Shrinking customer base? It’s not too late to give your brand some juice to jumpstart its needs.
Can a brand come back to life? Marketers and customers have often wondered this. Well-known and successful brands like Marvel, Apple, Lego, and Volkswagen have been on the verge of dying out before turning things around. There’s even a company that has been purchasing and reviving dead brands like Brim, Nuprin, Salon Selectives, Eagle Snacks, and Underalls. So how can brands achieve such a feat?
Look carefully.
I’ve helped companies devise the following strategies that didn’t just revive their brand, but helped them grow and find success.
Watch the Warning Signs
Brands can start by being vigilant, and acknowledge any problems they encounter. This way, they have a chance to pivot quickly before it’s too late. That’s where a company like Blockbuster went wrong, and where Netflix saved the day: instead of noticing that customers preferred to have movies sent to them, the chain kept building new stores rather than changing its existing model.
Netflix could have followed the same direction, but the company paid attention to trends and provided the streaming subscription service that customers wanted.
If you want to prevent your brand from dying, pay close attention to shrinking customer base and revenue. If your brand is stagnant and hasn’t evolved or adapted to the changing market, competitors will appear more enticing and innovative. Be mindful of this and you can prevent your brand from ceasing to exist in the first place.
Redefine who you want to be a brand to
if the current audience places a declining level of value on it, think about who might be able to use it in ways that enable you to regain value. Starbucks redefined the value of coffee globally by making coffee hip, urbane, and tailored to individual tastes. Now they’re looking to do the same thing with tea. In a world that really does believe it’s seen or searched it all, discovery is a powerful consumer motive.
sometimes changing the value of a commodity can be as simple as changing how it appears to others. Think about the difference in pricing and perception between bottled beer and beer on tap. However, new packaging alone won’t make up for a product that doesn’t add value. What it can do is signal the unrealized value that you want consumers to take up on.
Formulate your offer in different ways
the water industry changed how we think of water by adding vitamins and/or carbon dioxide and then segmenting those offers to specific audiences. Today, the world spends more than $100 billion a year on bottled water. What could you do to what you have to make it more than it is right now?
Think of the product or service in new ways
when you redefine what something is or could be, you reframe its context and it’s much easier to redefine what it can be used for. When you stop thinking of milk as a drink, for example, and start thinking of it as a food, as Fonterra did, you change the scope of the product you’re working within so many ways.
Very the story around it
New storylines can change how people perceive a product. Water, beer, and wine have all used stories to engage consumers and to deliver a new sense of worth. Increasingly, there are opportunities to link undifferentiated products to differentiating stories around the environment, supply chain, conduct, purpose, and cause.
Psychologist Dr. Norman Holland, in an interview with Stephen Denny, explains why: “When we adopt a brand for our own use, we integrate it into the stories of our daily lives.” Once integrated, of course, that storied brand has a new value for buyers because now it’s personal.
Name it in a variety of different ways
The deer industry in New Zealand renamed its venison offering “cervena” to differentiate it from deer meat sourced from elsewhere and to make a strong country-of-origin play. If you’re selling copper and everyone else is selling copper, what can you call your copper to distinguish it from what people can source anywhere? Again – renaming alone won’t be enough. In the case of cervena, the change in name spoke to an idea that consumers were interested in, and eliminated the concern, amongst American consumers, that they were eating Bambi.
Package it in different ways
The red meat industry is now starting to segment its offer and to assign different perceptions of value to cuts and breeds that not too long ago would all have just been beef. Angus is a classic example. Others are packaging along ethical lines to put daylight between themselves and others and to appeal to consumers who are prepared to pay more for feel-good foods.
Cage-free and free-range eggs are part of this trend. (What’s interesting for those interested in moral labeling, however, is how those terms and others can be defined in some jurisdictions. It doesn’t necessarily mean what it appears to mean.)
Distribute it differently
Changing the distribution channel can be a highly effective way to transform your white label product into something valued by a more specific audience. iTunes rebuilt the value of music by reinventing the concept of the single into a single digital track and allowing people to buy the music they wanted in a new way, at a new price. Tablets are having the same effect on books and magazines – redefining how consumers access content and buy it. It’s a very different value equation than it used to be – but at least it’s a value equation.
Price package it in different ways
This is a particularly effective approach when combined with segmentation. Go after various parts of the market with products that demonstrate various levels of value add and are price pointed accordingly – e.g. a bulk product at a bulk price, a high end or specialized product priced at a top-end price, and a consumer-focused product that may even operate at flexible price points. Forced into what was close to a death spiral for many, the airline industry repriced to find new ways of achieving yield. First, they cemented the front-end profit by giving business and first-class passengers more space and more comfort to protect margins.
Then they unbundled their economy offering, adding new categories like Premium Economy, cramming in more seats in cattle class, and instigating fees for service that have kept the asking price low whilst charging at every point for things that were once considered included. This evolution hasn’t exactly been a success from the travelers’ point of view, but it has certainly forced a rethink on what is paid for, and how.
A note of caution. While, as outlined above, there are a number of ways to stave off deterioration and even to restore value to goods whose value has decayed, there is also no denying that the product or brand you make has a best-before date in terms of margin. Unless you assume commoditization and continually look for ways to slow its advance or reverse its influence, it will get your brand in the end.
The key to successfully staging a resurgence in the value of your brand is to think of each of the nine tactics outlined above as a multiplier. To an extent, the more multipliers you can employ simultaneously, the greater the chances that you can lift your brand. Focus them specifically on the key needs and unmet desires of your (new) target market.
