IF YOU WANT TO SEE A GREAT EXAMPLE of how to completely ruin your brand positioning, turn your dial to NBC.
Until the early 1990s, the Peacock Network was the gold standard in late night broadcasting. Then, NBC let David Letterman defect to CBS, where he started a competing franchise that is today tops in the ratings (thanks, in part, to Letterman’s personal peccadilloes — but that’s beside the point).
Five years ago, NBC thought it was learning from history when it made a deal with Jay Leno to get him to step down from “The Tonight Show” in 2009, so Conan O’Brien wouldn’t take his comedy stylings to another network.
It was a fab idea, except they didn’t count on Leno still being a ratings winner when his “Tonight” came to an end. So NBC blinked and moved Leno into the 10 p.m. slot, effectively undercutting its core late night brand 90 minutes later.
And as we all know, they blinked again in January, pulling the plug on Leno’s new show and reinstating him on “The Tonight Show.” As for O’Brien, at press time his final show had aired and planning where he’d go to help further erode NBC’s late night beachhead.
What can marketers learn from the network’s foibles? For starters, there’s the basic lesson that, hopefully, all managers reading this already know: Your employees are your most valuable asset. Treat them with respect — if you don’t, it will cost you in the end.
Then there’s the age-old concept that Rome wasn’t built in a day. You need to test, and you need to hit your prospect/customer/audience with multiple impressions to build your brand. For a packaged goods marketer, that might mean an integrated campaign of print, TV and Web ads over a period of weeks or months. For a relaunched television franchise, that means giving the program time to build an audience — and not undercutting it with another show that dilutes its appeal to viewers.
And then, there’s the new-age concept that consumer opinions go viral today at light speed. At press time, the Facebook pages for “I’m With Coco” and “Team Conan” have over 824,000 and 211,000 fans, respectively. O’Brien’s fans used social media to organize rallies around the country to show their support and, naturally, videos of these events circulated around the ‘Net. As for the walls of Leno’s “fan” pages on the site, most are littered with pro-Conan and anti-Jay sentiments, many using language I choose not to repeat in a family marketing magazine.
Here’s hoping you treat your own brand and talent with more respect than NBC in 2010.
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