continue to help our customers?
It may have been a long time since you've critiqued the value your brand provides. It's natural. Businesses evolve. You get some success and then pieces get added on. Soon there are tangents. New products or services that don't quite fit. Maybe you quickly jumped into a new market but haven't made the splash you expected.
And because you're so busy running the business, you normally can't step back to evaluate let alone make the right changes. It's a looping problem.
If you're in this boat and have questions about what to do now, it's time to think long-term. The White Stripes said it best in their song "Little Room," the official anthem of Ivor Andrew.
“Well, you’re in your little room and you’re working on something good. But if it’s really good, you’re gonna need a bigger room. And when you’re in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room.”
STEP BACK INTO YOUR LITTLE ROOM.
With so much change, sometimes you forget how you grew from a little room to a big room. With the world forcing us toWFH as we distance ourselves from others, what you do in the coming months will have a direct impact on your following 12-18 months.
Leverage this opportunity to work on your strategy and rediscover why you first started in that little room so you can plan to move into your next bigger room. Get the conversation going by asking a few of our favorite brand discovery questions:
What business are you really in?
How do you measure success as a brand?
Why should customers care about you?
What pain points do you solve?
Who is your ideal customer?
How does your brand interact with your existing customers?
What can you do to increase the lifetime value of a customer?
By stepping back now, you can go farther later. Just don't do it in a vacuum.
Companies that dedicate time to strategy often do so without parties that bring perspective. The biased opinions of employees and filtered customer points of view make it difficult to be truly objective. As we often say at Ivor Andrew, it's impossible to read the label from inside the jar. If you don't know where to go from here, a third-party consultant or agency can bring that much needed external perspective to give you a balanced view.
Remember, now is perfect opportunity to strengthen your brand foundation so your next room can be the biggest yet. Let's get started.
Note: Meg and Jack White do not endorse Ivor Andrew, but they also don't NOT endorse Ivor Andrew.
