In its most recent January 2025 earnings report, Boeing indicated it suffered a $4 billion loss, roughly four times “worse” than what was expected by analysts and Wall Street.
Now what?
How Boeing can be fixed was the subject for dozens of people interviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal spoke with “… current and former Boeing leaders, airline executives, employees, suppliers, safety regulators and others….” The newspaper’s interviewers asked: What should Boeing do to turn itself around?
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The Wall Street Journal sorted respondent comments into five groups: 1) Think big, 2) Fix the culture, 3) Forget production deadlines… for now, 4) Revamp the design process and 5) Restore trust.
These important action areas must be part of an agreed strategic action plan. Boeing needs to implement the Six Rules For Brand Revitalization, immediately.
The Six Rules For Brand Revitalization guide brand rejuvenation and create a brand-building mind-set. Each of the Six Rules has a series of “Practices” – ongoing actions. Rules without actions are just theory. Brand is not theory. Brands are promises of relevant differentiated experiences. How you run your brand is how you run your business and vice versa.
The Six Rules are:
Rule 1: Refocus The Organization – Financial discipline, operational excellence, leadership marketing, Brand Purpose, and goals
Rule 2: Restore Brand Relevance – Thorough knowledge of the market, needs-based occasion market segmentation, Brand Promise
Rule 3: Reinvent The Brand Experience – Innovation and renovation, marketing, Trustworthy Brand Value Equation, fair value, total brand experience
Rule 4: Reinforce A Results Culture – Measurable mile-stones, balanced Brand-Business Scorecard, recognition and rewards
Rule 5: Rebuild Brand Trust – Internal/external, Trust Capital
Rule 6: Realize Global Alignment – Freedom Within a Framework, Plan to Win: Eight Ps, the Collaborative Three-Box Model
You might be thinking that a focus on brand is the least of Boeing’s problems at this crucial time. Brand is never an afterthought. Boeing’s now well-known, well-detailed operational issues are affecting Boeing’s reputation and profitability. Brand reputation is an indicator of the health of a brand.
A healthy business relies on four “must-haves”, one of which is Reputation:
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- Be a credible source: Provide stakeholders with confidence that its information is true and that its promises are delivered.
- Have an excellent reputation for quality and leadership: Behave in the same way, every time.
- Be a pillar of integrity: Keep stakeholders’ best interests at heart.
- Have a responsibility ethic: Be an effective global citizen
Boeing seems to have deficits in all four of these areas. Boeing does not appear to be perceived as believable. Although Boeing’s CEO is quite passionate, are shareholders believing what they are hearing but not seeing? Boeing’s reputation is unhealthy. There have been and may still be serious issues with cultural cohesiveness. Is taking responsibility still an unresolved issue? Do global customers still feel a sense of uncertainty in dealing with Boeing?
Shareholders do not like uncertainty. An unhealthy business is an uncertain financial bet. This is why it is imperative that Boeing implement against the Six Rules in order to reassert its health and its provenance for excellence and safety in flight.
Three of The Six Rules are implicit within the interviewees’ comments. With the interviewee comments, we can begin to develop a Boeing Brand Revitalization strategy to revitalize and re-establish the Boeing brand.
Rule 1: Refocus The Organization
Refocusing an organization around common goals is the first step for Brand Revitalization. What are our Common Goals? What is our Common Brand Purpose?
People need to know what is going on and where they are going. Employees do not mind an organizational refocus, especially when the situation is in flux or is on a downturn. But, employees do expect to know in what direction they are rowing. Is the company on a road to financial health? Are we allocating resources to key areas? Do we all share the same vision for the brand’s future?
Refocusing an organization requires organizational realignment behind improving financial discipline, dedication to operational excellence, leadership marketing including revitalized brand goals (purpose and promise). Telling employees that “we are at low point here.” And, saying publicly that Boeing has to “get its house in order” and “clean up its act,” as CEO Kelly Ortberg did, helps everyone face the facts. But, without a full understanding of what all this means for employees, the calls for remedial action are unhelpful.
Organizational excellence is a critical issue. As suggested by respondent comments, quality is suffering at Boeing. “Shareholders over safety” has apparently been the strategy. “Speed over quality” has been the mantra. CEO Ortberg told investors that eliminating layers of bureaucracy (a good thing) has placed Boeing in “.. a better position to make faster decisions.” Yet, no one remembers how fast you do something if that something is the wrong thing. Following the Six Rules allows the right people to do the right things in the right way for the right reasons.
As many interviewees suggested, Boeing needs to figure out just what are its goals in the new world in which Boeing now plays. The Wall Street Journal writes that “for decades, Boeing was an aerospace pioneer.” Boeing is no longer thought of as an aerospace pioneer. It is really easy to lose your pioneering advantage. History is littered with the headstones of pioneering brands. MITS was the first personal computer. Chux was the first disposable diaper. Ampex was the first video recorder. We do not remember these brands as Apple, Pampers and Sony became leaders. (Gerard Tellis and Peter Golder wrote about the pioneering advantage – or lack of – in their famous 1996 article, First To Market, First To Fail? in Sloan Management Review.)
Having a new brand direction is important. There is no substitute for the power of a clear and consistent definition of a new brand direction and destination. The same goes for organizational alignment. Nothing is more powerful than a properly aligned organization.
As the interviewees alluded to, a Boeing organizational refocus will provide: clarity of purpose; a common brand and business vision; a common set of goals including quality and safety; move everyone toward the same North Star; set priorities, insure brand consistency across geography and time; measurable objectives.
Rule 4: Reinforce A Results Culture
When there is a conflict between culture and strategy, inevitably culture wins. Research shows the link between culture and employee behavior.
A results culture is one that evaluates performance based on producing measurable results. It means having a clear relationship between executive rewards and brand-business performance. A results culture rests on measurable milestones and rewarding people based on performance where progress is tracked in a Balanced Brand-Business Scorecard.
People manage what management measures, recognizes, and rewards. Define how progress will be measured. It is not enough to produce the right results. It is important to produce the right results the right way for the right reasons. It is important to produce the right business results. It is also important that these results are based on a strong brand foundation. A Balanced Brand-Business Scorecard evaluates whether the brand is producing the right results the right way.
Interviewees agree that Boeing has a culture problem. One troubling cultural issue is the reluctance of employees to report safety and quality problems along with a “blaming” culture. There appears to be agreement that safety must be everyone’s job. Without safety, Boeing will struggle in its recovery.
Interviewees agree that Boeing lost its “ingenuity and quality” when Boeing management decided to focus on shareholder value, financial engineering and cost-cutting. Those financial wizards at Boeing overlooked the facts: You cannot cost cut your way to enduring profitable growth; Without brand value there is no customer value and without customer value there are no shareholder value results.
Your people come first. Not financial shenanigans. As one respondent reported, Boeing’s mindset has been to focus on the cash register rather than excellence and safety in flight. If employees do not feel that they are moving forward and respected, the brand will not move forward.
Rule 5: Rebuild Brand Trust
Trust is fundamental in building and maintaining long-term relationships. Trust enhances the quality of a relationship and minimizes perceived risk. Boeing has a trust deficit. Boeing’s trust deficit presents an enormous opportunity for Boeing to become the “trust-worthiest” source of a relevant and differentiated promise.
Boeing’s provenance is a good place to start. Boeing’s provenance is trustworthy evidence of Boeing’s authentic character, expressing what Boeing stands for internally and externally. Boeing’s provenance is its principled foundation of trustworthiness.
Boeing should reestablish its provenance, using that provenance to create the roadmap for moving forward. The provenance of a business is its consistent, motivating, relevant, distinctive heritage, based on its past theme. The power of provenance is not about preserving everything from the past; it is about preserving the best of the past for the present and the future.
Customer-centricity, as a prerequisite for growth, requires trust. Businesses are expected to act like trusted partners. A brand-led business culture that puts customers and users at the heart of all actions, helps embed trust building.
Trust is essential. Being a trustworthy source acts as a multiplier with regards to customer-and-user-perceived value. Trust is a key component of value. If there is no trust, there is no value. Why? Because people are willing to consider and support – personally and financially – brands they trust. If there is no willingness to rely on, to trust, a brand, then there will be no personal and financial support. No brand trust leads to no financial support leads to no shareholder value. Trust is a relationship criterion more than a transaction criterion.
Building trust as a source of corporate, organizational wealth is an important driver for enduring, profitable growth. Trust Capital is one of the components of organizational wealth. Creating Trust Capital allows an enterprise to generate a trust reserve that helps through crises of brand or corporate character. A trust reserve of Trust Capital builds strong relationships over time. Trustworthiness is a key component of Brand Power.
A powerful brand is more than a trademark; it is a trustmark. Trust is an important prerequisite for building long-term brand loyalty. Without trust, there can be no brand loyalty. When you trust a brand, you become committed to that brand. Trust is the most important prerequisite for building long-term brand loyalty. Brand loyalty is profitable. Trust takes time to build but can be destroyed in seconds. Saying “trust me” is not a viable nor credible solution.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the respondents defined four constituencies where trust is lost. Boeing lost trust with airline travelers due to crashes and a frightening incident on an Alaska Airline flight when a door fell off the plane. Boeing lost trust with its plane-buying customers. Boeing lost trust with the US military dues to massive overcharging. And, worst of all, Boeing lost trust with its employees. A member of the National Transportation Safety Board stated on the record, “They have a workforce that doesn’t trust Boeing, that is afraid of retaliation. As long as that continues… they’re going to have problems.”
Focusing on Financial Discipline and Operational Excellence are absolute necessities for Boeing right now. But, as with other turnarounds, Boeing must also understand and create Marketing Leadership actions to resurrect the Boeing brand. This is because all the work on Financial Discipline and Operational Excellence are on behalf of the Boeing brand. Engineers and factory workers are not designing and building airplanes. Engineers and factory workers are designing and building Boeing airplanes. Without the Boeing brand, Boeing runs the risk of becoming a commodity supplier.
The Six Rules and their associated Practices help create organizational cohesiveness, brand passion, corporate pride and quality. When people work together and move in the same direction toward the same destination with passion and pride, things fall into place.
Brand revitalization drives financial management, service management, personnel managements, product developments, distribution managements, pricing strategy, marketing management and operational excellence. The business of everyone associate with the brand is to drive enduring profitable growth of the brand to ever-greater heights.
Shareholders want a positive prediction for the future. The only future you can predict is the one that you create for your brand. You need adherence to The Six Rules to do this well.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define or redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change from the inside-out. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
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