One week ago I flipped the wall calendar that hangs beside my desk over to a new month. It has a photo of a hummingbird sipping nectar from a blooming flower. It’s a lovely photo, but it’s not my reality. You see, my desk also sits by a window that looks out over the landscape and, let’s just say, there are no flowers blooming. It is cold and gray. The trees are bare. There are dusty snow flurries swirling across the ground. What I want is the land of flip flops and short sleeved shirts. What I am getting is the reality of boots and layers of clothes buttoned to my neck. My desires equaling my reality are a season (and a few months) away from me.

Winter is like customer expectations, is it not? When your target market expresses dissatisfaction with your products and services, what do you do? The answer is you have to change or you risk losing your stake in the marketplace. How do you do this in a way that leaves your customers wanting more, not less, of your brand?

I want to talk about two groups of people I encounter this time of year. You might have heard of the Polar Bear Club. These are people who dare to live the desire for summer weather in the middle of the coldest days of winter. Once a year, they disrobe and take a dip in a frozen lake. The idea is to defy the bitter cold and act as if they were taking a leisurely swim in the middle of July – which of course, they are not. For just as soon as they plunge into the icy waters, they jump out and run for warmth. It is an absurd stunt that usually lands the club on the local news for a few minutes every winter.

The second group is not an organized club like the Polar Bears, but rather a segment of society that would rather avoid cold weather altogether. We call them the Snow Birds. At the beginning of the winter, they flee to warmer climates and don’t migrate back until the cold weather is gone. Rather than face the reality of winter, they simply leave, acting as if it never gets cold.

I bring this up because, in business, we too can long for what we do not currently have. We set goals and get revved up to change the current situation to one we desire. This is a common business practice and marketing is key to helping bring change about. However, many times, change becomes hard. There is a temptation to declare victory before the change has actually come about. Business leaders get ahead of themselves and declare their goals achieved in the middle of an icy lake. "It’s not so bad!” they assert as their skin turns blue. Or business leaders get frustrated with the progress of change and pull up stakes to head for warmer climates – so to speak. They simply ignore the problem and return when they believe times will be better. Neither response works because they do not modify the reality that your customers have a complaint that demands a change.

Here is how we use marketing to impact business change. Change comes about when you have an actionable plan that can be incrementally performed one step at a time. This actually works very well with modern marketing. Marketing is tasked with being the mouthpiece of the business, especially in the day we live in where business transparency is expected to be communicated. Those incremental steps need to be talked about. When one is completed, the success is reported, celebrated and the next step is communicated. Listen to what Chris Brandt, CMO of Taco Bell Corporation, has to say about this:

Transparency is the new black. Consumers expect more information from the brands they use and they expect brands to do good. They want to know who they are and what they stand for. They reward companies that have similar values and ask, "Is the brand good for me (the consumer) and good for we (society as a whole)?” Brands have to be more transparent in a genuine and authentic way—to live and demonstrate their values—they need to walk the talk. If they do, they will win both the hearts and the minds of consumers…¹

There are some recent examples of companies that have turned distrust from consumers into a win for their business by marketing the changes that were taking place. Do you remember the outbreak of E. coli at Chipotle Restaurants in 2015? This certainly was not the first time food poisoning impacted a restaurant. However, Chipotle did something in fixing the problem that worked well as a marketing technique: they confessed, they apologized, they told their customers they would fix the problem, they talked about the changes they were making and they moved on. It worked.

Big brands are among the least trusted institutions in America (by some measures, only Congress ranks lower), and in the absence of information consumers will typically assume the worst. So even a company’s flaws are generally better handled out in the open. Unsurprisingly, brand loyalty is also on the decline. But transparency is a key tool that can combat this trend of mistrust and cynicism. Transparent companies garner more devotion from customers and can even turn them into advocates – which, in a social network-driven world, can lead to outsized growth. ²

Transparency in marketing is the new way to build brand loyalty. It is no longer good enough to build a campaign around a boardroom table, especially when it comes to making changes. The consumer demands to be heard in the decision making process. If you act as if the problem doesn’t exist (the Polar Bears) or it will go away (the Snow Birds), you will find your customers will leave you. Instead, market the changes you are making to meet the desires of your target market. We still cannot market winter into summer, but we can celebrate the steps getting there.

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1. 25 Predictions For What Marketing Will Look Like In 2020 by Jeff Beer, Fast Company, March 3, 2015

2. What Chipotle Can Teach Companies About Honesty With Customers by Sophie Bakalar, Fortune, June 24, 2017