This post is authored by Ron Cicero. Ron has produced branded content and television commercials for a wide range of Fortune 100 companies and their brands over a 20-year career. His work has collected awards from the Cannes Advertising Festival, The Clios, The D&AD Awards, and the AICP, among others. He practices Nishio-style Aikido at The Dojo In West Los Angeles under 6th Dan, Chikako Bryner Sensei.

The internet hasn’t been kind to aikido. As very thoughtfully pointed out by Josh Gold in last year’s article “Aikido: Confronting a Crisis,” the downward trend in those Googling “aikido”—the inevitable first step anyone under 30 takes before starting a new activity—shows an art speeding towards irrelevance. What is more alarming than the lack of those searching, is what potential students find if they do.

Aikido’s Identity Crisis

Any high school textbook on marketing touts the importance of a brand’s USP, or unique selling proposition. And yes, like it or not, aikido is a brand that is competing for attention just like any other product or endeavor.

A USP simply distills, in a few sentences or less, the differentiating factors about a product or service that will attract the target consumer to exchange their capital (in this case mostly time) for what is being offered (aikido lessons). Sounds so simple that it’s easy to dismiss this concept as amateurish—except it’s often spoken about at length before Fortune 500 brands do anything. I know. I’ve had to suffer through many of these meetings while producing hundreds of TV spots for national and international clients.

What some very smart people at Kodak failed to realize is they were actually in the business of capturing memories. See the difference? Film was just the conduit and the emphasis on film prevented the brand’s USP from adapting to changes in the market and technology. The company was not willing to make the changes it needed to survive.

Seems crazy that the company who came up with the “Kodak Moment” and the technology to put cameras in phones couldn’t see this. But we all know how it ended—Kodak went from being one of the world’s most valuable brands to virtual irrelevance because of this mistake in understanding their USP.

So what does this have to do with aikido? Most aikido dojos are no different than Kodak because they don’t have a true understanding of what they are offering. Are they teaching self-defense? Moving meditation? Conflict resolution? Cardio-fitness? Worse, are they claiming they’re teaching self-defense when instead they’re focused on teaching something else?

Note: there is no judgment here. Aikido is remarkable in that it can be any one of these things. But no one dojo can teach a kind of aikido that can be great at all of them. If you cannot honestly and clearly state what your strengths and experiences are as an instructor, and connect that to the desires and expectations of (potential) students, then you are shortchanging yourself and your students and contributing to the decline of the art that we all love. You are making the same mistake as Kodak’s CEO.