No doubt, in the future most of CEOs of successful companies will have a business blog.
But before that they must come up with the biggest problem in conglomerate’s world – megabranding.
If you have two brands, for which you will stand for? I mean, for which you will create a personal business blog? What if you have three brands? Four? Five?
OK, if these brands are well-connected like Apple and iPod. Because they are well-connected, complementary and non-competitive brands, Steve Jobs can stay with both. And both of them can be winners.
But if you are a CEO of General Motors, for which brand you must stand? For which brand you must create a business blog?
The megaproblem of megabranding
That’s a problem. Big problem. Big problem of megabranding.
Even Steve Jobs soon can fall in trouble with this.
For what brand he stands now? MacBook, iPod, iTunes, iPhone? Never mind about QuickTime players, Mac OS, regular Mac computers and… (what have I missed?).
You can’t give a lot of attention for so many brands. And it is harder and harder to stay with the uniqueness of all these brands as a number of them increases.
For what brand you will create a business blog?
The most confusing question is „For which brand I must start a business blog?“.
Again, OK, if your brands are well-connected. MacBook, iPod, iPhone share the same focus on “easy usable cool product”, so Steve Jobs can easily write about any of them in his business blog. He is perceived as the “father” of all these products, as the creator of them. If he will start a business blog for all these products, there will be no confusion and a lot of good marketing for Apple.
But imagine a business blog by Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors. About what common feature of General Motor’s cars he can write? About bankruptcy? But wait, is it a reason to buy anything from General Motors?
The key to success is the passion to be focused
A successful spokesperson of the company stands for one idea, like Steve Jobs stands for ”easy usable coolness”.
Contrary to a typical CEO of a conglomerate of brands and megabrands who mostly speaks about irrelevant to buyer random topic. No doubt, most of those messages give little or no reason at all to buy from such megabrands as Rick Wagoner doesn’t give any believable reason to buy from General Motors.
The best place to collect all messages from a CEO is a business blog.
But in this case different brands with different reasons to buy must be presented by a different spokesperson in different business blogs.
General Motor’s spokesperson must be not Rick Wagoner, but the General Managers of Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac, Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, Hummer, and, at least, GMC. All these brands must be different and all of them must have a different spokesperson. And all spokespersons (preferably, the CEOs of those brands) must start a business blog.
Blogging for a CEO helps to think about strategy
If you stand for a megabrand, like General Motors, you are in trouble. In megatrouble. The only solution in this mess is to separate these brands to different entities. And for those smaller entities to focus on the real difference from competitors. Be a specialist, focus on the authentic message for the market about your brand specialization and be passionate about it.
Like Steve Jobs is passionate about coolness and ease of use in computer world.
If you have a “multibranding” strategy, just start a business blog. I am sure, soon you will come up with big problems about what to write, how to write and I hope that you will understand that these problems are very similar to your marketing problems – what to market, with what difference, with what reason to buy.
As I like to say “at first, a business blog is not a sales tool. It is the best helper for a CEO to think about strategy. As sales and marketing tool he becomes a little bit later.”
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