Blockbuster. MySpace. Blackberry. Yahoo.

All companies that had huge market shares yet failed to adapt when competitors came on the scene and so ultimately lost their relevancy.

The concept of a ‘pre-mortem’ is one borrowed from other industries that carefully manage tight projects, whereby a team of decision makers imagine the death of the organisation’s brand from a variety of different threats, such as: it becomes irrelevant due to a crowded marketplace; competitors find ways to make it cheaper or better; Customers lose interest in the marketplace. The list is endless, but the outcome is the same – the organisation becomes irrelevant and perishes.

But really, the brand hasn’t actually died…yet. The team can now research and develop plans to prevent the death from happening and start to put mitigation measures in place before the issues have materialised or are in their infancy. In other words, you could call the product of the pre-mortem exercise a ‘brand risk assessment’, just as the security sector uses to track and manage security risks from going uncontrolled.

The depth and detail of a brand risk assessment depends on the interest and capacity of the organisation; however, it can really focus the strategy to ensure the threats remain a low risk to the brand.

But what do you about the risks to the brand?

Your responses could be roughly categorised into the five following areas:

Accept: You accept the risk but do not take any action against it. It would be very costly for a business to work against all risks that the team document, so an ‘accept’ response will likely be taken (depending on the size of the organisation) for low risks at the time of producing the assessment.

Transfer: Moves the risk by exploring and / or entering new markets, or with research into emerging markets. As an organisation grows, more effort will be put into researching new markets in anticipation of unanticipated developments (such as the Coronavirus pandemic for example) so the organisation has a safety line to keep it afloat if the risk changes.

Avoid: The organisation decides the risk is so big it decides to leave the market or gets elbowed out by the competitors.

Eliminate: The organisation decides to remove the source of the risk, an example of this response could be buying or merging with a competitor.

Mitigate: The organisation decides to reduce the likelihood or impact of the risk. This could be done by increasing marketing activity (such as new content marketing experiments for example), or other outreach work to solidify the brand space and increase the market share.

Whichever response is selected is adoption of a course of action, even doing nothing means acceptance of a risk. Don’t let your brand be added to the list of the fallen, take action to tackle the risks early on.

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