Tired Brands: The Cream nightclub

Last dance saloon?

In the 1990s Liverpool nightclub Cream grew from being a small intimate venue catering for around 400 clubbers every Saturday night, to being one of the UK’s first ‘super clubs’ regularly attracting thousands of devotees from all over the country. It quickly capitalized on its success by launching merchandising material, setting up its own record label in partnership with Virgin, touring nationally and internationally with a variety of sponsors, and even embarking on a series of dance music festivals called Creamfields, catering for around 40,000 clubbers. By the end of the 1990s there were regular Cream nights in places as far afield as Buenos Aires and Ibiza, as well as the brand’s native Liverpool.

Yet in September 2002, Cream co-founder and boss James Barton announced that the Liverpool club was closing. Although Barton said the reason for the closure was to concentrate on other aspects of the company, he also admitted to Radio One that ‘if the club was doing the sort of numbers it was doing four or five years ago we wouldn’t be making this decision.’ The media responded by saying that the decision not only signified the imminent death of the Cream brand, but of club culture in general. Whether or not Cream manages to survive without its spiritual home remains to be seen, but the closure certainly indicates tough times ahead.

So why exactly did it happen? How could a club that became a household name for a generation suddenly lose its appeal? The reasons, as you might well expect, are numerous.

One argument was that as Cream expanded it gradually lost its cool factor. In 1992, the year James Barton and Darren Hughes set up the club, Cream was immediately viewed as a welcome antidote to the business-minded approach of the London club, Ministry of Sound.

Word of mouth helped to fuel its early growth, along with celebratory pieces in dance music magazines such as Mixmag which named Cream its ‘club of the year’ in 1994. Around this time Cream decided to expand its operation, moving the club to a larger venue and launching nights in Ibiza.

By the middle of the decade, Cream was everywhere. Clubbers were sporting tattoos of the distinctive Cream logo (which itself had won awards for its ‘propeller-style’ design), DJs from around the world were lining up to play in the main room, and one Liverpool couple even decided to get married at a Cream event. In 1996, Cream was cited as the third main reason people applied to Liverpool University in a poll conducted by the university. Over 60,000 people rushed out to buy the ‘Cream Live’ CD in the first week of release.

Then, in 1998, the first signs of trouble started to appear. Darren Hughes left the company to set up his own super club, Home, in London’s Leicester Square. The year after the first ‘Creamfields’ festival, Hughes started his own ‘Homelands’ event. The club’s former director was now the competition.

Another problem was the cost of putting on Cream events at the Liverpool club. Ironically, for a club which helped to establish the cult of the ‘superstar DJ’, the fees charged by big names such as Fatboy Slim, Sasha, Paul Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers and Carl Cox were becoming the major weekly cost. However, without paying for the DJs, Cream would have risked losing its market altogether. ‘It’s the performers who make the real money, though they used to draw in enough custom to make it worth the club’s while,’ says Mixmag editor Viv Craske. ‘Big clubs still rely on the same old DJs, despite no longer drawing the crowds.’ With big names typically charging four or five figure sums for two hours’ work, the costs could clearly be crippling for a club such as Cream which always advertised their events on the strength of their DJ line-ups.

Another factor, and one beyond Cream’s immediate control, was the fact that its original customer was now getting too old to be on the dance floor at three in the morning every Saturday night. For many 18-year-olds, the idea of ‘super clubs’ and ‘superstar DJs’ was starting to be wholly unattractive. As Jacques Peretti wrote in a July 2002 article in the Guardian, this generational shift took place at the end of the 1990s:

These teenagers were more interested in rebelling against their siblings and joining a band. Instead of going to clubs, it became cool to follow American nu-metal bands such as Slipknot and Papa Roach – bands that preach hate and pain in ludicrous gothic garb, not peace and love, as ageing house DJs might. [. . .] Even to their natural constituency, super clubs epitomised everything that had gone wrong with club culture [. . .] The cutting edge of this culture now is not Cream or Ministry of Sound, but tiny venues with a word-of-mouth following.

As Cream became ever-more commercial, it was seen to lose its point. What did it have to offer which couldn’t be provided by mass-market pub, club and restaurant corporations such as Luminar and First Leisure (which began to borrow the super clubs’ music policy for their own venues but without having to fork out for the high profile DJ)? Cream, and the other super clubs, had suddenly seemed to lose their sense of creativity and personality. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that in 2002, the year Cream shut its Liverpool club, the biggest nightclub event in the UK was School Disco – which completely rejected the dance music ethos in favour of unpretentious good fun, with clubbers dressing in school uniforms and dancing to Duran Duran and Dexy’s Midnight Runners).

Some people have also questioned the competence of Cream’s management team. The owners certainly had no formal training, as with most people in the clubbing industry. As Oxford graduate, former merchant banker, chairman and co-founder of Ministry of Sound, James Palumbo, once put it: ‘The world of nightclubs is so populated by incompetent people that you only have to be a bit better to make a success of it.’

This accusation is at least partly unfair though. In many ways Cream has been too ‘business-like’, at least ostentatiously. In an interview with the Liverpool Echo, James Barton was asked about the decision to close the club.

‘It is something which is unfortunate but I think we have to make these sorts of decisions,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day we are businessmen.’ Of course, they are businessmen, but that doesn’t mean they have to advertise the fact.

Equally, they were perhaps unwise to make such a big deal out of their tenth anniversary.

Cream is, or at least should be, a youth brand. As such it needs to be about the here and now, not the past. As one anonymous commentator remarked on the Internet, ‘when was the last time you watched other youth brands like Nike or Nintendo celebrate their birthdays.’ Certainly, when your core market is 18–24 year-olds the last thing you want to be telling them is that you are 10 years old. They don’t care about what you were doing when they were, in some cases, only eight years old. The club’s reputation has also been tarnished by its association with drug use. Merseyside Police expressed concerns in 2000 about the ‘drug culture’ at Cream, saying it could have taken more measures to prevent drug dealing at the venue. In 1999, a 21-year-old woman died after collapsing on the dance floor.

Although James Barton said after the club’s closure that the German brand remains at ‘the forefront of youth culture’ there is an increasing amount of evidence to the contrary. Its ‘Cream Collect’ album sold under 2,000 copies in total.

Competitors have also been quick to isolate themselves from the Cream closure, by blaming a lack of brand innovation. ‘Cream closing is a seminal moment in club land history,’ Ministry of Sound managing director Mark Rodol told the Independent newspaper. ‘It’s a lesson to club promoters that you can’t sit still. Ministry of Sound’s music policy changes at least every twelve months and has always done so, with our nights proving there’s still thousands of clubbers looking for a great night out.’

Although it remains to be seen whether the Cream brand will turn sour, or once again be able to rise to the top, there is no denying it needs a radical overhaul if it is to survive. ‘Clubs like Cream no longer empathise with customers,’ says Mixmag’s Crastke. ‘They’ve lost the trust of the kids. And once you’ve lost the kids, it’s very hard to get them back.’

Lessons from Cream

• Don’t contradict your brand values. If you’re a nightclub which is open untilsix in the morning, your key market tends to be people under 24 years old. It was a mistake then to emphasize the age and longevity of the Cream brand to a market which cares little about such values.
• Adapt or die. For youth brands, the only constant is change. The Cream nightclub relied on the same tried and tested formula for too long, using expensive DJs who had passed their sell-by date.
• Avoid over-exposure. By 2000, Cream could be found everywhere. At festivals, in clothes shops, in music stores, on TV adverts. As the brand extended its line however, the identity became diluted and consequently the club struggled to attract enough custom to keep it going.
• Watch market trends. The fact that 200,000 people went to see Fatboy Slim live on Brighton beach in the same month that Cream closed down proved that there was still a strong market for dance music events. It also proved that the Cream nightclub may have been moving in the wrong direction.

Tired brands: Ovaltine

When a brand falls asleep

In 2002, the Ovaltine brand celebrated its 98th birthday. That same year, it closed its UK factory and was forced to admit it had finally lost its main market. The Ovaltine brand was put up for sale and, at the time of writing, no interested buyers have emerged.

First produced by a Swiss food company in 1904, the malt drink with added vitamins became the UK’s favourite bedtime drink. However, although commonly sipped to get a good night’s sleep, the original advertising for the brand highlighted opposite qualities. Indeed, Ovaltine was an official sponsor of the 1948 Olympics and was billed as an ‘energy drink’ years before the term became widely adopted. In 1953, it was used by Sir Edmund Hillary on his famous Everest expedition and it was even reported to cure impotence, decades before the arrival of Viagra.

Curiously, this image was reversed in the later 20th century, and it became more popular as a cure for insomnia than a tonic for athletes and the sexually challenged. As Mark Lawson wrote in the Guardian in June 2002, it also became seen as a drink for the elderly through advertising campaigns steeped in nostalgia:

The singing kiddies of the radio show, winsome in their Winceyette pyjamas, were accurate reflections of contemporary childhood at the time they started but, as they continued to be the official faces of the brand, kept sending the subliminal image that it was something your granny used to drink. In common with cocoa and Horlicks, Ovaltine took on the image of the sedative nightcap of veterans. Any potential buyer for the drink might reflect that the backwards-looking website Sterling Time – dedicated to ‘British nostalgia. . . Englishness and patriotism’ – contains a large section memorialising the Ovaltineys [the children used for the 1930s Ovaltine campaigns].

Future anthropologists may also be interested in the fact that so many people were once drawn to draughts reputed to put you out for the night. Part of the reason for the decline of Ovaltine is surely that more recent generations exist in a habitual state of exhaustion, caused by longer working hours, the collapse of public transport and the cult of intensive, hands-on parenting among young mums and dads. They are also far more likely than their grandparents to drink wine nightly and have the option of late-night or allnight television: all reliable knockouts. Graham Norton, Jacob’s Creek and long-distance commuting now achieve much of what Ovaltine used to.

When Ovaltine sales started to slip, it launched spin offs such as Chocolate Ovaltine, Ovaltine Light and Ovaltine Power. It also started to use contemporary children in its advertising, in its attempt to reposition itself as a ‘now brand’ as opposed to a ‘then brand’.

However, unlike other drink brands – such as Lucozade, which moved from medicine status to sporty essential through clever marketing – Ovaltine has not been able to shake off its sleepy, nostalgic identity. Whether a new owner will be able to perform such a miracle remains to be seen.

Lessons from Ovaltine

• Don’t build unpopular brand associations. ‘The problem of this traditional bedtime cuppa is that it had become associated with two unpopular commodities, nostalgia and somnolence,’ wrote Mark Lawson.
• Don’t fall into the nostalgia trap. Nostalgia can be a powerful selling force, but it can also ultimately make a brand irrelevant to the present market.

Tired brands: Moulinex

Going up in smoke

Moulinex, the French-based electrical household appliance manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy in September 2001. The action placed the brand in immediate jeopardy, but was seen as necessary. ‘If they want to keep going but the shareholders wouldn’t agree, they had to do this, otherwise it would have meant liquidation,’ said one analyst at a Paris-based brokerage.

As the company neared collapse, Moulinex’s 21,000 employees started to resort to unusual methods in order to keep their jobs. One microwave factory in northern France was occupied by workers and then set on fire. The following day employees returned and threatened to detonate homemade bombs to destroy what was left of the plant. According to Business Week magazine, union officials even kidnapped the government appointed mediator to try and get a better deal on lay-off packages. ‘I am somewhat detained, but it’s not a real drama,’ was the message the nabbed mediator managed to phone in to the press.

These dramatic events constituted only the final chapter in what had been a slow and steady slide for the company. Under the management of Moulinex founder, Jean Mantelet, the company failed to anticipate the economic slowdown of the early 1980s, and from 1985 onwards losses began to mount up. Another problem related to the company’s core product offering – microwave ovens. Asian manufacturers were flooding the European market with similar products, and often at lower prices. But still Moulinex continued to spend money, with a strategy based on the takeover of other companies, such as the luxury coffee-maker specialist Krups, which Moulinex acquired in 1987. Debts steadily grew, and in 1996 Moulinex tried to return to profit by laying off 2,600 workers. This tough measure worked, at least in the short term.

In 1997, the company declared a profit for the first time in years. However, the celebrations were short-lived. Not only had the job-cuts damaged the brand’s reputation in France, the following year saw the new collapse of the Russian economy. As Russia was Moulinex’s second largest market, sales were dramatically affected and the company went back into the red. Things got even worse with a similar economic crisis in Brazil, a country where Moulinex had made various acquisitions.

In September 2000, the company merged with the Italian company Brandt. This did nothing to prevent declining sales and rising debt. The bankruptcy filing in 2001 was a drastic, but almost inevitable last resort.

As Moulinex is still struggling to find a buyer, the omens are not good for one of France’s most famous brands.

Lessons from Moulinex

• Watch the competition. Moulinex was caught off guard by the influx of microwaves from Asian manufacturers.
• Watch the economy. When economies are in trouble, so are brands. Following the economic crisis in Russia, Moulinex lost a major part of its market overnight.
• Keep employers on side. The numerous disputes did more to damage Moulinex’s reputation in its native France than anything else.

Tired brands: Rover

A dog of a brand

Rover has been making cars since 1904 and contributed its share of technological advances – the Rover gas turbine car in 1950 and the four-wheel drive T3 in 1956 with its fibreglass bodywork.

The P4, P5 and P6 series became hallmarks of British motoring throughout the 1960s and 1970s, with the P4 affectionately known as ‘Auntie’ Rover. During the prosperous post-war years, Britons bought as many Rovers as the company could turn out, but its industrial problems in the 1970s signaled the start of a long decline.

In 1994 BMW bought the UK manufacturer, trying to transform it into a competitive carmaker for the 21st century. But BMW was mainly interested in the group’s Land Rover division of four-wheel drive vehicles.

The Rover 75 was the first new car produced after BMW had bought the troubled company so every effort was made to ensure that it was a technical and aesthetic success. At first, these efforts seemed to have paid off. Across Europe, Japan and the Middle East, the Rover 75 was heralded as an excellent car by the automotive press during the year of its launch, 1999. One magazine commended its ‘elegant retro look’, and described it as ‘classy, stylish and refined.’ In total, the car won 10 international motor industry awards. And yet, despite such weighty endorsements, people have been reluctant to buy the car. In 1999, just 25,000 were sold, which was well below target figures.

The problem, it appeared, was not with the car itself, but with the brand.

According to Jeremy Clarkson the Rover name has a certain stigma attached to it. ‘It’s just about the least cool badge in the business,’ he said. ‘Rover, the name, is a dog.’

Of course, this may only be a matter of opinion. The sales figures, on the other hand, are a matter of fact. ‘A look at the numbers shows that the buyers are bargain hunters who flock to the showrooms only in response to extraordinary discounts,’ reported the BBC. The sluggish sales associated with the Rover 75 were therefore symptomatic of a broader problem regarding the Rover name itself. The company had become, in the words of one journalist, ‘a living symbol of the UK motor industry’s decline.’

‘The Rover 75 was the turning point. It was supposed to be the car that set the seal on Rover’s renaissance,’ says Jay Nagley of the Spyder consultancy.

‘The Rover 75 was a good car, but the problem with Rover is the image. People in that market sector didn’t necessarily want the Rover image no matter how good a car it was attached to.’

By March 2000, BMW had had enough. With Rover piling up £2m losses a day, the firm decided to break up the company.

Lessons from Rover

• If the name doesn’t work, change it. Critics suggested the Rover name should be dumped and rebranded as Triumph.
• Concentrate on the brand not the products. ‘The problem is the brand rather than the cars,’ said motor consultant Jay Nagley.

Tired Brands: Levi’s

Below the comfort zone

Levi’s is, without doubt, a classic brand. Originally produced by a Bavarian immigrant in the dying years of the battle for the American West, Levi’s jeans now have an iconic significance across the globe.

Indeed, in many ways Levi’s have come to define the very essence of the word ‘brand’ better than any other product. As advertising journalist Bob Garfield has written ‘in literal terms, it’s damn near the only true brand out there, burned into a thong of leather and stitched to the waistband.’

In its September 2002 edition, the UK version of Esquire magazine heralded Levi’s as the ultimate clothing brand and a staple to the worldwide wardrobe:

The secret behind the enduring magic and success of Levi’s has been its ability to symbolise both ubiquity and uniqueness simultaneously. No other brand has managed to become part of the system (part of the President’s wardrobe, even) while retaining a defining element of rebellion, revolution and counter-culture. Levi’s are both fashion and anti-fashion. Just try to name someone you know who doesn’t own at least one pair.

However, despite its continued ubiquity the Levi’s brand has had a rocky ride in recent times, having watched sales slip from US $7.9 billion in 1996 to US $4.3 billion in 2001.

As with most brand crises, the problems for Levi’s have been numerous. To understand them fully, it is necessary to appreciate the company’s branding strategy. Levi’s CEO Robert Haas told The Financial Times in 1998 (ironically one of the most uncomfortable of years for the brand):

We are in the comfort business. I don’t just mean physical comfort. I mean we are providing psychological comfort – the feeling of security that, when you enter a room of strangers or even work colleagues, you are attired within the brand of acceptability. Although what a consumer defines as psychological comfort may vary from sub-segment to subsegment. The key phrase here is that last one, ‘from sub-segment to sub-segment’. In its attempts to be sensitive to the various fluctuations of taste among the denim-wearing public, Levi’s has diversified its brand by creating a wide range of jean styles. Most significantly, it has branched out beyond its traditional ‘red label’ jeans and introduced a new sub-brand called ‘Silvertab’. The company has also produced a cheaper range of jeans with orange tags.

Furthermore, the advertising campaign used to promote the Silvertab range in 2001 was among the most hated in recent history. Ad Age called the campaign ‘insulting’ and claimed it ‘lacked branding’. Similarly, in 2002 the ads to promote Levi’s low-rise jeans achieved an equally negative reception among certain critics.

However, not all the problems have been of Levi’s making. For instance, it could do little to curb the rise of designer jeans such as those produced by Calvin Klein, Diesel and Tommy Hilfiger. All Levi’s could do in the face of such a competition was to try and preserve the integrity of its brand. Even here, the brand ran into difficulty.

In the UK, the start of the new millennium saw Levi’s become engaged in a very public battle with Tesco’s supermarket. Tesco’s claimed that consumers were paying too much for their Levi’s and the supermarket wanted to sell Levi’s in its own stores with a narrower profit margin. Levi’s refused to sell its premium jeans, such as 501s, via the supermarket, and went to court to stop imports from outside Europe.

‘Our brand is our most important asset,’ explained Joe Middleton, Levi’s European president. ‘It’s more valuable than all the other assets on our balance sheet. It’s more valuable than our factories, our buildings, our warehouses and our inventory. We must have the right to control the destiny of that brand.’

Even the UK government joined in, attempting to persuade the European Union to allow supermarkets like Tesco’s to import goods from anywhere in the world. However, Levi’s insisted that Tesco’s was missing the point, confusing the cost of making the jeans with the cost of marketing them. ‘The important point,’ said Middleton, ‘is that all these costs are an investment in the brand. The true cost of making this jean is not just the factory element.

It’s much more than that.’ The UK government, keen to eradicate the image of ‘Rip-off Britain’ has remained on the supermarket’s side, and it looks like Levi’s will eventually lose the battle. Despite all these unfortunate external factors, there is no escaping the fact that the real threat to the Levi’s brand is generated from Levi’s itself. Now that it is locked in an endless quest to appear ‘innovative’ and ‘youthful’, by launching a growing number of new styles, Levi’s is now proving the law of diminishing returns. The marketing expense continues to grow, while the true brand value diminishes.

The view within the business world has been articulated by Kurt Barnard, publisher of Barnard’s Retail Trend Report, in The Financial Times in 2001.

‘Levi’s is basically a troubled company,’ he said. ‘Although their name is hallowed in American history, few people these days wear Levi’s jeans.’

In 2000, the company failed to make the top 75 global brands by value according to the Interbrand 2000 Brand Valuation Survey. The inclusion of rival brands such as Gap and Benetton only served to rub more salt in Levi’s wounds.

So what is the solution? Most branding experts now agree that if Levi’s is going to regain the market position it held in the 1980s and early 1990s it will need to slim down and narrow its focus. Consumers are no longer sure what the Levi’s brand stands for. Denim, yes. But what type? Straight-cut, loose fit, low rise, twisted, classic, contemporary. You name it, Levi’s covers it.

It therefore needs to cure itself of what could reasonably be called ‘Miller syndrome’. Just as Miller decided to be all beers to all people, Levi’s is doing the same with jeans. But this does not mean that Levi’s should stop launching new styles, just that it shouldn’t do so under the Levi’s name. Indeed, one of the company’s biggest successes in recent times came when it created an entirely new identity in the form of the Dockers brand, launched in 1986.

For the Levi’s brand itself, the solution, as with so many other troubled brands, may involve a recovery of its original values. Indeed, there are signs that this is already happening. In 2001, the company paid out US $46,532 for the oldest pair of the Levi’s blue jeans in existence, named the Nevada Jeans, when they were advertised on eBay. A few months later the company launched a limited edition of 500 replicas, which were sold almost as soon as they appeared in special Levi’s concept stores.

Only time will tell if this Vintage collection turns out to be a symbolic gesture of the brand’s new direction.

Lessons from Levi’s

• Intensify, don’t multiply. Instead of accentuating its core brand values, Levi’s has confused jeans buyers with an apparently limitless array of different styles. As brand expert Al Ries has put it: ‘In the long term, expanding your brand will diminish your power and weaken your image.’
• Focus on your strengths. If Levi’s stands for anything it stands for ‘the original jean’. In order to fully recover it will need to consolidate and strengthen this identity.
• Don’t look down on your original brand. When Levi’s launched the Silvertab range it fell into the same trap as Coca-Cola when they launched New Coke. As branding expert and journalist Ian Cocoran has pointed out, ‘Levi’s now seems to have a real problem in convincing the consumer that ownership of the previously indomitable red label still represents sufficient kudos to command exclusivity.’

Tired brands: Nova magazine

Let sleeping brands lie

In the 1960s Nova magazine was Britain’s ‘style bible’, and had a massive impact on the fashion of the era. Alongside the fashion pages, it carried serious and often controversial articles on subjects such as feminism, homosexuality and racism. At the time, the magazine was unique, but by the 1970s other magazines started to clone the Nova concept. Nova itself soon started to look tired and fell victim to sluggish sales, and closed in 1975 after 10 years in operation – a lifetime in the magazine industry.

However, such was the impact of the magazine on its generation that IPC Magazines (which owns Marie Claire magazine) decided to relaunch the title in 2000. Second time around, the magazine was positioned as a lifestyle magazine that was as edgy and fashion-conscious as the original.

The first issue lived up to this promise. Here was a women’s magazine completely devoid of articles such as ‘10 steps to improving your relationship’, ‘How to catch the perfect man’ and ‘Celebrities and their star-signs’. According to the Guardian, the revamped Nova ‘had more humour than the failed Frank magazine, and more realistic fashion than Vogue while still being a clothes fantasy.’

Three months later though the publishers were already starting to worry that the sales figures were lower than they had anticipated. They therefore moved editor Deborah Bee, and replaced her with Jeremy Langmead, who had previously been the editor of the Independent newspaper’s Style magazine.

Although some commentators questioned the decision to place a man at the helm of a magazine aimed at women, gender wasn’t the real problem. After all, Elle magazine had a male editor for many years without disastrous consequences.

Tim Brooks, the managing director of IPC, declared that the first three issues of Nova had been ‘too edgy’. But the publishers had done little to calm wary consumers by shrink-wrapping the magazine in plastic. After all, most people who purchase a new, unfamiliar magazine want to flick through it first to check that the content is relevant to them.

The new editor was quick to make changes. The novelist, India Knight, was given her own column, and more mainstream features, such as an exercise page, soon appeared. Although the magazine gathered a loyal readership, the numbers weren’t enough.

In May 2001, a year after its launch, IPC pulled the plug on Nova. ‘It is with great reluctance that we have had to make this decision,’ Tim Brooks said at the time. ‘Nova was ground-breaking in its style and delivery, but commercially has not reached its targets. IPC has an aggressive launch strategy, and an important part of this strategy is the strength to take decisive action and close unviable titles.’ IPC also said that it wanted to concentrate on the bigger-selling Marie Claire.

For many, the failure of Nova’s second attempt was not a surprise. ‘It was exactly like all the other magazines and failed to capture the British public’s imagination,’ said Caroline Baker, the fashion director at You magazine, and a journalist on the original Nova. ‘They should have left the old one alone,
not tried to bring it back.’

Whereas the original Nova had little competition when it launched, the updated version had entered a saturated market place. 2000 had seen a whole batch of new women’s magazines enter the British market such as the pocketsized and hugely successful Glamour magazine (the first edition sold 500,000 copies). Unlike Nova, Glamour had spent masses on making sure the magazine was moulded around the market. ‘We travelled up and down the country and spoke to thousands of young women to ensure not just the right editorial, but the scale and size of the magazine,’ said Simon Kippin, Glamour’s publisher.

The Guardian reported on the highly competitive nature of the women’s magazine market where new titles are launched and extinguished with increasing speed:

The cycle of launches and closures may have speeded up but then so has society. Forty-four percent of revenue is currently generated by magazines that did not exist 10 years ago. People still like magazines, in fact 84 percent still believe that magazines are worth spending money on, according to Henley Centre research. The magazines that people enjoy buying however, are not guaranteed to remain the same.

Commentating on Nova and other magazine closures, Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Conde Nast Publications, said magazine closures are a fact of life for the industry. ‘It is not surprising nor horrific when magazines open and close,’ he said. ‘It’s completely predictable, and it’s been that way for hundreds of years, otherwise we would still be reading cave-man magazines.’

According to this logic the failure of Nova version two can be attributed to the natural order of magazine publishing. However, many have said that if Nova had been given more time to carve its niche, it would still be here today.

One thing though, seems certain. Having already been given a second chance, it is unlikely to be allowed a third. But then again. . .

Lessons from Nova

• Recognize that brands have their time. Just because Nova worked in the 1960s didn’t mean that the same formula would still be relevant in the 21st century.
• Account for brand failures. Magazine publishers take a pragmatic approach to failure. Indeed, most factor in a couple of annual ‘misses’ into their budgets. ‘Of every six magazines launched, two will fail,’ says Conde Nast’s Nicholas Coleridge.

Tired brands: Pear’s Soap

Failing to hit the present taste

Pear’s Soap was not, by most accounts, a conventional brand failure. Indeed, it was one of the longest-running brands in marketing history.

The soap was named after London hairdresser Andrew Pears, who patented its transparent design in 1789. During the reign of Queen Victoria, Pear’s Soap became one of the first products in the UK to gain a coherent brand identity through intensive advertising. Indeed, the man behind Pear’s Soap’s early promotional efforts, Thomas J Barratt, has often been referred to as ‘the father of modern advertising.’

Endorsements were used to promote the brand. For instance, Sir ErasmusWilson, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, guaranteed that Pear’s Soap possessed ‘the properties of an efficient yet mild detergent without any of the objectionable properties of ordinary soaps.’ Barrat also helped Pear’s Soap break into the US market by getting the hugely influencial religious leader Henry Ward Beecher to equate cleanliness, and Pear’s particularly, with Godliness. Once this had been achieved Barratt bought the entire front page of the New York Herald in order to show off this incredible testimonial.

The ‘Bubbles’ campaign, featuring an illustration of a baby boy bathed in bubbles, was particularly successful and established Pear’s as a part of everyday life on both sides of the Atlantic. However, Barratt recognized the ever changing nature of marketing. ‘Tastes change, fashions change, and the advertiser has to change with them,’ the Pear’s advertising man said in a 1907 interview. ‘An idea that was effective a generation ago would fall flat, stale, and unprofitable if presented to the public today. Not that the idea of today is always better than the older idea, but it is different – it hits the present taste.’

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Pear’s remained the leading soap brand in the UK. However, towards the end of the century the market was starting to radically evolve.

In an October 2001 article in the Guardian, Madeleine Bunting charted our love affair with soap:

Over the past 100 years, soap has reflected the development of consumer culture. Some of the earliest brand names were given to soap; it was one of the first mass-produced goods to be packaged and the subject of some of the earliest ad campaigns. Its manufacturers pioneered market research; the first TV ads were for soap; soap operas, tales of domestic melodrama, were so named because they were often sponsored by soap companies. Soap made men rich – William Hesketh Lever, the 33-year-old who built Port Sunlight [where Pear’s was produced], for one – and it is no coincidence that two of the world’s oldest and biggest multinationals, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, rose to power on the back of soap.
Recently though, Bunting argued, a change has emerged. The mass-produced block has been abandoned for its liquid versions – shower gels, body washes and liquid soap dispensers. ‘In pursuit of our ideal of cleanliness, the soap bar has been deemed unhygienic,’ she claimed.

Of course, this was troubling news for the Pear’s Soap brand and, by the end of the last century, its market share of the soap market had dropped to a low of 3 per cent. Marketing fell to almost zero. Then came the fatal blow.

On 22 February 2000 parent company Unilever announced it was to discontinue the Pear’s brand. The cost-saving decision was part of a broader strategy by Unilever to concentrate on 400 ‘power’ brands and to terminate the other 1,200. Other brands for the chop included Radion washing powder and Harmony hairspray.

So why had Pear’s lost its power? Well, the shift towards liquid soaps and shower gels was certainly a factor. But Unilever held onto Dove, another soap bar brand, which still fares exceptionally well. Ultimately, Pear’s was a brand built on advertising and when that advertising support was taken away, the brand identity gradually became irrelevant. After years of staying ahead, Pear’s Soap had failed to ‘hit the present taste’ as Thomas J Barratt might have put it.

Lessons from Pear’s

• Every brand has its time. Pear’s Soap was a historical success, but the product became incompatible with contemporary trends and tastes.
• Advertising can help build a brand. But brands built on advertising generally need advertising to sustain them.

Tired Brands: Kmart

A brand on the brink

One of the United States’ largest chain of discount stores, Kmart filed for bankruptcy on 22 January 2002. The action came after poor Christmas sales and the company’s inability to pay its major suppliers. The bankruptcy filing was viewed by the US business media as the culmination of a series of mistakes under Kmart’s CEO Chuck Conaway, who took over in May 2000 and launched a US $2 billion overhaul to clean up dingy stores and improve the company’s outdated distribution systems.

These distribution flaws had led to many of Kmart’s most publicized ranges not being found by customers. For instance, when Martha Stewart launched her ‘Keeping’ line of brand merchandise exclusively for Kmart in June 2000 she had to tell customers: ‘If you’re frustrated, keep looking.’

While facing an uphill battle with distribution, Conaway embarked on a price war, challenging rival stores Wal-Mart and Target on price. The tactic failed. Wal-Mart fought back even more aggressively, Target sued, and Kmart sales remained disappointingly stagnant.

Conaway was also criticized for drastically cutting Kmart’s advertising spend. Analysts believe he should have used advertising to tell consumers about the expensive clean-up operation. Kurt Barnard, publisher of Barnard’s

Retail Trend Report said:

I was very apprehensive when Chuck inherited Kmart and its creaky operations. But he did the right thing by diverting hundreds of millions to the stores in cleaning them up. Trouble was, he failed to let 270 million shoppers know that Kmart is a new store for the American family. Meanwhile, 270 million American shoppers kept nursing the image that Kmart was a dirty place and had too much stock.

Whether or not Kmart will be able to recover from bankruptcy and take on its stronger-than-ever rivals remains to be seen.

Lessons from Kmart

• Realize that price gimmicks won’t win long-term customers. ‘The problem was that Wal-Mart and Target were out there pitching low prices, broad inventories, hip products, and pleasant shopping experiences while Kmart was banking everything on random in-store discounts,’ reported Business 2.0 magazine. Kmart needed to communicate a reason for consumers to shop there – and shop often.
• Don’t neglect advertising. A retailer undergoing a great deal of change needs to tell the public about it on a regular basis. Instead, Kmart cut its newspaper advertising.
• Be better than the competition. This is a tough challenge. Wal-Mart is a retailing giant, while Target has been called ‘quite possibly the best run company in the world,’ in Sam Hill’s book on branding, The Infinite Asset.

Tired brands: Kodak

Failing to stay ahead

Can a brand become too successful? The short answer, of course, is no it cannot. Is it possible to conceive that the success and popularity of a brand such as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s could become a weakness? Surely not. And yet, the strongest brands are also those which are the most tied down.

Consumers know what they want from Coca-Cola (cola) and McDonald’s (fast food) and they don’t want anything different. If McDonald’s wanted to set up a vegetarian, high class restaurant, it would need to change its brand name in order to attract customers. Coca-Cola has learnt this lesson from real experience. When it launched a range of Coca-Cola clothes, sales were far lower than had been expected. The trouble was, although Coca-Cola is an internationally adored brand, people don’t want to wear it, they’d prefer to drink it.

So to ask the question again, can a brand become too successful? No, providing the brand stays within the same product category. If a brand becomes globally associated with one type of product, it is almost impossible to change the consumer’s perception. After all, brands are names. If two people have exactly the same name it can become confusing, and so it is with products. But what if the product category itself changes, regardless of the brand’s will? This situation may never have affected Coca-Cola or McDonald’s, as there will always be demand for cola and fast food, but it has affected others, most notably Kodak.

Perhaps no market in the world is currently changing with more speed than photography. More and more consumers are trading their standard photographic cameras for digital alternatives. Many experts have predicted that it is only a matter of time before the entire camera market goes digital.

Kodak, however, is a name intrinsically associated with conventional photographs. When most people think Kodak, they think little yellow boxes of film. They don’t think cutting-edge digital technology.

According to Harvard Business School professor John Kotler, the market shift towards digital photography constitutes ‘a howling, horrifically difficult challenge’ for the brand. ‘For a century Kodak had too much success and too much market share. It was as bad as IBM at its worst.’

How has Kodak responded to this challenge? It entered the digital arena in 1995 with the creation of the Kodak Digital Science brand. However, the following year saw the company invest heavily in conventional photography with the development of the Advanced Photo System (branded as the Kodak Advantix system). This new system offered various advantages for the consumer, including a choice of three print formats.

However, the development of the Advantix cameras and films was extremely expensive for Kodak. Between 1996 and 1998 the company invested US $200 million in the system, only to discover it had distribution problems.

Not enough retailers were interested in stocking the cameras and films, and there were not enough places where the Advantix films could get processed. Some brand commentators, including Al Ries and Jack Trout, have questioned the logic behind the decision to invest so heavily in conventional photography – albeit advanced conventional photography – at a time when the market was starting to head towards digital photography. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to let the old system die a natural death and use the money to build a new digital brand?’ Ries asks, rhetorically, in The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

Kodak stuck with Advantix though, and its persistence paid off, at least in the short term. By 1997 its Advantix product range accounted for 20 per cent of all Kodak sales. However, it looks unlikely that Advantix will be enough to stop photography customers ‘going digital’. And the investment in the Advantix system has only served to reaffirm the association with conventional photography. Even now, too few consumers are familiar with the Kodak Digital Science brand. As Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer explain in The Ultimate Book of Business Brands, the company needs to change its competetive strategy if the brand is to survive in the long term: ‘Today, Kodak is competing not just with arch rival Fuji but with hungry Silicon Valley predators in search of a share of the emerging digital-photo market. The challenge facing the company is to transform itself into a high-performing organization, capable of holding its own with the likes of Canon and Microsoft’.

However, the Kodak brand has been tied with conventional photographic film since it was introduced in 1885, and the reputation will be hard to change. Furthermore, numerous other photography brands have a broader, more digital-friendly reputation. Not only Canon, but Minolta, Sharp, Sony, Casio and many more.

Furthermore, every time a technology makes a major advance, entirely new brands emerge on the scene. When the home computing market exploded, along came Apple. When mobile phone technology took off, along came Orange. Kodak itself was once a pioneering new brand for a pioneering new technology, famously promoted with the slogan ‘You push the button – we do the rest’. Now though, the brand name carries with it over a century’s worth of brand perceptions which are out of sync with the digital era. The question Kodak executives will resist, but ultimately may have to face, is whether it is time to push the button on the brand itself.

Opinions from the marketing experts are divided. Dearlove and Crainer believe its former successes will be enough to carry the brand through claiming, ‘the Kodak brand is likely to survive in one form or another – it is too valuable to be allowed to die.’ Ries, on the other hand, believes Kodak doesn’t stand a chance: ‘The Kodak brand has no power beyond the realm of conventional photography.’

If Kodak is to stand a fighting chance it needs to make some tough and potentially risky decisions. It will find it increasingly hard to keep one foot in conventional photography and the other in digital. After all brands are built on ‘either/or’ rather than ‘both/and’ policies.

As branding is a process of differentiation, Kodak must still preserve a unique identity in order to stand out from its competitors. At the same time, it must be able to form a brand image that is as cutting-edge as the technology it is starting to promote. This is by no means impossible. After all, providing photography survives in some form Kodak will have a fighting chance. Its strategic partnership with AOL for its ‘You’ve got Pictures’ service was certainly a move in the right direction.

It will, however, mean making some tough and difficult decisions. Among these will be the most difficult decision a brand ever had to make: should it divorce itself from its own heritage? Although difficult, it is better that this decision is made by the brand on its own accord, rather than forced upon it at a later date by the state of the market. Whether it will be possible is another question entirely, and only time will tell. Ultimately, Kodak may be forced to create a new brand altogether.

Lessons from Kodak

• Markets do not stay static. Markets are always in a constant state of flux, especially those which are based around technology.
• Brands have a lifespan. The Kodak brand has been around since the 1880s, making it one of the oldest technology brands in existence. Now, the brand may be reaching the end. ‘There is a time to invest in a brand and there is a time to harvest a brand,’ says Ries. ‘And, ultimately, there is a time to put the brand to sleep.’
• Success is a double-edged sword. The more successful a brand becomes within one market, the more difficult it becomes for the brand to adapt when that market changes.

Tired brands: Polaroid

Live by the category, die by the category

If digital photography represents a difficult challenge for Kodak, it represented a near impossible one for Polaroid. In October 2001, after years of falling sales and drastic cost cuts, the firm filed for bankruptcy. Although the company was eventually purchased in July 2002 by the private equity arm of Bank One, many believe the glory days of Polaroid are in the past.

However, digital cameras are only one contributing factor in the perceived decline of the instant photography brand. To understand how it was unable to maintain its once formidably strong brand assets, it is necessary to understand how the brand evolved.

Polaroid was founded by Harvard graduate Edwin Land in 1937, who had spent years researching ways to reduce the problem of glare within photographs.

Indeed, early Polaroid products included glare-reducing desk lamps and eye glasses.

In the years after World War II, Polaroid became chiefly associated with instant photography. Land, who had pioneered a process in which coloured dyes were able to be passed from a negative onto film inside a sealed unit, launched his first camera in 1948 and by the 1970s the brand was a household name. In fact, as the first and only brand within its category, the brand became the name of the end product itself. In other words, people didn’t say ‘a Polaroid photograph’ or even ‘a photograph’, they simply said ‘a Polaroid’.

Polaroid’s profile was enhanced further during the 1970s through the longrunning advertising campaign for the company’s One Step camera, featuring actors James Garner and Mariette Hartley in romantic roles. Because of its instantaneous nature, with photos developed in your hand seconds after they were taken, the Polaroid identity became that of a fun, cool ‘live for the moment’ kind of brand.

The 1970s also saw Polaroid develop an almost cult status, with various high-profile figures becoming passionate fans of the brand. The art world, in particular, became a fan of instant photography. This was no accident.

Edwin Land had understood that artists could help to legitimize his invention since the 1950s. He had known that if Polaroid was seen as a novelty, or a gimmick, the brand would die as quickly as it had emerged. He therefore needed to establish Polaroid photography as a potential art form in its own right.

In 1955 he had found the solution in the form of Ansel Adams, an internationally acclaimed landscape photographer who had exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Adams was sent out to Yosemite National Park in California to experiment with different types of Polaroid film. Artistic photographs of snow-covered landscapes which rivalled much of Adams former work were the end result. With the help of a ‘serious’ photographer such as Adams, Polaroid was now a brand to be treated with respect. Such was this success that every time Land created a new film he would invite photographers and artists to the Polaroid labs to see what they thought. There is even an official Polaroid Collection of Art which has been lovingly built up and now includes over 20,000 works.

By the mid 1970s, modern artists of a very different nature to Ansel Adams became Polaroid devotees. Such luminaries as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, William Wegman, Chuck Close, Lucas Samaras and Marie Cosindas were all big fans. Warhol, in particular, loved his Polaroid camera. He had it with him at all times and snapped everyone he met on his hedonistic adventures around Manhattan.

In an article which appeared in the Guardian in October 2001, Jonathan Jones explained the connection between the Polaroid brand and the art world:

Polaroid colour is intense, slightly unreal, adding its own sheen to an image. This appealed to artists because it made explicit the artifice of the photographic [. . .] The revolution that made Polaroid a universal tool for artists, as well as a truly mass photographic method, was the launch of its SX-70 camera in 1972. This was the first camera to have an integral Polaroid film, so you took the picture and saw it come out of the camera in an instant.

Since the company became a household name in the early 1970s, Polaroid had been used by artists to make dirty, cheap, quick, casual pictures whose contribution to the good name of Polaroid is debatable [. . .] The 1970s were the golden age of the Polaroid, but not in a way that lived up to Land’s artistic ideals.

In other words, the endorsement of artists and photographers which Land had so craved was now having a counterproductive impact on a brand seeking to establish instant photography as a serious medium. So while Polaroid’s popularity continued to rise, in many ways its credibility started to diminish.

With Polaroid viewed as a fun, frivolous and even throwaway brand, consumers rarely considered a Polaroid as a substitute for a ‘normal’ camera.

These cameras were usually seen as a luxurious and optional product, which although they might provide fun at parties, would never be as good as a Canon for taking family portraits.

This problem could have been partially resolved if ‘conventional’ photography brands such as Kodak were seen by the public to be treating instant photography seriously. In fact, Kodak had treated it seriously and planned to compete against Polaroid with its own range of instant cameras. Polaroid, however, was unwilling to share its market with anyone else and filed a lawsuit against Kodak. But while Polaroid may have won in the courts, it had effectively stopped the growth of the instant photography market.

This deliberate strategy of isolation was to cause further problems in the 1980s when more affordable conventional 35mm cameras saturated the US market, assisted by the emergence of one-hour photo shops. Customers could get high quality photos without waiting a week for them to be developed.

This meant that Polaroid was gradually losing its key brand asset. It hadn’t been able to compete on quality for some time, but it had been able to compete on speed. Now even that was being taken away.

The final blow was the arrival en masse of home computers and digital cameras. In his account of Polaroid’s demise, BBC News Online’s North America business reporter neatly summed up the superiority of digital photography: ‘Not only could pictures be taken and viewed instantly, but they could be sent hundreds if not thousands of miles away with a mere click or two of a computer mouse.’

Rapidly, the Polaroid brand was running out of options. It had already tried to expand into conventional 35mm photographic film, but had failed to convert enough Kodak customers. The brand association of Polaroid and instant photography had proven too strong in consumers’ minds. Polaroid proved equally incapable of turning itself into a digital-imaging company.

This surprised many analysts who believed Polaroid would have a better chance than Kodak had in competing within the digital arena. ‘Nobody was in a better position than Polaroid to capitalise on digital photography,’ said Peter Post, CEO of Cossette Post, a part of Canada’s largest marketing company, Cossette Communications Group. ‘What’s a bigger benefit than its instantaneous nature? Polaroid could have been a major force in digital photography today if somebody had looked out into the culture and tried to figure out where the brand would fit in. They just never went there.’

Ironically, for a brand associated with speed and instantaneity, one of the major criticisms levelled against Polaroid was that it was too slow in reacting to changes in the market. It had failed to anticipate the implications of digital photography, just as it had been unable to respond effectively to the rise in one-hour photo shops a decade before.

The creativity that Edwin Land had displayed when building his company simply wasn’t there anymore. As the famous US entrepreneur David Oreck stated in a lecture on ‘Who’s Killing America’s Prized Brand Names?’ there is a dangerous trend against creativity within many long-established companies.

‘Business managers are averse to risk. Wall Street people don’t want risks; they want this quarter’s results. But the visionary has a higher respect for the brand.

We have to find a way not to stifle the creative person,’ he said. ‘There’s still more poetry than science in business.’

Another failing attributed to the Polaroid brand is that it is a ‘one-trick pony’. It fought to become the one and only name in instant photography and has now paid the price. Yet brands can evolve. If Polaroid had been clever it could have branded digital products as a logical and even inevitable extension of its instant photography range.

Other experts have concluded that Polaroid should have concentrated less on the specific products it made and more on the particular values it represented to the consumer. Even John Hegarty, the chairman of Polaroid’s advertising agency, joined in this attack. ‘Polaroid’s problem,’ he diagnosed, ‘was that they kept thinking of themselves as a camera. But the “[brand] vision” process taught us something: Polaroid is not a camera – it’s a social lubricant.’

If Polaroid had concentrated on the unique ‘sociable’ aspects of the brand, rather than the unique technological aspects, it would have certainly been less vulnerable when technology overtook its core product offerings. But by the end of the 1990s it had left it too late. Debts were mounting, and the brand was by that point associated with the Polaroid camera. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 caused a slowdown in travel, and consequently a decline in demand for cameras and films. These bleaker market conditions proved too much. By that time Polaroid had amassed debts of almost US $1 billion, and the company’s share value slipped from a high of US $60 in 1997 to a low of 28 cents in October 2001. That same month, the company filed for bankruptcy.

Lessons from Polaroid

• Be quick. Polaroid was slow to anticipate and respond to future trends, such as digital photography and one-hour photo shops.
• Don’t be over-protective. In forcing Kodak out of instant photography, Polaroid was defending its brand at the expense of the market. Very few brands can sustain a product category single-handedly over the long-term. Polaroid therefore went against ‘The Law of the Category’ as formulated by Al and Laura Ries. Namely, that ‘leading brands should promote the category, not the brand.’
• Focus on values, not products. According to Kevin Roberts, the US chief executive of Saatchi and Saatchi, for a brand to be truly successful it needs to become a ‘lovemark’ rather than a ‘trademark’. In other words, the brand needs to inspire passion. Roberts cites Coca-Cola, Nike and Harley Davidson as classic lovemarks. In order to create a lovemark, Polaroid would have needed to focus on its value as a ‘social lubricant’ (to borrow John Hegarty’s phrase). This would have helped to increase Polaroid’s elasticity (see below).
• Be elastic. Branding author Jack Trout observed that companies are limited to one idea per brand. When that idea is the product itself, as opposed to the values it represents, brands become inflexible.
• Feel it, don’t fight it. Polaroid’s early brand vision was to establish instant photography as a serious artistic medium. However, by the 1970s this vision was undermined by pop artists who loved its fun and frivolous associations. Polaroid resisted this image for too long, just as it resisted other external factors that impacted on the brand.
• Stay relevant. ‘Brands that don’t keep up can get lost quickly,’ says Peter Post of Canadian marketing firm Cosette Post in a brandchannel.com article by John Kavolefski. ‘They first become irrelevant, then invisible, and then they’re gone.’ Instead of exploiting the opportunity offered by digital photography, Polaroid was concentrating on developing a 35mm colour print film.
• Stay creative. ‘A lot of these older brands start to lose any kind of creativity in their strategic thinking,’ says marketing consultant, Bruce Tait in the brandchannel.com article. ‘The whole idea should be to insert originality into the strategic process, and push to be relevant and differentiated.
• There’s too much belief in marketing as a scientific process. People have too few ideas. The leads to sameness in strategy and that’s why brands die.’
• Be essential. With the arrival of digital photography there is no longer a need for Polaroid’s style of instant photography. For instance, whereas building site managers used to rely on Polaroid in their professional life, they now use digital cameras to take on-site pictures. The only exception is in the legal field, as Polaroid film remains the only thing certain courts accept as evidence because it cannot be altered.

Tired brands: Oldsmobile

How the ‘King of Chrome’ ended up on the scrap heap

Oldsmobile is among the brand legends in US car history. Conceived in 1897, it was one of the five core brands manufactured by General Motors (GM) – the other four being Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac – and helped lead the company to a 57 per cent share of the US car market by the middle of the last century.

For decades, Oldsmobile was a pioneering brand. In the 1920s, it became known as the ‘King of Chrome’ because it was the first car with chromeplated trim. A decade later it became the first production line car in the US with a fully automatic transmission. In 1966, it introduced a car with front wheel drive.

However, in more recent times Oldsmobile has lost its pioneering edge. GM famously decided that instead of preserving and accentuating the unique identity of each of its brands it would increase its profits ‘through uniformity’. As a result, Oldsmobiles began to look very similar to other GM cars, with only small, superficial differences.

In 1983 a Fortune magazine article highlighted the growing homogeny of the GM brands by including a photograph of an Oldsmobile alongside a Chevrolet, a Buick and a Pontiac. The article’s headline was, ‘Will Success Spoil General Motors?’, but it may as well have been, ‘Spot the Difference’.

The article described GM’s new state-of-the-art assembly plant at Orion, Michigan: The $600-million plant bristles with robots, computer terminals, and automated welding equipment, including two massive $1.5 million Ploogate systems that align and weld assemblies of body panels.

Unmanned forklifts, guided by wires buried in the floor, will carry parts directly from loading docks. In its flexibility, Orion sets new standards for GM plants.

But while GM’s technology may have been cutting edge, the values associated with the Oldsmobile brands were anything but. An article in the Detroit News in May 2002 explained the problem the Detroit-based company faced in the 1980s and 1990s:

GM’s historic brand strategy, pioneered by chairman Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, counted on consumers methodically moving up the ladder of affluence from Chevrolet to Buick to Oldsmobile to Cadillac. The game plan worked when GM built distinct cars for every division, but fell apart when the company slapped different nameplates on essentially the same vehicles. A solid, but staid Oldsmobile has little appeal to consumers enamoured with sleek Audi sedans or Toyota’s elegant Lexus luxury cars.

Loyalty, instead of enthusiasm, drew consumers to GM showrooms. The average age of owners of Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac drifted into the mid-60s.

Towards the end of the 1990s, GM unveiled a new branding strategy to combat this lack of enthusiasm. The idea was to focus more on specific models rather than the brand division. Within the Oldsmobile range, GM launched the Alero, Aurora and Intrigue models in an attempt to catch up with its slicker rivals. Although the new cars received various positive reviews within the automotive press, and an intensive marketing drive that included strategic appearances in The X-Files, they failed to capture the share of the younger market they were designed to attract.

At the end of 2000, GM made what must have been a painful, if unavoidable decision to gradually phase out the Oldsmobile brand. The Oldsmobile collector’s models mark the end of production. From 2004, no future Oldsmobile models will be manufactured.

Since the decision was made, marketing experts have been conducting post-mortems of the brand to see what exactly went wrong. One mistake that has been highlighted repeatedly is GM’s attempt to strip the brand of its oldfashioned connotations. This was always going to be difficult for a car that predates Ford and even has the word ‘old’ within its name.

GM tried to get round this problem by launching an advertising campaign based around the slogan, ‘This is not your father’s Oldsmobile’. However, as Coca-Cola discovered with New Coke, it is not easy to reverse a brand identity which has been a century in the making. Another, rather pointless tactic was to build Oldsmobiles without the name Oldsmobile on the outside of the car. One Brand Week article, published in February 2001 after GM made its decision public, examines the folly of such branding exercises:

The problem [Oldsmobile] encountered is that brands, particularly brands with a well-established image, cannot be repositioned. At best they may be nudged slowly in a new direction but not one that is the antithesis of what it stood for [. . .] A better solution, and a more unique approach, would have been to accept the brand as it was, with its older profile, and give its older customers a product they wanted to own with a message that appealed to their needs. In addition to capitalising on the existing profile of the brand, that strategy would have taken advantage of the growing number of mature Americans and their increased spending power.

The Oldsmobile hadn’t always been viewed as staid and boring though. Although it had never been a youth brand, it had been considered an innovator in its field. The most critical brand damage therefore occurred when this reputation faded, and the motivation to buy an Oldsmobile (as opposed to another GM car) no longer remained so great. However, despite these obvious failings, affection among Oldsmobile’s traditional customers is still strong. There is even a Web site (saveoldsmobile.org) dedicated to encouraging GM to reverse its decision to phase the brand out. But a visit to the Web site will only serve to remind you that the significance of the Oldsmobile brand is confined to the past. The affection most feel for the car is already tinged with nostalgia. Indeed, if it is the job of branding to distinguish one product from the next in the mind of the customer, the Oldsmobile brand failed decades ago.

Lessons from Oldsmobile

• Make your brand distinctive. When GM decided to adopt a policy of uniformity, the Oldsmobile brand became too, well, general.
• Don’t betray your brand values. ‘One can change some of the elements providing that the consumer continues to recognise that the same brand values are still present after the change,’ says Jacques Cherron of brand consultancy JRC&A. Attempting to convert Oldsmobile into a young and hip brand was clearly one brand betrayal too far.