How to Engineer a Brand Turnaround

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Brian Bennett

STIR | President
Oct 22
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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
  • Off-page SEO – Google and aggregator listings, rankings, content and reviews
  • Digital infrastructure – Database / CRM, integrator & email capability
  • 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
  • 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
  • Influencer marketing – Can leveraging the recommendations and publishing power of influencers drive business and commerce for your brand?
  • Terrestrial media – Evaluate previous spends and plan effective campaigns
  • Event marketing – Where, when and how to participate in or stage events
  • 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.

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.

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.