Skip to main content

Am I Leader Or Legend?

Never mind the faulty math, the Big 10 conference re-brands itself as six 'Leaders' and six 'Legends.'   Let's see.  I'm a Wisconsin alum so I should care most about...Leaders...and which teams are those again?

As an audience, physicians can be pretty tough.  But messin' with college football fans takes real courage, especially with such a questionable idea.  Somewhere a branding consultant is frantically shopping for a Kevlar athletic supporter.

Isn't it amazing how many re-branding efforts go comically awry?  I recently gave Drake University a D+ for their recent re-branding, mostly because that's the grade they gave themselves.  What grade should we assign the Big 10?  Maybe an 'F' for the math and an 'Incomplete' because I predict they'll soon ditch 'L-squared.'

What might have happened here?  Well, notice Commissioner Jim Delany's comment in the Tribune article linked above:
"I know us. I think what we did was right."
Lots of 'I's' in that statement.  My guess is it's evidence of some smart people inward-focused to a fault.  The first thing leaders should remember is that branding is not really about THEM, their opinions, their comfort zones or even their latent narcissism.

I define a brand as "that which an organization is willing to deliver and actually capable of delivering." Willingness and capabilities, no more, no less, are what connects an organization with the marketplace.   It's about what the MARKETPLACE wants, not what the organization's CEO WANTS them to want. 

Thinking about making a change, freshening-up your own brand?  What do they need?  What do you deliver?  Figure it out BEFORE you do something cringe-worthy, not after.

Update later today:  Word from various sports talk radio programs is that Big 10 officials expected the negative blow-back and have no intention of changing course.  Fine.  I'll simply pay them no more mind.  (See yesterday's post about brand breakups, below.)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor
Post a Comment
Read more

Being Disrupted Ain't Fun. Deal With It.

Articles about disrupting healthcare, particularly those analogizing, say, Tesla's example with healthcare's current state, are frequently met with a chorus of (paraphrasing here) "Irrelevant! Cars are easy, healthcare is hard." You know, patients and doctors as examples of "information asymmetry" and all that. Well, let me ask you this: assuming you drive a car with a traditional internal combustion engine, how much do you know about the metallurgy in your car's engine block? I'll bet the answer is: virtually nothing. In fact it's probably less than you know about your own body's GI tract. Yet somehow, every day, us (allegedly) ignorant people buy and drive cars without help from a cadre of experts. Most of us do so and live happily ever after (at least until the warranty expires. Warranties...another thing healthcare could learn from Tesla.) Now, us free range dummies - impatient with information asymmetry - are storming healthcare
Post a Comment
Read more

My Take On Anthem-Cigna, Big Dumb Companies and the Executives Who Run Them

After last Friday's Appeals Court decision, Anthem's hostile takeover of, er, merger with Cigna has but a faint pulse. Good. Unplug the respirator. Cigna's figured it out but Anthem is like that late-late horror show where the corpse refuses to die. Meanwhile, 150 McKinsey consultants are on standby for post-merger "integration" support. I guess "no deal, no paycheck..." is powerfully motivating to keep the patient alive a while longer. In court, Anthem argued that assembling a $54 billion behemoth is a necessary precondition to sparking all manner of wondrous innovations and delivering $2.4 billion in efficiencies. The basic argument appears to be "We need to double in size to grow a brain. And just imagine all those savings translating directly into lower premiums for employers and consumers."  Stop. Read that paragraph again. Ignore the dubious "lower premiums" argument and focus on the deal's savings. $2.4 billion saved
Post a Comment
Read more