Brand Resurgence: 4 Lessons Learned from Amazing Brand Comebacks

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Brands fizzle out all the time. From historic flops like the Ford Edsel to problematic launches from established brands, such as Crystal Pepsi and the disastrous introduction of Apple Maps, brand disintegration can hit any company for any number of reasons. But some brands are agile enough to adapt, adjust their strategies, learn from their mistakes, and re-emerge stronger than ever.

 

Brand revitalization can generate a powerful response for any business, whether your brand is guttering out completely or simply losing steam. Here are some lessons to learn from amazing brand comebacks that have revitalized some of the most successful brands in the world.

 

 

4 Lessons Learned from Amazing Brand Revitalizations

 

1. Apple: An Unconventional Partnership

Despite the company’s problem with its map application, Apple is among the most powerful and well-known global brands today—but they weren’t always. It’s a well know story, the company started out strong in the 1980s with a decisive and profitable position in the computer industry. But following Steve Jobs’ resignation in 1985, performance dwindled, and by the mid-1990s the organization faced imminent bankruptcy.

  

Apple Newton Messagepad

Image via www.apple.com 

   

Jobs returned as CEO in 1997 to face the daunting task of restructuring the company and salvaging the brand. After scrapping the expensive Newton, Jobs took a bold and controversial step by entering into a partnership with Apple’s biggest competitor, Microsoft.

  

  

Apple’s customers weren’t thrilled with the idea of sleeping with the perceived enemy. But the $150 million investment from Microsoft not only allowed for the development of popular Microsoft programs like Office for the iOS system, but also paved the way for the iMac—Apple’s sleek, innovative all-in-one PC that represented the new brand positioning and served as a landmark for the company’s signature products, including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

 

Jobs’ risk-taking may have met with initial resistance from his primary audience, but the partnership paid off and ultimately helped Apple claim the dominant position in the mobile device market.

 

 

2. Old Spice: Shifting the Target Market

Classic American brand Old Spice introduced its grooming products for men in 1938. The brand experienced steady growth, and by the 1970s was the top brand in its product class. However, the Old Spice brand aged along with its customer base, and by 1990 it had lost its appeal—Old Spice was an old man’s staple, and brand loyalty was at an all-time low.

 

 Old Spice Classic

Image via www.pg.com 

At this point, Procter & Gamble purchased the Old Spice brand from parent company the Shultan Co., and launched a brand retargeting campaign aimed at capturing the younger generation. A new deodorant line called Old Spice High Endurance was marketed to teens, and the brand’s performance slowly ascended. Then in 2010, the company released the first of a series of quirky online commercials featuring the “Old Spice Man,” aimed at the younger generation.

 

 

The video quickly went viral, and propelled the Old Spice brand to the top spot in the body wash market. Sales of Old Spice increased by 107 percent in June 2010, shortly after the video’s release.

 

Old Spice Boat Man 

Image via www.pg.com

 

With a package redesign, new product releases aimed at a new demographic, and a video campaign that targeted younger markets by appearing in the channels they frequent, Old Spice created a brand resurgence that is still going strong today.

 

 

3. Dr. Martens: Banking on Nostalgia

Footwear brand Dr. Martens, known for patented air-cushioned soles and trademark yellow stitching, was a UK favorite for years. Dr. Martens boots saw peak success in the 1970s, when British punk rockers adopted the brand and created a craze. But when grunge moved in during the 1990s, Dr. Martens moved out—in a big way.

 

 Dr Martins Patent

Image via www.drmartens.com

 

The brand fell out of favour in the fashion industry, forcing the company to downsize together with production stopping in the UK. In 2003, Dr. Martens’ production facilities relocated to more economically favorable China, leaving just a handful of design and office staff behind.

 

 Dr Martens Metallic

Image via www.drmartens.com

  

But in 2007, the company took advantage of a growing retro movement to relaunch the brand—and pulled off a successful brand resurgence simply by changing the name of its product. The original Dr. Martens shoe was introduced as the Dr. Martens “Vintage” line, with campaigns appealing to their customers’ sense of nostalgia. By 2010, the brand appeared in multiple designer collections on fashion show runways, and in 2012 Dr. Martens was assessed as the eighth fastest-growing company in Great Britain.

 

 

4. Nintendo: Pushing Brand Innovation

The Nintendo Co. has existed for longer than most people realize. The Japanese company was founded as a playing card manufacturer more than 120 years ago, but is better known as one of the first video game companies in the world. Nintendo entered the video game market in 1974, and found incredible success in the 1980s with enduring classic arcade games like Donkey Kong and Super Mario Bros.

 

By the 1990s, the company dominated the home gaming console market with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo, and handheld Gameboy system. But competition from Sony and Microsoft heated quickly, and sales of the Nintendo 64 system launched in 1996 lost out to Sony’s PlayStation. The next iteration from Nintendo, the GameCube, performed dismally against both PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox.

 

Wii Console 

Image via www.wii.com

 

Following the GameCube, Nintendo stopped focusing on improving its existing design, and moved into a new more innovative direction. In 2006, the company released the Wii—an entirely new design that resembled no other system. It was easy to use, highly interactive, and marketed not just to video game players, but to families with children. In addition, it was no coincidence that the name of the product is pronounced “whee,” which strongly associated it with fun. The Wii sent Nintendo surging back to the top, far outselling both of its main competitors’ same-year system releases, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.

 

 Wii Family 

Image via www.wii.com 

 

A focus on brand innovation and a redirected marketing campaign allowed Nintendo’s fizzling brand to come back stronger than ever. To date, the company has sold more than 86 million Wii units and continues to outperform its competitors.

 

There are many ways to revitalize your brand with a brand resurgence or rebranding strategy, from a simple product name change to an extensive overhaul of brand packaging, brand positioning, and strategic brand partnerships. Regardless of the size of your business, these brand comeback lessons can help you revive a flagging brand and experience greater customer engagement, higher brand recognition, and increased profitability.

  

What do you think?

• Would a strategic partnership with a competitor help you leverage your brand? How about partnering with a complementary business?

 

• What kind of strategic risks have you considered taking with your brand?

 

• Is there a new market demographic you could reach by refining your positioning or brand strategy?

 

• Would you consider relaunching your products under new names to spark a brand resurgence?

 

• What innovations can you implement in your products or promote in your marketing to strengthen your brand?

 

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!

Personal Branding: Tips for CEOs & Senior Executives

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Branding is essential for the success of your business, but your products or services aren’t the only aspects of your company that need a strong brand. As a CEO or executive, and the public face of your business, developing a distinctive and consistent personal brand complements and further solidifies your business brand—while at the same time helping you achieve personal development, growth and enhanced career success.

 

Personal branding is a natural extension of your leadership. Your personal brand encompasses your expertise, your career accomplishments, and your professional reputation. In large part, it is the emotional response your customers have when they hear your name—it is the experience of ‘you’.

 

As a CEO or executive, you don’t have to be Sir Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos to enjoy the benefits of a well-developed personal brand. The following four tips will help you create a consistent personal brand that will help elevate your professional reputation and drive brand effectiveness for your business.

 

  

Top 4 Personal Branding Tips for CEOs and Senior Executives

 

1. Understand Your Existing Personal Brand

Whether or not you’ve worked to develop it, you already have a personal brand. The problem is that it may not be the brand you want.

 

Your personal brand is defined by your reputation, and by other people’s perceptions of you. This is especially critical in today’s digital world, where trusting online information and resources is the rule rather than the exception. What kind of picture does a Google search for your name paint?

 

Controlling your personal brand begins with awareness of the reputation that’s already out there. Your professional website, social media profiles, and published content should all reflect the brand promise you want to deliver to your customers. Without active participation in shaping your personal brand, it will be created for you—and you may not be pleased with the results.

 

Some of the most crucial ingredients for managing your personal brand online include:

  • A professional photo: Maintain personal brand consistency with one high quality, professional headshot that’s used for all of your online platforms, from your website to Linkedin to Facebook to Google Authorship etc. Having a great photo not only encourages brand recognition and visibility, but also helps to create personal connections with your customers.
  • A unified profile: As with your photo, use a single, succinct and compelling personal bio for every aspect of your online presence that encapsulates your personal brand and strengthens brand recognition.
  • A defined and consistent brand position: Make sure your personal brand philosophy is reflected in every piece of content that appears under your name online. Conflicting or incongruent presentations can undermine or dilute your brand and raise doubt in the minds of your audience about your integrity.

   

  

  

2. Define Your Niche

You may know how to define a niche for your products or services, but what about your personal brand? You can’t identify a target audience, because your customers aren’t buying you—or are they?

 

The goal of personal branding is to sell your audience on ‘you’ as a professional, an expert, and a business leader. This means you do have a target market, and it includes your business customers as well as your colleagues, strategic partners, stakeholders and the thought leaders in your industry. So defining your personal brand niche means deciding who your ideal audience is, and determining how you can best connect with them on a personal level.

 

3. Elevate Your Personal Brand By Association

As the saying goes, you are known by the company you keep. This holds true for personal branding, where a few strategic endorsements from industry influencers can enhance your personal reputation and allow you to be perceived as successful by association with known name brands.

 

 Tim Ferris 4 Hour Work Week

Image via www.timferriss.com

  

Tim Ferriss, entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Work Week, has seen phenomenal success as a personal brand, bolstered by multiple endorsements from highly recognizable names. The bio page of Ferriss’ website places him in the company of big business and personal brands, from working with Google, Harvard, and Nike, to appearances in Forbes and on CNN, to receiving mentions in the class of Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey.

 

As a CEO or executive, networking with influencers in your industry and gathering testimonials is a powerful way to build your personal brand and draw on the success of association.

  

4. Own Your Brand

Even in an impersonal medium like video or the Internet, your audience can tell when you’re being authentic—and they can spot a phoney. Your personal brand will not be successful if it’s not authentic. In fact, authenticity forms the foundation of a unique personal brand that helps you stand out. As writer and poet Oscar Wilde (who was a strong personal brand before the term was defined) said: “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

 

Many CEOs and executives fear the possibility of polarizing their audiences with a strong, authentic brand. But it’s essential to realize that, like your business brand, your personal brand won’t appeal to everyone—and it doesn’t have to.

 

 Steve Jobs

Image via www.apple.com

  

Take, for example, Steve Jobs. The former CEO of Apple was unquestionably a powerful personal brand. Innovative, dynamic, and widely respected, Jobs was also known for his strict perfectionist tendencies and for being harsh on his employees. He never tried to hide these qualities or apologize for them, yet even after his death, Jobs remains a beloved icon and a symbol of technological innovation.

  

   

Jobs’ less desirable personality traits remained a known but low-key quantity throughout his life and career. But even more polarizing personal brands can be successful, whether at the positive or negative end of the spectrum. Consider the unprecedented success of UK entrepreneur and celebrity chef Gordon James Ramsay, Jr, OBE. Abrasive, brusque, and demanding, Ramsay has built his personal brand on unending criticism delivered in crude language that has actually reduced his guests—his customers—to tears on occasion.

 

 Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares

 Image via www.gordonramsay.com

 

Still, Ramsay’s audience can’t get enough. The reason is that despite his caustic demeanor, Ramsay is absolutely authentic. He has a genuine interest in, and a passion for, helping others succeed, and that passion shines through. And while he may seem to work at cross-purposes, at its core, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares aims to create more successful restaurateurs through the application of Ramsay’s demonstrated expertise.

  

   

Defining, shaping, and promoting your personal brand as a CEO or executive requires concentrated effort and some brand strategy inputs, but the results are worth the challenge. By maintaining a powerful and consistent personal brand that is distinct from, yet complementary to, your business brand, you can engage your customers and strengthen your platform for ongoing success.

 

What do you think?

 

• Are you aware of your existing personal brand? Is it positive, negative, or neutral?

 

• How can you monitor and shape your personal brand online?

 

• What niche audience does your personal brand appeal to, and how will you reach them and engage them positively?

 

• Where would you start looking for influencer endorsements in your industry?

 

• How can you define and enhance your authentic personal brand?

 

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

 

FMCG Branding: Top 4 Tips For Competing Profitably Against Own Label Brands

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The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market is one of the most competitive and aggressive in the world. Whether your products are foods or beverages, toiletries, cleaning products, household or office supplies, or consumer electronics, your customers have a vast array of brands to choose from—and it’s up to you to build a brand platform, with a sustainable business model, that attracts, retains and grows your target market.

 

As every FMCG brand owner or manager knows, today’s FMCG brands are not only competing against comparable brands at equal retail pricing levels. In fact, the stiffest competition comes from private label brands offering similar products with significant price discounts, which your business may not be able to match. In a suppressed global economy where customers are looking to make every dollar, pound or euro count, you need a multi-pronged branding strategy that addresses the price fighting battles and enables your brand to flourish more profitably, at higher price points.

  

 

4 tips to help you increase your FMCG brands profitability and take market share from private label brands

  

1. Highlight Innovation

Customers are always hungry for something new and different—as the long lines or queues at Apple retail stores whenever a new iPhone is released can attest. Building a brand promise around innovation can also work for FMCG products. Innovative brands have inherent value to the customer, and can therefore command higher prices.

 

To bolster sales in its flagging UK and European markets due to damaging competition from private label brands, Unilever has shifted its brand strategy emphasis to innovation. The company has seen early success in UK markets with the introduction of compressed deodorant cans, presented as an environmental innovation in sustainable living across its Sure, Dove, Vaseline and Lynx brands and, the recent introduction of a new toothpaste brand called Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 which highlights a “unique enamel science formula” for rebuilding tooth enamel. This highly innovative new brand has achieved a significant price premium for the category, retailing at $17 /£10 / €13 per tube—much higher than regular toothpaste prices.

  Regenerate Enamel Science Nr5

Image via www.unilever.com  

 

The innovation lies in the formula they came up with which combines calcium silicate and sodium phosphate to regenerate enamel by up to 82 per cent in three days, while also making the tooth three times stronger. When you consider 80 per cent of tooth problems in adults are caused by enamel erosion Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 is a very compelling brand innovator.

 

However the brand didn’t just stop at this one highly innovative $17 / £10 / €13 Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 toothpaste for daily use, to achieve the best effect is has to be used in conjunction with a second product, a ‘Boosting Serum’ if you want to achieve the full 82 per cent effect, which retails at a further $51 / £30 / €38 and gives the user just the ‘once a month’ required 3 day usage amount! The consumer has to spend $51 / £30 / €38 per month on the ‘Boosting Serum’ plus $17 / £10 / €13 on the Regenerate Enamel Science toothpaste, requiring a monthly expenditure of $69 / £40 / €51 per person on their ‘at home’ dental care! So where the average humble regular toothpaste with an RRP of around $7 / £4 / €5 or less endeavours to prevent erosion, Regenerate Enamel Science NR5 is the first to reverse it. Similar to Apple this is a superb example of brand innovation with premium positioning achieving a premium pricing strategy.

 

  

  

2. Focus On Your Brand Story

Stories hold a timeless attraction for everyone, and brands with strong stories behind them are much more memorable and compelling with customers. Tradition, heritage, and history are classic elements for many successful brands, allowing companies like Burberry, Rolls Royce, and Smythson to cash in on higher price points by emphasizing the timeless qualities and standards of their brands. The same principles apply to FMCG goods, with brand heritage delivering a promise to customers that the extra cost is worth paying for. Note: Your brand story must be authentic, irresistible and consistent in a way that’s relevant to your target audience throughout every touch point of your brands’ existence and engagement on or offline.

 

Fairy Liquid Royal Wedding 

Image via www.pg.com

  

The UK brand Fairy Liquid has effectively utilised history and heritage to increase market share and surpass competition from private label brands. Beginning in 2010, Fairy Liquid launched a commemorative heritage campaign celebrating the iconic brand’s 50th anniversary, and a consistent brand vision of mildness and domestic harmony. The nostalgic hark back to simpler times, including a re-launch of its original white bottle packaging, drove impressive year-on-year growth of 13.1% in the hand dishwash category and 24.2% in the auto dishwash category.

 

 Fairy Liquid Diamond Jubilee

 Image via www.pg.com

  

In 2011, Fairy Liquid once again realized sales growth with the launch of a commemorative bottle to celebrate the royal wedding and another to commemorate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Further, the brand is the most popular for parent company Procter & Gamble on Facebook, with a strategy of frequent engagement on social media through nostalgia-based topics. With the right brand strategy, even newer brands can employ history and heritage to add value to their FMCG products.

 

 

3. Inspire Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is a driving force behind the power of a brand, particularly for FMCG brands. Customers who are loyal to your brand will buy your products every time, regardless of cost – but you’ve got to consistently give them a compelling reason for their loyalty! When you develop a loyal customer base, you enjoy not only repeat business, but coveted word-of-mouth advertising as your brand fans tell their family and friends that they’ll only use your products.

 

Procter & Gamble, the parent company to dozens of FMCG brands, creates customer loyalty for not only individual product lines, but the corporation’s umbrella as a whole. The company’s loyalty-driven ongoing Olympics campaign is one of the most notable and effective in the world, with a series of commercials celebrating international mothers and their everyday work in raising Olympic champions. Each of these inspiring, heartstring-tugging commercials ends with a series of brand placement images, and the campaign’s tag line: “P&G. Proud sponsor of Moms.”

 

 

  

  

4. Create Exclusivity

Many luxury brands rely on exclusivity to maintain sales and customer levels at premium price points. Creating exclusivity can also be an effective strategy for FMCG brands in two ways—by developing the perception of exclusivity for customers, and by building retailer relations for exclusive product distribution.

   Grey Poupon Mustard

Image via www.kraftfoodservice.com  

 

FMCG brand Grey Poupon has built a brand on exclusivity. The “luxury” mustard brand has always catered to a higher end customer, creating a brand that is synonymous with discerning tastes. Early in 2014, Grey Poupon applied the exclusivity concept to social media marketing with a unique Facebook campaign that only allowed customers to “Like” their page if their application was approved and they were able to “cut the mustard.”

  

Grey Poupon Facebook Application 

  

The ‘Like Applications’ were weighed using several factors, including education level, number of friends, and books read. Those who failed to hit the mark were offered tips to improve their standing and invited to try again.

 

 

  

  

In 2013, Duracell rose to 46% of the alkaline battery market share after developing an exclusive distribution relationship with wholesale retailer Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart company. While the wholesale deal required a slight discount on bulk sales, Duracell was still able to maintain a higher price point than private label battery brands and realize an additional $140 million in sales.

 

As the competition increases between FMCG brands and private label discounters, companies must develop multi-faceted value-added branding strategies to differentiate their products, attract new customers, and earn customer loyalty at higher price points. As always, a consistent brand promise built on delivering incomparable ‘perceived’ value remains essential to long term success in the FMCG arena.

 

What do you think?

• Does your brand have an innovative element you can highlight in your marketing campaigns?

 

• How can you highlight your brand story in a way that adds value for customers?

 

• Are there any traditions or heritage stories you can tie to your brand to invoke nostalgia or pride?

 

• Who is your ideal loyal customer? How does your brand marketing strategy reach them?

 

• Can you develop exclusivity around your brand, either through customer perceptions or distribution and retail relationships?

 

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you!