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The times, they are tough!

The global economic recession has persisted since late 2008. The forecasts for economic revival, growth and consumption around the world have been meek. Businesses, customers and governments are challenged to come to terms with stagnant markets and innovate different possible strategies to jumpstart the globally interconnected economies.

As economies shrink, unemployment increases and customers curtail their consumption, global brands that have withstood many a massive challenge are hard pressed to devise clever strategies to reinforce their brand identity, informed by the underlying value proposition on the one hand, while simultaneously thinking of how to reinvigorate growth by creating engaging brand-customer experiences on the other.

A key ingredient to devising successful strategies that can handle the multidimensional challenges posed by the global recession is effective and visionary leadership. Visionary leadership becomes even more important in times of crisis or transformational changes.

Internally, visionary leaders are called to rally the internal stakeholders by selling them the brand vision and the strategic steps needed to bring such a vision to fruition. Externally, visionary leaders are charged with creating a positive and optimistic view of the brand among the many institutional intermediaries that can influence opinions of the public, regulators and other stakeholders.

The corporate world has seen many such visionary leaders that have shaped their brands, strengthened the brand-customer relationship, and withstood the challenges of time and space to create iconic brands that have garnered worldwide recognition.

While most of these CEOs, such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, Virgin Group’s Sir Richard Branson, Sony’s Sir Howard Stringer, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have successfully transformed their brands into global icons, none of the these brands have had to endure the magnitude of global economic crisis that many of today’s brands — themselves included — are being forced to deal with.

While firm leadership is important at all times, it becomes even more critical to the brand’s survival and growth during times of external, large-scale crisis situations such as the current global economic downturn. It is imperative that CEOs, corporate boardrooms and brand managers understand the challenges involved in providing visionary and inspiring leadership during crisis times. This article offers five critical steps that CEOs should take to ensure brand success amid crises.

Innovate to enhance the brand portfolio: One of the surest ways for brands to continue to excel and out-compete their competitors in the current knowledge and technology economy is to innovate. CEOs should create a corporate atmosphere and reward structures that not only enable internal stakeholders to bring about discontinuous and breakthrough innovations, but should also devote strategic resources to the pursuit of innovative solutions.

Collaborate to leverage on distributed knowledge: The changing paradigm of the global economy is gradually embracing the centrality of distributed knowledge embedded in geographically dispersed stakeholders. Especially during times of crisis, CEOs should aggressively invest in building corporate infrastructure that can offer excellent platforms to the brand and its strategic partners to collaborate with these diverse stakeholders to enhance their value creation activities.

Consolidate to reap the benefits of efficiencies: One of the biggest challenges brands face during economic recession is to trim down their cost structures in order to be better equipped to compete with generic products and store brands that undercut the brands with an aggressive pricing strategy. Given the external environmental conditions during a crisis, CEOs should proactively prune their brand portfolios to consolidate the gains from a handful of core brands, thereby achieving cost efficiencies that will bode well for the brand’s competitive strategies.

Target diverse, growth segments: Crisis situations are excellent opportunities for brands to explore beyond their core industries and market segments in order to expand their scope and customer reach. Especially, the bottom of the pyramid markets of many emerging economies holds a lot of promise for brands that seek expansion beyond their core. Furthermore, given that these segments are inherently focused on low cost, CEOs should tie in their cost cutting and consolidating strategies to exploring these segments to reap strategic benefits.

Create a strong brand vision and culture: Finally, CEOs should take it upon themselves to cultivate a thriving corporate culture centered around the core brand values and the underlying value propositions. During times of crisis, the need for internal stakeholders to identify with the brand and live its ideals and values becomes extremely important. CEOs as chief brand ambassadors should be aggressive and proactive in creating such a brand vision and culture in their corporations.

Martin Roll is a global business and brand strategist. His website is www.martinroll.com.