In the past few days, a lot has been made about the reference in the 1989 film, Back to the Future II, regarding life in October 2015. You might remember that Marty McFly paid a visit to October 21, 2015 and found that people were flying their cars to work, kids were skating on hover boards and basketball sneakers were electronically self-lacing. All of that has yet to become a reality. However, the movie got it right with some of the technologies that seemed too far out to be true in 1989. Items like large screens used for video conferencing and video goggles similar to Google Glass have made it to the future.

However, the most intriguing prediction about life in October 2015 from the movie was that the Chicago Cubs would win the World Series. For those of you who are not baseball fans, the Cubs have been the running joke of post-season baseball for generations. They have not played in the World Series since 1945. That is 70 years ago! The last time they won the Series was in 1908, 107 years ago. They have come oh-so-close to being in the World Series, but there always seems to be some oddity that bars the door to the Fall Classic for the Cubs. In fact, some attribute the Cubs with bad luck. It has been chronicled that a bar owner brought a goat (yes, a goat!) to a game during the 1945 World Series and was turned away because the goat smelled, well… like a goat! The owner of the goat, Billy Sianis, is said to have put a curse on the Cubs. He sent a telegraph to the owner of the Cubs which declared "You are never going to win a World Series again because you insulted my goat.” The Cubs were up 2-1 over the Detroit Tigers at the time of the goat incident, but after the curse, lost 4-3. So the drought began.

In 1969, the Cubs were on their way to winning the National League East title when they went into a late season collapse. They lost 18 of their last 25 games. Some superstitious fans attribute this to a black cat that walked in front of their dugout during a game in New York’s Shea Stadium, home of the Mets. (The Mets went on to win the NL East title by a comfortable 8 games better than the Cubs, and the 1969 World Series.) Others will point to the 1984 season when the Cubs had a 2-0 series lead on the San Diego Padres in the National League Championship Series (NLCS). At that time, the NLCS was a best of 5 series. All they needed was one more win and they would move on to the World Series. The Cubs lost the next three games and lost the series. In 2003, the Cubs were one game away from going to the World Series once again, holding a 3-0 lead in the eighth inning over the Florida Marlins. They were five outs away from breaking the curse. That is when a fan, Steve Bartman, reaching for a foul ball, pulled the ball out of Cub’s left fielder Moises Alou’s glove for what would be the second out of the inning. In the aftermath, the Marlins rallied for 8 runs in the inning and won the game 8-3! The next day, the Marlins finished off the Cubs in the NLCS and went on to win the 2003 World Series. Do you see the trend?

Here is the intriguing thing about October 2015. The Cubs are in the NLCS after a 12 year absence. They have a good team, finishing with the third best record in all of baseball in 2015. During the extended playoff system, they have beaten the two teams who had better records than theirs. They seemed to be getting hot at the right time, until they reached the NLCS and once again, the Cubs have found a way to collapse on themselves, losing four straight games to the New York Mets for a chance to go to the World Series. So not even Marty McFly’s outlandish claim that the Cubs would win the 2015 World Series was enough to break the curse!

Now how does all of this relate to marketing? First of all, let’s talk about breaking cycles. One of the jobs of marketing is to change the course of negative sales slides. That has to do with a couple of actions. First, make sure your brand stands for what you want it to in the minds of your customers. When there is negativity attached to your brand, it is time to rebrand. We have the technology today to measure customer feelings about your brand. Does that mean that changing the name of a product immediately will change customer perceptions? In some cases, yes. But in a rebranding situation, you may also need to do more than create a new logo. You may have to change your product or service for the better. That begins with understanding what the marketplace thinks about your brand and, in particular, what you can do to change the negative aspects of it. That leads to the second action. It is the job of marketing to protect the company brand from trending to the negative. This is where customer service and marketing meet. You have to react quickly to customer complaints and snuff out discontent. We are living in an age where an unhappy customer can let loose on social media and make more fires than what you will have fire trucks to put out. Marketing has to make sure that customers are happy with what you are selling them. If not, you have to work quickly to remedy the complaints. Taking care of the back end of a sale is critically important to retaining customers. And retained customers become your biggest fans when trying to reach new customers. Once again, social media has made it easy for us to express our satisfaction with any product or service we use. This has to do with more than just technology, it has to do with a human touch from someone in your company. Follow up with customers is the key to steering their opinions to the positive and away from the negative.

Back to the Future had part of it right. We are a technology-driven society. But Back to the Future had it wrong too! The Cubs winning the World Series in 2015 would take more than a flying car and a hover board. It takes a team of people getting past all of the negativity of the past. The same is true of marketing your brand. Measure the opinions of your customers, but also give them a human touch in fixing any complaints. It will help your brand win in the end.