I just finished reading an article in FAST COMPANY about Ticketmaster, the World’s Most Hated Brand (July/August, 2011). And while that distinction is debatable, CEO Nathan Hubbard didn’t disagree with it very much. It seems that years of slow service and inflexible systems have generated strong consumer dislike for Ticketmaster.

“If Ticketmaster were a person,” one person tweeted, “I’d kick it in the f**king face.” And other stuff like that.

When you think about it, there are many hated brands out there. Who doesn’t have a horror story about the cable company or your wireless provider?

Banks are a popular subject of hatred these days, thanks to our multi-trillion dollar stimulus program that made them healthy and able to pay themselves huge bonuses again – while they turn their backs on small business owners who desperately need investment funds to expand and create jobs. I’m amused by Ally Bank’s ad campaign parodying abusive bank practices while they pretend to be different. Efforts like that usually only remind viewers how all banks are abhorrent.

Some brand hatred scenarios are temporary or limited to small segments of the population. I was recently surprised how many well-educated, financially successful people in my inner-city neighborhood rose as one to register their hatred for Wal-Mart when the retailing giant announced plans to locate a store not too far away.

And it’s easy for an otherwise respected company to become the subject of passionate, vitriolic loud and ugly protest when it makes an environmental false step. You don’t want to get the tree-huggers riled up.

So what should you do when you find your brand love turning into brand hate? Here are a few suggestions to help steer the ship back into safe harbor.

1. Quantify the problem

Do some basic research to find out how widespread the problems are, and hopefully identify the key issues. Don’t assume from anecdotal information that you know how deeply rooted the consumer issues are. Look for underlying causes and segment your study so you can determine if the problems are widespread or limited to certain groups.

If there are multiple problems, prioritize them and determine which ones need attention first.

2. Develop solutions

In some cases the solutions are obvious. You make a slow process faster. You give the buyer more options before they buy. You provide “insurance” if the buyer decides to back out.

For bigger issues, like those related to the environment, you provide facts that help people understand the whole picture. You make sure they know about things you are doing to minimize the impact or improve the quality of life for those affected.

Wal-Mart is dealing with their urban penetration problem with some creative new strategies involving smaller footprint stores with more attractive facades. From the 195,000 square foot Super Center behemoth, to the 42,000 SF Neighborhood Markets and the newer 15,000 SF “Marketside” concept stores emphasizing fresh foods, Wal-Mart is attempting to serve inner-city customers with smaller stores that stand out less obtrusively.

In other cases where the issues are more complex and solutions less obvious, you invite interested parties to participate in the discussion. You establish forums for open debate and sharing of ideas. You become transparent.

3. Spread the word

Once you’ve identified the problems and started the process of developing solutions, you get the word out that changes are underway. Everyone knew that’s what BP was doing after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but there’s no denying their television commercials helped soften the blow of negative opinion along the Gulf coast.

Social media has given millions of Twitter and Facebook users a platform to vent their unhappiness, but it also offers the opportunity to spread the news about service and facility improvements.

The worst thing a brand owner can do when faced with mounting negative attitudes is ignore the complaints. The old saying, “Their perception is your reality” applies more now than ever. If customers think you have a problem, you do. And the sooner you start fixing it, the better.

Several years ago I discovered a delightful and somewhat rare book called The Book Of Gossage about the life and times of San Francisco ad legend Howard Luck Gossage, who practiced his trade back in the 50s and 60s out of a restored firehouse on Pacific Avenue.  Some of you may remember Gossage as the man who came up with the Great Paper Airplane contest to promote Scientific American magazine, or the kangaroo giveaway for Qantas Airline.

We can also thank Gossage for recruiting the dry wit of comedian Stan Freeberg to the world of advertising, producing wildly successful campaigns for clients like Contadina tomato paste (“Who put eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can?  You know who. You know who.” After an awkward silence, the announcer would finally give the client’s name at the very end, just in case you didn’t know.)

Gossage was also ahead of his time on the subject of media commissions.  His policy was to rebate all commissions to his clients because he worked on retainer.  I’ve always liked retainers because they put you “on the team” and remove the necessity of selling additional media buys or projects that might not need to be done.  If you want objectivity, why put your agency in the position of having to sell you things to make enough money to staff adequately to handle your account?

I’ve written frequently about the importance of stickiness in advertising.  Gossage’s ads were always sticky because he liked to use coupons.  Sometimes, the stuff he gave away had no value whatsoever, like the “shirtkerchief” for Eagle Shirtmakers, which was merely a way to demonstrate their quality fabrics and stitching.  Or the free “Pink Air” coupon for Fina gasoline, which was a total hoax around the idea that since everything else at a Fina station had already been perfected with additives, making the air that goes in tires pink was the only additional improvement they could think of.

Every time Howard Gossage ran an ad with a tiny coupon in the lower right corner, thousands of people would cut it out, put it in an envelope with a stamp and mail it in.  This whole idea of involving the reader in the message was one of Gossage’s primary contributions to our craft, and sadly, it appears to have faded from the landscape.

The Book Of Gossage includes another book called Is There Any Hope For Advertising?, which consists of many of his speeches to ad groups.  It was published by the University of Illinois Press posthumously in 1986.  (Gossage died in 1969 of leukemia, a disease he said his doctor characterized as “fatal, but not serious.”)  This book-within-a-book describes many of his unique views on the nature and state of advertising, which Gossage obviously felt was badly in need of improvement.

One of his more salient observations had to do with the demise of our “free press.”  Gossage’s point was that we lost freedom of the press at precisely the same moment that newspaper and magazine publishers quit raising their subscription prices to cover the cost of publication.  When they decided that subscription costs only needed to cover a portion of the total expenses, with advertising revenue making up the difference, the decision about whether or not that publication was worth publishing was taken from the reader and transferred to the advertiser.   It’s an issue broadcast and print media managers are struggling with today – how can we charge for content in ways that are acceptable to people who want that content?

It bothered Howard Gossage a lot that many advertisers were trying to solve communication problems by throwing huge sums of “big stick” media money at them.  His favorite phrase was, “using a billion dollar hammer to pound a ten-cent thumbtack.”

Gossage asked us to consider how often you need to read a book, a news story or see a movie or play?  He joked, “If it is interesting, once is enough; if it is dull, once is plenty.”

So when he created print ads, he often did it with the notion that you were going to read each and every ad, and get the intended message without needing to run that particular ad again.  One famous low budget campaign he is known for was a series of ads for the Whiskey Distillers of Ireland in which he ended each ad in mid-sentence with copy picking up right where it left off the next week.

This is revolutionary stuff to a b-to-b guy like me.  My concern has always been about how many times we can run an ad before response drops off.  The problem with this, of course, is that most B2B ads are puffy, self-absorbed exercises in chest-thumping.

Maybe if we started thinking about ways to involve our readers and viewers in the message, once would be enough.

I forced myself to slog through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestselling book, The Black Swan, because I kept thinking there would be valuable marketing insight tucked away. And I guess that’s true, even though Taleb makes it very hard on the reader to discover insight.

On one hand, he ridicules economists, investment counselors and other “prognosticators” for their inability to predict important events. Then he turns right around and reminds you he was once one of those people, using four and five syllable words like epistemic and Platonicity to impress us with his in-depth credentials and wisdom.

I’ve always felt a true expert should make complicated issues simple and understandable. Taleb takes the other extreme. By sprinkling his writing with ten and twenty dollar words, he forces you to continually flip back to previous pages and chapters to refresh your memory as to what he is saying. It isn’t necessary, and it isn’t good journalism. But enough about that.

There are some important lessons for marketers in The Black Swan, the main one being it’s almost as important to consider what we don’t know as it is to analyze what we do know. Business intelligence software models historic data to help you predict the future based on what has happened in the past. Amazon has built a huge business using tools like that.

And Taleb will tell you predictive software is okay for certain types of data that fit a bell curve (Gaussian) dispersion. Other types of data, however, do not fit. When one or two new entries completely change the average or the shape of the curve, traditional modeling formulas are out the window.

Movie ticket sales is a good example. You might know that Titanic is the all-time box office champion with sales of more than $600 million ($1.8 billion adjusted for inflation). You might even have a list of other movies that have done well. But someday a movie will come along that will totally obliterate the mark set by Titanic. Predictions based on the bell curve dispersion of historic movie performance won’t help you estimate the potential of future blockbusters.

That’s why Taleb strongly advises us to consider the unexpected. His book, written in 2007, is filled with warnings about complicated derivative financial investments and Wall Street’s increasing fascination with them. He’s one of the few people who spoke out about the dangers of acting like we know how to “manage risk” with these instruments when, in fact, they are unmanageable because of vulnerability to outside influences.

It would be like asking military experts in 2003 how long we will need to take care of business in Iraq and get that country back on its feet with new leadership. Whatever they might have predicted, it wouldn’t be six years and counting. We simply don’t have the ability to predict things like that, so our plans should take into consideration extreme events that will cause our assumptions to go radically in one direction or another.

That’s the primary lesson of The Black Swan. Analyze your historical data. Consider your market position and competition.  Develop sales and market share projections. But also consider what happens if extreme events change the game entirely. New laws, new technology, wars, out of control inflation — these are all examples of possible scenarios that should be included in your planning.

And in case you’re wondering about the book’s title, for hundreds of years we assumed all swans were white because every swan we could see was white. One hundred percent of the data said swans are white. And then someone spotted a black one.

In the world of swan watching, that’s what you call a game changer.

I just got back from the BMA annual conference in Chicago where at least half of the several dozen distinguished speakers were talking about the wonders of blogging. Okay. Okay. So maybe there is some value there. We’ll see.

For fifteen years, I wrote monthly columns for Marketing News magazine. It’s not easy having viewpoints worth sharing, although I don’t think that slows down many bloggers.

In my book, The Case For B2B Branding, I researched 21 case studies on companies that have done something significant with their b-to-b branding programs. I was fortunate to have dinner at the conference with a representative of one of those companies: Jason Cordova, director of strategic marketing for General Electric.

I told Jason that GE was my branding epiphany. More than ten years ago at a BMA conference in San Jose, CA, I heard Richard Costello, who at that time was GE’s manager of marketing communications, make this statement: “Last year, GE generated incremental revenues of $10 billion due to the power of our brand.”

I’m sure that statement flew over the heads of many people in the room that day, because we’re used to big company guys making statements with big numbers. But Costello’s words hit me right between the eyes. He said billion, not million. And he said “incremental,” meaning it just goes along for the ride. A bonus, if you will.

Later, as I was writing the book, I went back and looked up GE’s financials for the year Costello uttered those immortal words. Ten billion dollars was roughly equal to GE’s entire net profit for that year, so you can say without brand power, GE would have been a break-even company.

Since that time, I have discovered many other b-to-b marketers who have decided to put brand power to work for their companies. But the sad fact is most business marketers haven’t a clue about branding. They still think it’s all about having better widgets with better features and benefits.

Several speakers at the BMA conference were all over that myth. One of them, Joe Pine, has written and lectured persuasively about the commodization of goods and services, and about the need to move beyond that. He calls it the “experience” economy — that’s actually the name of one of his books. If you do a good job describing the experience customers can expect when they do business with you, they’ll pay for the privilege.

So in this blog space, I’ll be looking for ways to help business-to-business marketers understand the importance of branding and the rewards of doing it properly. Stay tuned!