Greek philoso­pher Her­a­cli­tus wrote about change as life’s con­stant cen­turies ago. Many brands have strug­gled or even failed to stay rel­e­vant through the years, while oth­ers have man­aged to remain rel­e­vant for decades. So how can you make your brand more rel­e­vant?

Umang Shah, Campbell’s glob­al direc­tor of social and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, shared his own tips and take­aways on per­pet­u­al brand rel­e­vance at Adver­tis­ing Week to help orga­ni­za­tions of any size remain rel­e­vant to con­sumers.

The 5 Stages Of Brand Irrelevance

First, Shah said, brands must avoid what he called the Five Stages of Irrel­e­vance.

Stage 1: Success

Per Shah, the point when a brand actu­al­ly has suc­cess and mon­ey is where it then has the abil­i­ty to make bad deci­sions. He point­ed to plat­forms like MySpace and Friend­ster as great exam­ples.

“These plat­forms reached a point of suc­cess, but the dif­fer­ence between Face­book and MySpace was Face­book focused on giv­ing users a cer­tain set of fea­tures, but MySpace had a bunch of fea­tures,” Shah said.

Stage 2: Complacency

“If you’re suc­cess­ful and you have light­ning in a bot­tle and it works, you might not nec­es­sar­i­ly be look­ing for­ward and con­tin­u­ing to be suc­cess­ful,” Shah said. “You prob­a­bly did a bunch of things wrong and you did one thing right.”

Black­ber­ry is a good illus­tra­tion of this con­cept.

“I remem­ber when I would not have believed that Black­ber­ry was not going to be in everyone’s pock­et for­ev­er,” Shah said. “They also thought that every­one was always going to use Black­ber­ry, so they didn’t have to open up their mes­sen­ger plat­form. They fig­ured every­one would come to them.”

Stage 3: Out of Touch

If your brand focus­es more on itself than its audi­ence, the brand los­es sight of who that audi­ence is, Shah said.

“It’s not so much about what we do as a busi­ness to be suc­cess­ful, but what is it our users get out of busi­ness with us?” Shah asked.

Case in point: Union Pacif­ic is a brand that cares about trains and tracks, but users of the rail­road care about get­ting from Point A to B, Shah said.

“If Union Pacif­ic had focused more on the trans­porta­tion aspect than infra­struc­ture, it might be rel­e­vant to us today,” Shah said. “It might have brought us Uber. There’s always an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­tin­ue to evolve and the best orga­ni­za­tions are focused on pro­vid­ing the best expe­ri­ence to users.”

Stage 4: Panic

At this stage, a brand has had great suc­cess at one point in time, but it is not a mar­ket leader any­more and starts to freak out and over­re­act, Shah said. Point­ing to the Aztek mod­el from Pon­ti­ac, Shah said it was “large­ly con­sid­ered the worst auto launch in his­to­ry” and he called it “the ugli­est car out there.”

“Pon­ti­ac was going through the Phas­es of Irrel­e­vance and know­ing that SUVs and crossovers were gain­ing adop­tion, they went crazy and lis­tened to every­one else and decid­ed they had the solu­tion,” Shah said. “They went crazy and we end­ed up with this prod­uct. But they didn’t hit on the most impor­tant point, which is under­stand­ing their audi­ence and cre­at­ing a prod­uct they care about.”

Stage 5: Obsolescence

By this stage, Shah said brands have either cor­rect­ed along the way or become obso­lete.

“There are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies out there that prove this out,” Shah said. “If through­out those stages you don’t make the right deci­sions – whether it’s beta, HD or DVD – you become obso­lete.”

10 Ways to Make Your Brand More Relevant

Don’t let your brand become irrel­e­vant. Here are 10 tips for per­pet­u­al brand rel­e­vance from Shah.

1. Make Hard Decisions

“When a brand has suc­cess and mon­ey, it can make easy deci­sions, but it’s impor­tant to always look at the problem/campaign and eval­u­ate if it is doing what’s right or easy,” Shah said.

For exam­ple, Noma, which is con­sid­ered to be one of the best restau­rants in the world, will close its doors for a year in order to con­tin­ue to pro­vide a prod­uct that’s rel­e­vant, inter­est­ing and that peo­ple want to come back for, Shah said.

“They want to cre­ate an expe­ri­ence that remains #1 and you don’t do that by sit­ting around,” he said.

2. Stay Fearless

Small­er orga­ni­za­tions like star­tups have no choice but to take risks and do inter­est­ing things, accord­ing to Shah.

“Look at Tes­la. There are a mil­lion rea­sons you shouldn’t start a car com­pa­ny in your garage and com­pete with BMW and Porsche, but they had a vision and didn’t allow all those mil­lions of rea­sons why they shouldn’t scare them away from doing what they believed in and now they do have a prod­uct that beats a lot of com­peti­tors,” Shah said. “You don’t cre­ate a car with ‘insane mode’ if you’re not fear­less.”

3. Put Audience Above All

While adver­tis­ers like to talk about con­tent mar­ket­ing and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing terms, but Shah said that it’s real­ly about the brand’s audi­ence at the end of the day.

“Every­thing else doesn’t real­ly mat­ter. In my cur­rent role at Campbell’s, we have a plat­form called Campbell’s Kitchen and we have the abil­i­ty to cre­ate lots of dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences,” Shah said.

4. Put Brand Above Product

Shah also said every orga­ni­za­tion has the abil­i­ty to focus on its brand above its prod­ucts, point­ing to Apple’s time­less ad mes­sag­ing in which themes like bring­ing music to con­sumers wher­ev­er they are remains rel­e­vant ten to 15 years after the ads orig­i­nal­ly ran. “It allows them to con­tin­ue to evolve the prod­uct line to match the brand,” he said.

5. Surround Yourself With The Right People

The right peo­ple can include the smartest tal­ent, great­est cre­ative agen­cies or right tech­ni­cal part­ners, but it could also mean com­peti­tors.

Point­ing to the McWhop­per Burg­er King pro­posed for Peace Day on Sep­tem­ber 21, Shah called the failed ven­ture a “sad but great exam­ple of an oppor­tu­ni­ty to do some­thing unex­pect­ed.”

“Burg­er King did what you didn’t expect them to do and McDonald’s did what you’d expect,” Shah said. “This was a huge oppor­tu­ni­ty for both brands to ben­e­fit, but in choos­ing to work with only them­selves, McDonald’s lost out.”

6. Vote with Your Money

Shah said brands should cre­ate bud­gets and encour­age their teams to invest in the right kinds of projects. Like, for exam­ple, Campbell’s is team­ing up with Ama­zon Echo on a brand­ed effort that will report­ed­ly offer recipe sug­ges­tions.

“It res­onat­ed so much and had so much poten­tial to con­nect with users in a com­pelling way,” Shah said. “I chose to pull mon­ey away from an exist­ing project because it was not the safest thing to do, but it felt right.”

7. Force Failure

Campbell’s has a mar­ket­ing inno­va­tion lab in which it encour­ages employ­ees to “come up with cool, inter­est­ing ideas that wouldn’t have got­ten fund­ed through tra­di­tion­al chan­nels,” Shah said.

To ensure the brand gets “the newest, most inno­v­a­tive think­ing,” Shah said there’s a man­date that a cer­tain num­ber of these ideas fail.

“It’s about cre­at­ing an envi­ron­ment where peo­ple under­stand that tak­ing risks and fail­ing isn’t a bad thing,” he added.

8. Play The User Card

Shah said it is impor­tant for brands to focus on users and for mar­keters to be com­fort­able with say­ing to their boss­es, “This doesn’t make sense,” or, “This isn’t good for who we’re try­ing to sell prod­ucts to.”

9. Get Out Of The Way

It’s also impor­tant for lead­ers to estab­lish a vision and then let it go to either inter­nal or exter­nal con­trib­u­tors, like Coca-Cola did when fans set up a Face­book page and the brand invit­ed them to help build out its com­mu­ni­ty, Shah said.

“It’s hard for us as large orga­ni­za­tions or even small orga­ni­za­tions to do that,” Shah said. “But there’s no sense in fight­ing the cur­rent.”

10. Change The Vernacular

The rea­son the indus­try has come up with so many buzz­words is because it has lost its way, Shah said. Don Drap­er was cre­at­ing con­tent, but he didn’t call it con­tent mar­ket­ing, he added.

“I think we need to rethink what our cur­rent terms mean and think about suc­cess and fail­ure,” Shah said. “Stop think­ing of fail­ure as the F word. Google shut down Google Glass, but there’s no one at Google who thinks Glass is a fail­ure because it is being rolled into so many projects and it was a great idea and they will get tons of val­ue out of it, just not in the man­i­fes­ta­tion you see it now.”

What’s your take on Shah’s tip for per­pet­u­al brand rel­e­vance?