So, What Do I Do When My Personal “Brand” Goes Bad?

By Vic Downing

© Vic Downing March 2007

“My Brand?”

You need a brand at work at least as much as a bar of soap needs a brand in the supermarket.

You don’t buy soap. You buy a particular bar of soap. You buy Ivory soap or grape seed soap or the cheapest soap or the most fragrant soap. What you are buying is a brand. A brand is to soap what the doorknob is to your door: it is the doorknob—not the door—that you grip and that gives you entry into the house.

A brand is a mental “doorknob” the soap maker has installed in your brain. When you think of soap, you “grab on to” a collection of feelings or thoughts or expectations you have associated with a particular product that is easily recognized by the way its name is displayed or the color or shape or feel or odor of its packaging. The connection between the packaging, name, color, shape, feel, and fragrance of the soap and your feelings has been established by your direct experience with the soap and your indirect experience of the soap which you have gained from advertising and the comments of other people.

In the same way you don’t buy soap, employers don’t hire and promote employees. Employers hire and promote calm-under-pressure employees, oil-on-the-water employees, can-sell-anything employees, expensive-but-worth-it employees, et cetera.

A brand is a mental “doorknob.”

Work hard, show up on time, and do what you’re supposed to do makes you “a bar of soap”… a good bar of soap no doubt, but just a bar of soap among many other good bars of soap. Work hard, show up on time, do what you’re supposed to do and develop the expectation in your employer that you are as valuable to the team during deadlines as a safe harbor is to a ship in a storm—do that and you will be the “bar of soap” that is chosen when others are not.

Brands Go Bad?

What comes to mind when you think of Enron? No doubt you think of scandal, corruption, exploitation, and tragedy. At one time Enron had a very well known and very positive brand. Something happened (and many things didn’t happen) that caused that brand to “go bad.” The same thing happens to people at work.

Terrific employees who (for whatever reason) start missing deadlines, get caught stealing, lose their composure in meetings, et cetera have brands that “go bad” almost over night. The solution to those brand problems is very clear: take responsibility for what you have done and start over by consistently doing exceptional work. If you can’t start over, find a new position with a different employer. Whining, rehearsing excuses, and denying the problem amount to career-suicide. You were the cause of the problem. You hold the solution in your hands. Fix it.

The best way to spot your brand going bad is to become very familiar with what your brand looks like when it is doing well.

The causes of your brand going bad may or may not be under your control. It doesn’t matter. For example, in 1982 seven people in the Chicago area died after ingesting Extra Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide poison. Tylenol’s market share immediately dropped from 35% to 8%! Overnight the Tylenol brand plummeted from “reliable pain reliever” to a “deadly pill masquerading as medicine.” The culprit was never found. Not fair.

What happened to Tylenol can happen to you. You can “get crossways” to a person or a department or a customer and suddenly you are persona non grata everywhere in the company. Regardless of the cause, the first thing you need to do is spot the problem and start taking powerful, intelligent action.

How To Spot Your Brand Going Bad

In the case of Tylenol, the signs were easy to spot: people died and market share was lost. It is a lot tougher to spot a brand problem at work.

Spotting your brand going bad (before it is too late) is like spotting a counterfeit ten-dollar bill. The best way to spot a counterfeit ten-dollar bill is to study a real ten-dollar bill. Once you’ve become very familiar with the real thing, the counterfeit is easy to spot. The same thing holds true for brand problems: the best way to spot your brand going bad is to become very familiar with what your brand looks like when it is doing well.

The following table should help:

Comparing a Strong Brand to a Weak One

	Your Brand Is Strong and Positive	Your Brand Is Weak Or Is Going Bad
Invitations	You are usually invited to meetings, invited to join teams, invited to share your views. You are never “left out” or if you are, it is obviously a sincere mistake and others are very troubled by that oversight.	You are invited less often or not at all, or you are invited because you “have to” be invited. Occasionally someone “forgets” to invite you or “forgets” to brief you as thoroughly as the others.
Conversations	Conversations are “alive” and “real.” You and the others are usually spontaneous, confrontational, respectful, humorous, inquisitive, and candid.	Conversations seem forced or formal or awkward. If included, you are tolerated or others react to you with a polite façade but rarely “let their hair down” with you, sincerely joke with you, or strenuously challenge you.
Beyond Work	It is not unusual for you and the others to “linger” after the meeting or “hang out” occasionally after work.	Interactions with others seem to be limited to the meetings. Conversations focus on business alone.
Follow-Through	When you win the commitment of others, they almost always follow-through on time and in the ways you and they have discussed.	Even though others seem to agree to implement your recommendations, it is not unusual for the action to not be taken, or for the action to be significantly delayed, or for the action to be done in a significantly different way.
Candor	Others are straightforward and clear about their expectations of you, their value of your work, their disagreements with your point of view, their personal preferences, etc. It is not unusual for others to strongly disagree with you and to persist in the disagreement until some resolution is achieved. It is not unusual for others to spontaneously applaud you for your unique way of adding value.	At best, encounters are polite or politically correct and nothing more. It is unusual for others to engage you in a clear-cut disagreement; it is even less likely that others will persist in that disagreement until some resolution is obtained. “Applause” of your unique contributions is rare or non-existent. Even though you explicitly seek to “get to the bottom” of the (ill-defined) problem, in the end things pretty much remain “chilly” or impersonal.

What To Do When You Spot A Brand Problem

Take powerful and intelligent action right now.

The causes of your brand going bad may or may not be under your control. It doesn’t matter.

The Tylenol murders were spotted on September 29, 1982. On October 5, 1982 Johnson & Johnson (the parent company of Tylenol) halted the production of Tylenol, distributed warnings to hospitals and distributors, and recalled 31 million bottles of Tylenol with a value of $100 million (in 1982 dollars!)

In less than one year J&J’s market share rebounded from 8% to 35%. In November of 1982 J&J introduced a triple-sealed package that became the world-standard for safety. Today Tylenol is the most popular over-the-counter analgesic in the US. Today J&J and Tylenol have a universally recognized brand that is virtually synonymous with customer-focused, honest, and safe.

Here’s the point :you never have a higher stage or a more attentive audience than when you have bad news. (Needless to say, that is no reason to go out and create bad news!) When there is a traffic accident, people gawk. When you have a brand problem, people gawk. Use bad news to your advantage in the same way J&J used it to their advantage.

Following is a process that will help:

1. Team-Up: Fixing your brand when it is going bad is tough work. It is emotional and the problems and solutions are elusive. Persuade at least one, trusted, tough-minded friend to be your coach. Give him/her the assignment of holding you accountable to the following steps. You want to err on the side of someone who is tough rather than compassionate and someone who has no time to spare rather than someone who “has time.”
2. Lock-In A Target: Set a specific date by which time you need to see things move from the right-hand column to the center-column (above). Put the date in your calendar today.
3. Forget About Fairness: Make a list of reasons you are not responsible for the problem, a list of the ways others are mistaken, and a list of the “dirty tricks” that have intentionally and unintentionally been used against you. File the list. Every time your mind returns to how “all of this is unfair” and “doesn’t make sense,” review your list, reassure yourself that you already know these things, and then move on.
4. Put A Point On The Problem: Review the list of five indicators of problems listed above. Identify the description(s) that most match your experience. Write down specific, dated and timed examples of those problems. If you can’t write down the specifics, then you are probably imagining things (in which case you need to upgrade your attitude and get back to work).
5. Make Sure You Aren’t Feeding The Fire: (A) Work very intensely to identify how you have contributed to the problem. Your contribution to the problem is the one part of this whole mess over which you have total control. When you find your contributions to the problem, go fix them. (B) What are you personally accountable for accomplishing? Are you doing it? If not, fix the problem. (C) Take a look at the five indicators of a brand going bad (listed above). Are you doing any of those things in the right-hand column? If so, stop. Start doing the behaviors in the center column.
6. Focus on Your “Target” (# 2, above) At Least Once Each Week: If you think you see movement from the right-hand column to the center column, confirm it with someone you trust. If you don’t see movement by your deadline, then give the lion’s share of your attention to moving yourself into a completely different work group or organization. Don’t keep waiting for things to get better. They won’t. Get moving. Build a better brand in a new “market.”

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