A couple of days ago, I wrote about how imagining a brand’s hotel lobby could make for a good litmus test. It reminded me of another heuristic a marketing executive once told me about; they measured the health of a brand by how much negative press it gets.
When Jay-Z bragged about owning the Nets and Barclays Center, he omitted the actual ownership stake: 0.067% of the Nets and less than 0.2% of the Barclays Center. For context, that’s approximately a director or lead-engineer level equity compensation in a Series A software company. (Apples to oranges, the Nets and the Barclays Center were arguably less risky, etc. etc…)
The thing is, even after we found out, I got the sense we all still took it seriously. That’s because Jay-Z’s artist persona has a healthy brand. We didn’t amplify the negative press or counter-messaging on his minute stake in the team. Between the savvy messaging his team put out, the respect we had for Jay-Z, and the timing of the message (the news came out when he sold his shares), it felt like we all collectively said, “Hey, it still counts!”
The opposite happens with an unhealthy brand. Anytime there’s negative press, it gets amplified. Facebook’s brand was the classic example of that; it looked great in 2013, and deteriorated until it needed to shed the brand—rallying the company around a new name, Meta, would be better than maintaining the business under its old name, Facebook. What a mess.
Think about this the next time you need to deliver bad news. Are you making an effort to explain the situation, honestly and without misleading? Will your people be willing to accept the difficult news? Or will they be all too eager to jump into the dogpile and take your brand down another notch?