What Kind of Long-Term Marketing Are You Unintentionally Creating?

The idea of the ‘long-term’ is a strange and paradoxical one in business. You might feel as though a lot of your initiatives are to do with laying groundwork for the future, but this could also be something that’s disrupted by repeated pledges to renew your brand when things aren’t going how you’d like them to.

Still, while these eras of renewal might feel like fresh starts to you, your audiences likely don’t see it in quite the same way. Therefore, it becomes important for you to think about your brand as a whole – the narrative that you’ve created from your origins to now.

Natural Changes and Evolution

This is something that occurs with every brand, and with brands that have been around for decades, expecting a long-term narrative to be cohesive isn’t just unrealistic; it creates a disparity. Many people might like to draw attention to the ways in which Coca-Cola has changed since the 1950s, especially in regard to the ingredients that it uses. What’s interesting about this is even though the company has arguably changed in many ways to the point where it obviously no longer resembles that older self, it still has to protect itself as if it were a consistent entity.

Your business will change, your business will hopefully improve, and that will make you look back on your older self with some degree of shame or discomfort – but there is reason to be proud of that progress. 

Issues and Responses

What is most important about this evolution is that you learn the right lessons. Not every business will have the luck of smooth sailing – there will be problems. Some of these problems will be bigger than others, such as in the case of suffering a massive breach, leak or some other kind of cybersecurity attack. The lesson that you learn in these cases is very vital, however, and can help inform your business going forward. If you find out what is MDR in cyber security, that then means you can implement measures that make your brand much more secure – preventing that from happening again and changing audience perception to one that, over time, views you as a beacon of security and safety.

Negatives and Contradictions

However, the long-term and these constant renewals are where ideas of contradiction can occur, and that’s something that can shatter the illusion of your marketing and your values. Deciding to renew your business as a beacon of environmental care and respect because you know that this might resonate with your audience won’t cover up previous actions that were directly antagonistic to this issue or the groups that support activism.

Equally, if you decide to get involved with causes that promote things like employee wellness or something similar, but your business is flooded with negative reviews from old employees about their time with you, a disparity emerges. You have to understand your business as it’s seen through the eyes of your customers.