Re-defining your brand is dangerous, but essential.
Sir John Hegarty
Co-founder and Creative Director at The Garage Soho & The Business of Creativity
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People don’t care about brands. This is the summation of numerous studies that reckon audiences wouldn’t mind if most household names disappeared tomorrow. Survey respondents might claim indifference, but this jars slightly with the level of outcry that ensues when a much-loved company unveils a change in direction. Rebrands can draw astonishing levels of ire from the public. Coca-Cola’s unveiling of New Coke in 1985 resulted in the company receiving 8,000 angry phone calls per day. Vanishing might be fine, switching things up is verboten.
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The re-definition is a perilous moment in the life of a business. Staying in the cultural conversation is fundamentally important. As society changes, your brand must evolve and refresh itself so as not to be left behind. But driving too audacious a re-think comes with hazards too. If your brand has a history, this is something to be leveraged rather than discarded. Consider how Old Spice reclaimed its link with youth and masculinity in the late 2000s. Or how Apple re-discovered its emphasis on innovation in the 1990s. Then there’s Crocs, the determinedly ugly shoe has conquered high fashion. If you are in possession of a storied company, your guide to the future can be found by re-examining its past.
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Beyond this, great brands don’t try to reflect who their followers are. Instead, they focus on inspiring. There is huge value tied up in acknowledging history, the biggest challenge is turning it into something that captures the public imagination. Re-defining might be dangerous – doing nothing is fatal.
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Founder Stocks Taylor Benson and Good Deeds@STB
1 天前My take on a readable version
Dear, stay true to the core—the essence of your brand. By doing so, you’ll be able to navigate the changes in society and let your brand evolve naturally.
I always remember Tropicana as one that really got it wrong. Re-defining your brand is essential, but you have to retain the thing that makes your brand memorable.
Writer, Designer & Art Director.
2 天前When we're in a shop and we can't see any of our favourite brands we get a sense of mild panic about the shampoo we're buying, or the tea, or the soap. That's because brands are about trust. That's why they carry a badge. We need to know where it's from, who makes it and what it does for us. I buy that people don't care about brands when you ask them, but whether they know it or not, they need brands. Your brand can stay up to date and be relevant, move with the times, fit in with pop culture - but established brands are lucky enough to be trusted anyway. Redefining your brand is very different from marketing it; inspiring people to buy more of it. If you want to redefine your brand to sell more of it, it's likely lazy marketing. If you need to make it more relevant to the cultural conversation, you're likely talking about the product, not the reasons people trust your brand.
PR& Writing |Corporate Communications | International Corporate Finance and Governance Experience | Personal and Business Branding
2 天前In principle I agree with you, but what I see is just too much risk taking for attention that might not pay off.If we look at Chanel,RR, Bentley, etc still doing traditional ads with some update and they work 100%, share prices flying, companies charging maximum premium on customers who are willing to wait for the product. Good,well done products will never be out of fashion. Somewhere these companies lost their identities and forgot why customers fell in love with them for the first time:they wanted to buy a heritage British luxury brand or they enjoyed watching (real) people's face lit up when spotting Christmas decorated CocaCola trucks, bringing festive feeling....these were the essence of these brands, RR, Chanel, Bentley they still focus on their core mesage which is why people fell in love with them.People claim they want innovation ...they want happy life, freedom, feeling loved and admired.... these are very basic human desires and I think this is what these brands understand.This is an RR ad, beautiful, enjoyable, still selling a car and we definitely would like to be in that car and having that lifestyle,and no flashing screens can change that, avg customer age 42. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCc1qDMsgMI&t=4s