When it’s time to kiill off a brand
When is it time to retire a tired brand?
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Procter & Gamble is thinking of dropping one of its flagship brands, Ivory Soap, as part of an effort “to clear out weaker performers to focus on…brands that account for almost all its revenue and profit.”
Ivory Soap’s ads were a part of every Baby Boomer’s life.
Who could forget the T.V. announcer telling us “it’s 99 and 44/100ths percent pure”? The first Ivory T.V. commercial aired in 1939, on a Cincinatti Reds-Brooklyn Dodgers game, just 5 months after television was introduced in the U.S. By the 1950s, Ivory was a sponsor of soap operas, like The Guiding Light (I still remember my Grandma Rose faithfully watching it every afternoon). In the mid-1970s, Ivory made advertising history by sponsoring the “Nominate the Ivory Girl” contest; we see wineries today doing similar things.
So why would P&G kill the brand off? “Marginal or underperforming brands collectively are holding back the company, which needs to be more nimble in a competitive environment,” says the WSJ, noting that Ivory’s share of the U.S. bar soap market has dropped to 3.4%, down nearly 20% from ten years ago.
No doubt company execs feel a strong bond for Ivory, which “got P&G into the magic of branding.” But no management team can afford to keep a dying brand on life support forever. So how does a company know when it’s time to pull the plug?
That brands come and go is no secret. Ever hear of these wineries: Monte Vista, Old Madrid, Mancuso, Garrett & Co., Colton, Poway, Scatena Bros.? All were thriving 70 years ago; now, all gone, alas. Why? “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Tolstoy’s maxim suggests that the demise of each winery or brand is due to its own peculiar causes; but we can generalize about them all and say they failed to keep up with the times.
You can tell when a winery’s failing to keep up with the times by looking at who it sells wine to, especially through its club. Are its customers all “of a certain age”? If they are, the winery has one foot in the grave, literally. This is why wineries are so interested in reaching out to Millennials. At least, they’ll be around for a while.
Actually, the analogy to “pulling the plug” is apt for this reason: How do you know when it’s actually time to do it? This can be an unbelievably difficult decision for a wine company trying to figure out what to do with an underperforming brand. Ownership may have a lot of time, experience and love invested in the brand; there’s always the chance that things can be turned around with the right marketing and sales plan. One doesn’t want to act precipitously: once you’ve killed a brand, it ain’t ever coming back.
I think I know some brands out there in California that won’t be around ten years from now. I could be wrong: there are brands I thought were moribund in 2000 that are still alive. Anyhow—have a great weekend!
Steve,
One of my ad agency clients was General Electric.
Chairman and CEO Jack Welch’s had an edict: each operating unit had to rank among the top three market share/sales revenue/operating income companies in its industry — or it was sold off.
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/23/b3581001.htm
(Note that G.E. sold off last-place-in-the-TV-ratings broadcast network NBC to Comcast.)
~~ Bob