Marketing Launches: Risks to Avoid

Launching or transforming a corporate brand carries a great deal of risk and uncertainty, and its ultimate success or failure often falls into the lap of the internal marketing team.

So, how can you safeguard yourself? Before building your marketing communications launch plan, here are just a few typical launch traps you should look out for:

Wearing rose colored glasses – Often, feedback from audiences or internal groups raises a red flag. It is viewed as an obstacle to achieving business goals and unfortunately, this warning is often ignored. According to Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge blog, CEOs, often dismissive of marketing, are discovering a dangerous reality: aggressive marketing and brand-building can boost stock prices by raising customer and investor expectations. But the penalties for not delivering on marketing promises are fast becoming as significant as not meeting quarterly earnings targets.

Message Dartboard - The absence of testing the advertising messages is like playing darts. Maybe you’ll hit the target, maybe you won’t. Marketers are often guilty of spending too much time focusing on the how (the medium being used to transmit their message) and not enough time focusing on the what (the message itself.) An effective marketing message will be effective no matter what medium is used to transmit it.

Short changed - A lack of sufficient financial resources to adequately support the effort. Budget goes hand-in-hand with measurable results. Your CEO MUST see a return on marketing investment so have a plan in place that provides the numbers to keep ‘em writing the checks. Nirmalya Kumar, in his book Marketing as Strategy, writes, "Today, many CEO's of major companies are disappointed by marketing's inability to produce measurable results. Increasingly they view their marketing department as an expense, rather than an investment.” So how do you get your CEO to see you as an investment? MarketingProfs argues that marketing must have a visible financial impact, must have a visible impact on the CEO, and campaings must be memorable.

Remember, launching a brand brings a unique set of risks, expectations and pressures that differ greatly from any other type of marketing communications efforts. The key is knowing the risks early on, and developing a smart marketing plan that overrides every risk you face.