Lisa Orrell is a branding & marketing expert and a certified success coach with over 20-years of experience. Lisa works with corporate employees, small business owners, coaches, consultants, entertainers, academics, speakers and authors. She is the author of four popular business books and a professional speaker. Based on her expertise, her interviews and articles have appeared in many media vehicles, including: ABC, MSNBC, NPR, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Cosmopolitan, China’s HerWorld Magazine, and Entrepreneur.
Can advertising and brand bulding help bring back a dead-but-not-forgotten brand to life?
Why not? Macy’s almost “went away” but seems to have done a good job at repairing their image.
Dead brands are also important for the lessons they teach living brand. How far is this true?
I think they’re extremely important from the perspective that current brands can (a) Learn from the mistakes those now dead brands made in their marketing efforts and (b) Current brands can also learn from the business model & business decisions those companies made that played key roles in causing their brands to no longer exist.
So what’s the key factor to keep in mind for marketers who wish to take a shot at waking up a dead brand?
In terms of reviving an old brand, decisions have to be based on ‘why’ the brand faded out to begin with. If it just wasn’t a good product, versus it just wasn’t marketed properly, are two totally different factors. However, either of those issues can be fixed if the company is willing to do the research and the work…and if they have the budget. It starts with assessing the reason it “died” in the first place. Old Spice was starting to fade, but it did a great job of bringing itself back to life by launching a great marketing campaign around two years ago. They also got rid of the image that it was “your Dad’s or Grandfather’s cologne”, and targeted the new demographic of Gen Y males with that new funny marketing campaign.
And how about the importance of social web – the Facebooks and Twitters of the world – in the revival act?
It’s a must. A majority of consumers start their “buying” process online by researching and spending a lot of time reading reviews before they even step foot in a store, car dealership et cetera. Therefore, companies need to have a presence online and be able to engage with potential customers, aside from just having a website, to accomplish this. If a company/brand isn’t on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and/or Pinterest it is missing out on a lot of potential brand-building awareness and lead generation. That translates into missing out on potential buyers and gaining market share.
In your view, is there an example of a brand revival that you think was executed successfully?
Old Spice has done a great job. And JC Penney gave it a good shot with revamping its image to being “hip & cool” under their former CEO, but they received major backlash from existing customers and are now in the “we’re sorry, we hear you, and want to see you” fix-it campaign mode. We’ll see how that goes. On the flip side, a brand like MySpace would need a miracle soon. It dominated social media but then rapidly faded out, although it’s in a massive re-branding phase being positioned as an “artist” site (versus a site for “everyone”, like Facebook). We’ll see how that pans-out.
