“Is your brand still relevant? All brands eventually face the question.”

– Mark Ingraham, Image Perspective

The following article written by: Paul Friederichsen, Branding Strategy Insider

An agency creative director once shared with me the three essentials for a good concept:

1) It must be original, 2) It should be memorable and 3) It absolutely has to be relevant.

Relevance has everything to do with targeting, as in being empathetic with your target audience, speaking their language, understanding their needs and desires, and knowing what problem they have that you can solve better than anyone else. Of the three, it’s easy to see why “relevance” is the most important. It makes the brand message meaningful, and therefore actionable, to a receptive and consequently motivated target customer.

The question all marketers eventually face is when does their successful brand cease being relevant, and therefore lose its sales effectiveness? And also important, what can or should be done about it? Here are four examples going way back to the 1950s that still resonate today.

1. Change In Business Strategy – Recently, MetLife opted to change course by placing more focus on marketing insurance to business and less on marketing to consumers. The long-running campaign featuring characters from the 1950’s Peanuts comic strip seemed out of character for a business-savvy appeal. Charlie Brown in a three-piece suit? Don’t think so. So while the current MetLife campaign was very successful in consumer marketing, it would lack the necessary business relevance to its new target customer. As MetLife wisely surmised, the adorable cartoon franchise would likely be ineffective in positioning its brand with legitimacy against the business-targeted competition.

2. Change In Social Mores – Sometimes things can get branded quite by accident, as in the case of the annual Georgia–Florida football game, aka “the world’s largest outdoor cocktail party.” A sports editor coined the name in the 1950’s after observing a drunken fan. It subsequently grew into a brand for the annual game that the City of Jacksonville promoted heavily. However, after alcohol-fueled incidents and multiple arrests in 1984, coupled with a general rejection of excessive drinking and drunkenness (especially centered around college students), the Southeastern Conference asked CBS Sports in 1988 to stop using the questionable name in marketing its coverage (even though it has died hard to this day). The issue here is that the “cocktail party” brand identification for the event had lacked empathy for a growing social concern (alcoholism, drunk driving) and therefore sensitivity and relevance for the participating entities (the colleges, the conference, the municipality, etc.) as well as the public at large.

3. Change In Lifestyle – Tony the Tiger became the mascot for Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal in the 1950’s, thanks to an art director at Leo Burnett. Frosted Flakes are, well, frosted with sugar (in fact, they’re 37% sugar) and like many such super-sweet cereals, have earned a dubious reputation over the years with dieticians and nutritionists. While Tony the Tiger roared, “They’re Grrrreat!” to Baby Boomers as kids, Baby Boomers as parents (and their Gen X children as parents) are much less convinced. So, in order to maintain the brand’s relevance to changing dietary preferences and health consciousness across generations, Kellogg opted not to retire the 65-year old mascot, but to give him an expanded mission. Now Tony the Tiger touts the virtues of a healthy, well-balanced breakfast and plenty of play and exercise to a new generation of concerned parents.

4. Change In Media Consumption — Similarly, with another brand launched in 1954, Playboy also found itself becoming increasingly irrelevant to the next generation of men. So, in a surprising move, dispensed with nudity in its magazine starting with the March 2016 issue. Not because men don’t find pictures of nude women appealing anymore, but because they can find them for free on the Internet. As a result, Playboycirculation had dropped from a high of 5.5 million in 1975 to 800,000 in 2015. With the new editorial stance, the new, non-plastic wrapped Playboy is repositioning itself as a sophisticated alternative to Esquire and GQ – and hopes to acquire a new crop of advertisers in the process. Time will tell if Playboy can turn around its skid into publishing oblivion, but for now it’s a bold experiment in the art of maintaining relevance … and sales.

Brand survival depends on relevance. And it requires constant awareness and sensitivity to market conditions, trends and shifts in demographics, psychographics, purchase behavior and media habits. Brands that adapt by staying relevant survive and flourish. Those that don’t stay relevant become but a footnote in marketing textbooks.

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“As all things technology eventually trickle down to the SMB space, so too have fairly sophisticated, often personalized phishing attacks. The past success of these scams in the Fortune 500 space have arrived in force to the target-rich SMB market.”

– Patrick Torney – eDot

The following article written by: J.P. Morgan

It’s a typical day at the office. An employee receives a friendly reminder email from a vendor they’ve known for years about an invoice coming due. The email is conversational, asks about the employee’s recent vacation, and then reminds the employee that a late payment for the invoice could result in a 20 percent surcharge if not handled immediately.

The employee recognizes their account representative’s name and email address, sees the vendor’s branding in the email and submits the invoice for payment, without giving it another thought. But in their rush to avoid a late fee, they don’t realize the email they just responded to is actually from jsmith@vendorcompony.com instead of jsmith@vendorcompany.com—the vendor’s real email account.

In today’s digital age of Facebook and LinkedIn, wire fraud schemes that rely on targeted email phishing have become increasingly common and sophisticated. By finding individuals who haven’t enabled privacy features on their social media accounts and then using that publicly-available data to craft believable, fraudulent emails, criminals trick businesses into quickly sending funds by creating fake, urgent situations. Frequently, victims don’t realize they’ve been duped until they confirm the transfer of funds with a vendor or manager—when the money is already long-gone.

According to the Association for Financial Professionals’ Payments Fraud and Control Survey, the number of businesses reporting wire fraud more than doubled, from 5 to 11 percent in 2013, with wire transfer listed as the preferred method of payment for fraudsters. This is largely due to the quick payment clearing timeline—which is much faster than ACH or check.

As the numbers of victims continue to rise, businesses are fighting back by setting up internal controls and procedures for employees who process payment instructions via email. Ravin Yadav, Vice President for J.P. Morgan Transaction Services and Fraud Expert, says, “Rigorous application of simple procedures such as callbacks and validations go a long way in detecting and preventing a fraud loss.”

To protect your business, ensure all employees handling payments for your business always:

• Validate new payment instructions received via email—even if the email is internal.
• Pick up the phone, whenever possible, and speak directly with the individual requesting a funds transfer.
• Contact the vendor or client directly to confirm any requests for payment method changes, validating the changes are legitimate before processing.
• Carefully review all payments before they are sent and ensure all correspondence is validated and documented in a unified way across your business.

If your business falls victim to phishing or wire transfer fraud, use the event as an opportunity to assess your internal controls. Training your staff on the ways that fraud is evolving is critical. In the fight against fraud, a little knowledge goes a long way.

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“Life cycle management is the easiest thing to design, but often times the hardest to implement and adhere to over time. Unfortunately today the impact on the company is no longer limited to performance.”

– Patrick Torney – eDot

The following article written by: John P. Mello Jr., Tech News World

“Patch your systems in a timely manner” is a mantra of security experts, but what happens when the patch well runs dry because a product’s maker no longer supports it? That is a situation many large enterprises find themselves in, and it’s one that poses security risks.

Between 30 percent and 50 percent of the hardware and software assets in the average large enterprise have reached their end-of-life date, according to a BDNA report released last month.

End-of-life products pose a serious security risk to the enterprise.

“The vast majority of vulnerabilities — more than 99 percent — exploit out-of-date software with known vulnerabilities,” said BDNA President Walker White.

Oversight is a common reason end-of-life products continue to run on an organization’s systems.

“There may be a new version of a product, but because you don’t have a clear view of what’s in your environment, you can miss the old version in your upgrade process,” White told TechNewsWorld.

That’s how orphan apps are created, too.

“These products may remain on a network and are not removed because no one is using them, and no one has turned off their lights,” White said. “A hacker will exploit that kind of leftover artifact.”

Overworked IT

Overworked IT departments can contribute to the end-of-life security problem.

“IT spends 80 percent of its resources just to keep the lights on and 20 percent on new development — if they’re lucky,” White said.

Moreover, IT can be overwhelmed by EOL data.

“They have plenty of data, but the data is so vast and there’s such a high degree of variance in it, that they can’t distill it down to information that is actionable,” White explained.

There are industries where there’s little incentive to replace end-of-life products because change is slow, added Faizel Lahkani, CEO of SS8.

For example, what’s changed in power distribution in the last 25 years?

“The answer is very little,” Lahkani told TechNewsWorld.

“As a result, there’s no fundamental driver to change something that’s designed well and works well and is for a fixed purpose,” he said. “Then the problem is you have technologies that weren’t built for security — that have vulnerable attack surfaces that allow hackers to take down things like power grids and water distribution systems very easily.”

Staying pat with legacy systems is not a good idea, Lahkani warned.

“Even in the case where you have to keep a legacy system, keeping it and saying, ‘I’m good’ is not acceptable because, from a security perspective, those systems are vulnerable,” he said. “You may have to live with them because you don’t have the dollars to replace them, but you still have to secure those systems.”

Malware’s Changing Role

Malware has become a penetration tool for hackers, but once nested in a system, Black Hats prefer to use other means to conduct malicious activity.

Ninety-nine percent of post-intrusion activities do not employ malware, according to a recent LightCyber report.

Instead, intruders prefer to leverage standard networking, IT administration and other tools, the report notes.

“We suspected there wasn’t a large use of malware, but we were surprised by how extreme our findings were,” said David Thompson, a researcher at LightCyber.

“They were much higher than we expected,” he told TechNewsWorld.

Avoiding Detection

Attackers have moved away from malware for a simple reason: detection.

“Attackers know security organizations are using multiple layers of defense on the perimeter and the endpoints so they’re not using malware that can be detected by those solutions,” Thompson explained.

When Black Hats do use malware, they tend to use it only once, LightCyber found.

More than 70 percent of the malware used for launching an intrusion was found at only one site, the study notes. That makes it very difficult for protection solutions based on signatures to identify such attacks.

However, “the signatures do catch up, which is why attackers stop using malware as soon as they can once they get into a system,” Thompson said. “If they continued to rely on it, they would be found in a matter of days or weeks.”

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