Month: June 2025

When brand performance begins to falter, the first place to look is whether the brand’s promise is aligned with the consumer’s top purchase decision drivers. Whether marketing a successful brand or managing a brand turnaround, the most important notion to truly understand is your consumers’ preferences and how they are evolving. Clearly understanding these preferences will allow you to evolve your messaging in parallel to create maximum appeal. This is the ‘why’ of your brand.

It Takes Work to Stay on Top 

Keeping a brand properly positioned requires vigilance. As each brand and company is unique, there are innumerable ways that brand messaging can stray from its consumers’ desires.   

For example: 

• Often, the corporate culture does not want to challenge what has historically been accepted or the approach of the last marketing director. 
• Many times, sales departments will influence consumer messaging, leaning hard on what the trade feels is important, thereby overlooking the consumer’s desires.  
• What was once a powerful message may no longer be relevant. The consumer marketplace is changing rapidly. How products are consumed and perceived can change quickly.  

What Drives Consumer Preference?  

There are nearly endless reasons why a brand may be preferred by an audience. And at times, there is more than one in play. Here are several common drivers: 

• Lower price  
• Higher quality 
• Convenience 
• Special performance 
• Higher awareness and familiarity 
• Unique design or engineering 
• Cultural affinity with the audience 
• Greater distribution/availability 
• Greater product variety 

Gather Insight Without the Overspending 

The traditional way to understand consumers’ drivers is some form of market research, whether formal or informal. Unfortunately, custom research is out of budget for many brands, so marketers need to be savvy in how they gather information. 

Alternative Ways to Gauge Drivers: 

• Consumers vote with their dollars.  So, follow the trends in growth and sales. What is driving these trends? 
• Digital media provides immediate feedback on ideas and concepts.  What posts, ads and word combinations are producing clicks? What conversations are trending on social media? 
• Segment your buying audience. Understand the consumer’s various frames of reference, such as what their other choices tend to be and how they use the product. The differences between groups are often quite revealing.  
• Look into research panel studies like MRI | Simmons, which periodically examine a variety of categories. Sometimes this information can be accessed through media sources and agencies. 
• Drill down on the consumers’ media habits and lifestyle choices. This can be done through licensed research such as Nielsen | Scarborough.  This can help you break out preferences by geographic region. 
• Get into the market.  Marketing should not be driven from headquarters.  You need to get into the market by going to shows, events and wherever you find your audience. Interact with them regularly, and the truth will reveal itself. 

Transforming Data into Brand Engagement 

From the insights gleaned, a new model for consumer messaging should be built.  This model should consider the holistic brand situation. Determining a brand’s ideal positioning is not a formulaic process. Artificial intelligence (AI) alone will not get you there!  It takes authentic intelligence, plus creativity and intuitive analysis. It is important to keep things simple: There is immense power in listening to the consumer and appealing to the simple truths in their lives. 

With your new insights, you must craft a powerful new consumer messaging platform and bring it to life in a meaningful way. 

Let’s Talk

If you’d like to discuss, we are available for a conversation at no obligation to you. Reach out to Brian Bennett at bbennett@stirstuff.com.

When a brand’s performance starts to slip, it’s tempting to experiment and address the outward signs of weakness –  the symptoms. But often, the symptoms of brand trouble don’t reveal the root of the problem. They are just a sign of deeper problems, indicating that changes need to be made. But what changes? 

Unless you are certain of your problem and have the skillset to correct it, your fixes won’t stick. You’ll burn time, money and energy and still end up in the same place. Sometimes, these reactions create additional problems and begin to send a brand into a negative spiral. It’s important to get it right the first time. 

If you’ve been tweaking and tinkering, trying all the apparent solutions, but growth still stalls, it’s time for a reset. Step back. Zoom out. Take a fresh look, a new assessment. Look at your industry, category, business model, brand message, media and campaigns. Be open to change. As they say, ‘what got you here will not get you there.’ You may need a third-party consultant, who is not so close to the brand, to come in and lead the process. 

The marketplace is changing at an ever-increasing pace. There is little that you can take for granted. 

We suggest you begin at a macro level to isolate the issues: 

1. Can we rule out product design? 

• Is the product performing for its consumers at a competitive level? 
• Are others innovating where we are not? 
• Is the category evolving and leaving us behind? 

2. Are pricing, distribution and promotions to blame? 

• Do we make it incredibly easy to shop, price and buy our product? 
• Are we reaching our consumer in the media they most frequently consume? 
• Are our customers leaving great reviews about us on social media for others? 

3. Does our image and message resonate with our target audience? 

• Do we know what drives their decision to purchase? 
• Do we conjure positive perceptions and feelings?  Are we likable? 
• Are we seen as authentic, enthusiastic and well-intentioned? 

The Path Forward Starts with Smart Planning  

When a brand is underperforming, it’s usually not because of one thing—it’s a complex web of missed signals and unrealized potential. Knowing when and how to make changes takes expertise, dedication and the willingness to get uncomfortable with old habits. You don’t just need ideas. You need a holistic plan that’s strategic, built from scratch and tailored to your business—one that removes friction and unlocks growth. Given the stakes it is best not to go it alone. This is the time to bring in a marketing consultant/agency like STIR  and its Futurescape Planning Process.  

We’ll find the issues. We’ll map the fix. And we’ll spark the kind of creative and strategic energy that doesn’t just solve problems, it repositions your brand for the future. 

So, if your brand feels stuck, don’t just tweak. Transform. Let’s talk.

This article provides a high-level overview of what it takes to change the fortunes of your brand for the better through a brand turnaround and how to do it as effectively and efficiently as possible. Along the way, there are links to additional blogs on some of the specific subjects mentioned.

What is a Brand Turnaround?

When a brand is failing to perform in ways that run deeply through an organization, further than advertising or PR alone, it becomes evident over time. More than just a creative boost, it becomes clear that the core direction of the brand is not leading to success. The brand vision is cloudy and uncertain. Corporate leadership can see from objective performance metrics that something deeper, a brand turnaround, is necessary to meet corporate growth goals. And in that capacity, our company, STIR, has created a long list of successful resurrections for brands in a wide variety of categories. We are happy to share some high-level learnings with you here.

Typical symptoms of brand failure that drive leadership action are:

• Loss of or low market share
• Flat or negative sales trends
• Poor profitability
• Emerging competitors
• Underperforming products and sales staff
• Low website traffic and consumer engagement
• Unimaginative and unsuccessful marketing efforts

A brand turnaround in marketing is a comprehensive exercise that becomes necessary when the organization needs a fresh strategic perspective and a holistic refresh of its brand communications and digital infrastructure. Positive change at this scale goes beyond executional elements like logos and ads to detailed upgrades of marketing operations, marketing technologies and staff expertise. To make the necessary change, internal expertise often needs to be supplanted or augmented with the vision and talents of people trained specifically to accomplish this goal – brand turnaround specialists.

An Integrated | Holistic Capability Is Required

A brand turnaround is not an easy fix. A brand’s marketplace presence has many important components. These all need to be aligned for success. The weak-link analogy applies here. Addressing some, but not all elements simply will not generate the positive change leadership seeks. A growth engine needs to run on all cylinders. Few internal marketing professionals, within companies of any size, have the specific knowledge and experience to direct optimal alignment across all the specialized marketing tools involved. It is even more difficult to try to align and manage multiple independent vendor specialists in all marketing disciplines, as each will suggest actions that serve their own purposes, not a holistic brand solution. A holistic brand vision is required, and integration and management skills are paramount.

Mastery of All Disciplines Is Necessary

Here is a list of elements that must be expertly analyzed, aligned and rebuilt to produce positive results. Each requires mastery of best practices as well as a vision for integration. (Not every company needs or can afford all of these disciplines, but most need several of them to some degree.)

• Business review – Business situation, sales, marketing, corporate strategy, competitive, research & plans
  • Eight Steps to a Successful Rebrand
• Off-page SEO – Google and aggregator listings, rankings, content and reviews
• Digital infrastructure – Database / CRM, integrator & email capability
  • Build a Marketing Machine to Produce Growth and Profit
• Thought leadership & content marketing – Assess internal SME’s, blogging, video and existing content efforts vs. target audience needs
• Website performance – User experience, content, speed, on-page SEO, conversion path & performance, tracking tools
• Social media – Paid history & organic following, platform utilization, editorial content, CTA, engagement, cadence, listening & community management
  • Integrated Paid Social Campaigns Transform Marketing Plans
• Programmatic digital media – Prospecting and retargeting campaign utilization, performance
• Paid search – Evaluating existing campaigns and assessing the optimal structure of a paid search campaign
• Public relations – Generating awareness, third-party endorsement is a powerful brand tool
  • You Need to be More Mediagenic
  • Selling by Storytelling
• Influencer marketing – Can leveraging the recommendations and publishing power of influencers drive business and commerce for your brand?
  • Influencer Marketing will Influence Your Level of Success
• Terrestrial media – Evaluate previous spends and plan effective campaigns
• Event marketing – Where, when and how to participate in or stage events
  • Be the Talk of the Trade Show With Earned Media
• Marketing plan development – Objectives, strategies, audiences, geographies, spend levels, brand positioning platforms, media and messaging

Achieving Success Requires Sophisticated Planning

Each marketing element has its own unique role in the promotion of the updated brand. Through planning, all tactical efforts are aligned to strategy and scaled to achieve objectives. Catering individual strategies to address unique audiences and business situations on budget requires experience and skill. Marketing technologies must be developed to support the prescribed marketing techniques.

To accomplish this, a marketing plan is developed that unifies and integrates all elements and efforts. This plan also serves to unify sales, marketing and management in a new and reinvigorated direction. Your team needs total buy-in on the new direction for a turnaround to occur.

• A Brilliant Marketing Message is Simple

Developing Messaging That Will Resonate With Customers & Consumers

Particular care is taken in updating and/or interpreting the brand’s positioning and messaging at a strategic level. Advertising creative and content execution are the tip of the spear and must be crafted carefully to the requirements of the individual media and individual audiences to achieve desired effects.

• To Turn Your Brand Around, First Rethink It
• How to Develop Your Brand Story
• What’s the Matter with Your Brand?

With some companies, that messaging begins with a new company or brand name. With others, it’s an updated logo. In almost all cases work begins by creating a more compelling and highly functioning website. Clear, compelling and complementary creative is necessary to capture the attention and imagination of customers and consumers at the top of the sales funnel. The brand also needs to generate appropriate messaging that delivers a consistent brand persona at all touchpoints as prospects move through the sales funnel to conversion. The grand design for messaging should synchronize with the newly designed customer journey specified in the marketing plan.

Bringing In A Brand Turnaround Specialist

If this process sounds complex, that is because it is complex. If a company and brand leader tasks a team of first-timers to complete a brand turnaround, the end result is virtually guaranteed to take too long and produce suboptimal results. If the goal is to set the company/brand on an immediate path to success with massive upside potential, then a brand turnaround specialist like STIR Advertising & Integrated Messaging is the partner you’ll need to create success. We have literally changed the fortunes of companies, making them fortunes in the process.

While this process is complex it does not have to be tremendously expensive. A financial investment will certainly be required, but the process can be scaled to virtually any business. If your brand is not producing the growth and profit that it should, the key question should not be whether you can afford a brand turnaround, it is whether you can afford not to engineer a brand turnaround. Positive results are usually seen within a 12-month period. These efforts generally pay for themselves within a two-year period. After that point, your brand will be on a long-term path to incremental success and profitability for many years to come.

Let’s Talk

An initiative of this scale is something to consider carefully. If you’d like to talk about the process further we are available, at no obligation to you, for a conversation to help you assess whether this course of action will benefit your brand.