GASP! A fouro post about brands--alert the media!

Mark Tungate excerpts his Media Monoliths: How great media brands thrive and survive over at MediaBistro

In his new book on how to breed a successful brand, this British journalist dissects 20 brands, from MTV to The Economist, and finds they all have seven common keys to survival.

HAVE A VISION

It's incredible how few of the media monoliths grew out of a team effort. When you probe into the history of the world's greatest media brands, you realize that, more often than not, a single individual created them, as well as putting in place the values that still drive them today. James Gordon Bennett Jr, Condé Nast, Paul Julius Reuter, Adolph Ochs, Ted Turner, Mike Bloomberg—all fascinating personalities who had the spark of an idea and took it through to its logical conclusion, paying little heed to their critics....

PICK A TARGET...

CREATE A CLUB...

GO WIDE—YET NARROW...

BE FLEXIBLE—AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT...

BUT MAINTAIN QUALITY...

FINALLY, STAY RELEVANT

A heritage is a wonderful thing—but it doesn't make you invulnerable. There are plenty of historic brands that have been reduces to mere shadows of their former selves by various economic and strategic mishaps—I'm thinking of Life magazine in the United States, and the satirical publication Punch in the U.K. The older media monoliths I visited were almost as paranoid about relevance as they were trust, and rightly so.

The recession has alerted big media to the danger of complacency. Reuters is currently going through a painful modernization process, and over the past few years both The Times and the Financial Times have revamped to pull in younger readers. The IHT—possibly the most fragile of all the media brands I've covered—may have acted just in time with its 2004 relaunch.

Yet the events of the past few years, from the Twin Towers to Iraq and beyond, have proved that veteran brands have a certain advantage. Both Time magazine and The Times told me that their readership figures soared after September 11, 2001, and have yet to sink back to their previous levels. CNN—always a safe bet in a war—undoubtedly benefited from events in Iraq. In times of uncertainty, people embrace the familiar. The trick is to make sure you deliver what these returning audiences expect, but in a fresh and surprising way. Then they'll stick around for more when the smoke clears.