Resilience is one of the most important traits a successful human can have. It can also work for business brands, argue Booz Allen Hamilton consultants Nikhil Bahadur and John Jullens in strategy+business (more or less a Booz house organ). In New Life for Tired Brands, they start with a mini-study of Ford’s decision to kill the Taurus and replace it with the Five Hundred, and why, after $150 million or so, it then decided to erase the Five Hundred name and call the car the Taurus.
It isn’t clear that Ford was wrong to kill the Taurus name; the product had been out for a long time, and had lost its luster. As they say,
Given the natural ebb and flow of a product’s life, most brand managers will eventually have to make the decision either to stay the course or to abandon ship. And as tempting as starting anew is, it carries its own risks — as Ford’s experience with the Five Hundred shows. But the price of sticking with a faltering brand can be just as disastrous.
Thus, their purpose. They’ve got a model, the Brand Value Assessment, that can help companies figure out when to kill a brand and when to save it. It’s a little hard for a non-brand manager like me to tell how it works, but it sounds like a mix of analytics, focus groups and surveys, and basic market research.
The model consists of four parts:
a Purchase Funnel Assessment, which measures all the steps that a consumer takes on the way to buying something; a Brand Equity Review, which looks at whether the brand still has positive associations; a Competitive Dynamics Assessment, in which the market competition is examined; a Value Proposition Check, a look at how the brand could be leveraged.
All well and good, but shouldn’t brand managers be doing these things all along? The authors imply that many companies simply start treating their brands as cash cows, and don’t bother to look at what’s going in the market. Doesn’t anybody still read “Only the Paranoid Survive?” Andy Grove’s heart-thumping look at how Intel managed itself when he was CEO (and probably still does)?
Also, the authors offer this caution:
The Brand Vitality Assessment is not a panacea for tired brands. Brands get tired for a host of reasons, and it may be impossible to revitalize them after years of negative associations and sluggish performance. What the BVA offers is a rigorous, data-driven approach to deciding a brand’s future.
And perhaps a way for Booz Allen consultants to extend their own bottom line. I’d love to hear if readers think they could do a Brand Value Assessment without calling a consultant.
