John Tantillo’s Winner and Loser of The Week

Brand Winner...	And Loser...

John Tantillo’s Winner and Loser of The Week: 

Winner:  Netflix

Loser:  The New York Jets                                                     

Winner: 

The big media conglomerates haven’t been too happy with the rise of Netflix for a long time and now they’re letting everyone know.

The CEO of Time Warner, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, called Netflix a small time operation with bad economics and scoffed at the idea that the company was poised to take over the online video world.

But with a stock price that has gone up 400% in recent months and a rapidly growing share of the media pie, you’ve got to wonder… especially when the big boys are worried.

Fact is, Netflix is a company that knew its brand long before there was even a market for it.  After all, the company is now an internet-streaming, content delivering company –that’s the bulk of its business— but this wasn’t the case when it started.  When it started, the bulk of its business was through the mail. 

Sure the company always used the Internet as its storefront and order completion but it’s only now that the name “Netflix” really reflects what it does.  This isn’t an accident.  From the very start, Netflix has been powering ahead with a single vision: to deliver movies and TV shows to its customers online for a very competitive price.

It may be true that Netflix’s deal with Starz allowed it to get a mother lode of prime video content for very little money ($25 million) and that when this contract is up next year, the company might struggle, but my sense is that the most important fact is brand consistency. 

Netflix has carefully built a brand that has become the go-to place for consumers looking to dump the cable companies and watch their movies and TV shows online. 

Netflix and its CEO perceived the way the media world was going: content was going to get cheaper because the ability to deliver content to the consumer was going to get cheaper.  Netflix had the wisdom to establish its brand as the gateway to this new world and the patience to wait for this new world to arrive (as long as ten years ago they were experimenting with web-delivered video).   

Bottom line, it might be that Netflix won’t be the dominant player, but my guess is that they’re well on their way because while the cable and media companies have been niggling over price, Netflix has been consistently building a brand that consumers in the new marketplace are flocking to.

Stay tuned.

Loser:

Brand integrity always shows: from upper management all the way down to the guy who sweeps the floors in an organization.

For the Jets this means that when a strength and conditioning coach blatantly trips an opposing player on the sidelines during a game, you’ve got a brand problem that goes way beyond public relations damage control.

Obviously from a brand crisis point of view, the New York Jets now need to immediately take action against this coach in a very public way to show that the organization will simply not tolerate this kind of unsportsmanlike behavior.

But the brand damage goes deeper, because my guess is that this coach’s behavior was only possible because of a general brand attitude.  We’ll have to wait for all the facts to come out, but my guess is that this brand attitude probably involves the whole organization.

The best thing the Jets can do now is to make the brand recovery process as open and as thorough as possible.  Don’t stop with this one coach, let the public know that the Jets as an organization won’t let this kind of thing happen again.

And, remember, things are always easier when you keep marketing and branding in mind.