How long do you have to turn around the perception of a company taking a beating?
This is a question that has faced Steve Bayliss since he accepted the job as the chief marketing officer at Sky TV halfway through 2019.
It's the type of task the average armchair critic on Facebook would scoff at as a lost cause. As anyone in the comments section will tell you, Sky is a lost cause and a rip off at that.
This perception didn't appear on social media overnight. It was carefully constructed, brick by brick, over years into the edifice that would ultimately become broadcasting's hated incumbent.
As is often the case with social media histrionics, there was a nugget of truth to the negative sentiment that resonated with the public's sense that Sky hadn't been treating them right.
When Bayliss talks to his team about social media, he often puts up an image of a dusty pub in 1970s Australia with what he calls "awkward proximity issues".
"This was social media before it was scaled up," Bayliss tells the Herald. "It was where people told other people what they liked, loved and what was driving them crazy."
As the character Don Draper famously said in the hit show Mad Men: "If you don't like what's being said, change the conversation."
But how do you do that in an age when your perception is passed around social media circles like a water bottle at a Sunday league football match?
"That's a heck of a challenge," admits Bayliss.
"It's not something that can be solved quickly. It's going to take consistent effort. There's research showing that unless you do something catastrophic, it takes two years to change people's minds either in the positive or the negative."
This isn't the first time in his career that Bayliss has faced this kind of challenge. When he joined Air New Zealand in 2004, he didn't walk into the company that is today revered as one of New Zealand's most loved brands.
"Back then, if you went to a barbecue and people asked where you worked, you'd be afraid to tell them Air New Zealand because you'd get some coaching," says Bayliss.
"It took four years of consistent, courageous focus on customer, storytelling and leadership for that to fire and for the brand to re-win admiration and love."
Bayliss attributes the turnaround to Air New Zealand's former chief executive Rob Fyfe and sees parallels with his current boss Martin Stewart, the gutsy Brit who's gone into Sky and waterblasted some of the legacy cobwebs out of the business.
"Both are driven leaders who don't take 'no' or 'we can't' or 'should we do that?'. It's more a case of 'why not?' and let's break glass and do it anyway – particularly as it relates to activities in favour of the customer."
Stewart has had no qualms about leaving a few shards of glass around the Sky offices, reeling in staff changes, dumping things he doesn't believe in (Sky's puck, for instance) as well as making a clean break from former CEO John Fellet.
He's also shown a fighting spirit more often associated with a challenger brand, slashing prices and working to address some of the tech issues that have long plagued Sky's services.
This all points to the fact that Sky can no longer afford to throw its weight around like a monopoly player – as it has historically been accused of behaving.
"We can't take anything for granted," says Bayliss.
"Whether customers are turning up for a single event or they have a subscription, we need to have the attitude of re-earning their business every day.
"Every day they have the choice to not renew their subscription, to quit, not to buy the next event on Sky Sport Now. Customers have more choice than ever before. We have to fight every day for their business."
This strategic shift has set the stage for Bayliss to start having different conversations with Sky's target market.
There's a creative swagger to the company's recent advertising work that hasn't been seen in ages, and Bayliss says this has all been very deliberate. Whether its comedian Josh Thomson wielding his power as Dr Chaos or naked boy running across a packed beach, there's a concerted effort to catch the attention of viewers.
"We've probably done more creative work in six months than most organisations do in years," says Bayliss.
"Within the science of media, marketing and digital environments, there's an undeniable power in great storytelling."
The work of researchers Peter Field and Les Binet has long shown that investing in advertising that delivers an emotional impact – whether through humour, a great story or a powerful message – creates more resonant and profitable brands in the long-run.
It was long thought that this only applied to ordinary consumers, but an update to the pair's research this year showed that the impact of emotional advertising is just as strong when it comes to business people. It turns out that the forces motivating shoppers in the mall are much the same as those influencing the sentiments of the key business decision makers.
This is important an insight for a brand like Sky, which has seen its stock market price plummet 60 per cent in the past the year, to around 68 cents at the end of last week.
Some of this will be associated with rational concerns over the future of the business amid growing international and local competition, but the negative sentiment that's come to be associated with the business won't be doing it any favours.
There's also a decent argument to be made for Sky being undervalued, with Fat Prophets analyst Greg Smith tipping the stock to potentially rise as high as $2 by the end of next year.
So what is it going to take to make investors believe in the company enough to see the stock price reach that level? And will the company's ability to tell its story have any impact on this?
Bayliss wouldn't comment specifically on the stock price, saying that this isn't his department. But he did more broadly say he understands why there might be reluctance from Kiwis in accepting Sky's turnaround efforts at face value.
"Look, we're a very new team at Sky and there could be an element of people going 'I really like what I'm seeing, but I just want to see it a bit longer before I drink all the juice in'," Bayliss says.
"This isn't surprising. We've been off the pace a little bit recently and people just want us to prove that we really are back."
To do that, Sky needs to continue proving its worth in a multi-headed media landscape unlike anything we've ever seen before. And it needs to do it against internationally famous companies that don't even need to market in this country to garner an audience.
Horizon research shows that Netflix now reaches as many as two million New Zealanders – and the company has largely achieved this on the back of fame built elsewhere. So how do you even market against a business that doesn't need to market here to win?
"If we focus on Netflix, we're making a mistake," says Bayliss, pointing out that Sky needs to offer much more than just SVOD entertainment to maintain its relevance in the local market.
Sky did assert its commitment to the SVOD space this week with the acquisition of Spark's Lightbox, essentially consolidating the main local players under one roof.
But Bayliss says that Sky's strength remains in its ability to offer everything in one place, particularly at a time when the local streaming scene is becoming an unbundled mess of different subscriptions.
"Subscription fatigue is becoming a really big issue," he says. "How many of these damn subscriptions do I need? How do I sort them all out? Where is the stuff I want to watch? And how do I find it?"
Bayliss says that if Sky can focus on offering a single solution to customers who might like a bit of lean-back entertainment with their sports and SVOD preferences then they can offer the convenience of having everything you need in one place.
And at a time when things are becoming messier and more complicated, that convenience might just be what customers want most. The only challenge now is holding on to everything that makes Sky an effective one-stop shop.
