Is your brand dead?

A little late for Halloween perhaps but on a spooky note I thought it might be worth discussing dead brands as the equivalent of beating heart corpses, a topic I read about recently. It appears that the question of whether someone is dead is not a clear cut issue. Over the years there has been much debate and various tests proposed and then discredited. Dead sailors would be sewn up in body bags before being dumped overboard with the last stitch put through the nose just to be sure Jack Tar was really on his way to Davy Jones. On land doctors would pinch the corpses’ nipples or put a mirror under the nose just to make sure there would be no banging on the coffin lid. Eventually it was agreed that you were dead when your heart stopped beating and of course this could be checked quite easily. However, even this was not an end to the matter – was there any brain activity? Modern medical equipment can check this and surely death is only really final if the brain is dead and if the brain is dead then the body must surely also be dead? Not so apparently – we now know there are a worrying number of cases where the body will continue to function for days, years, even decades after the brain has ‘given up the ghost’. These are known as ‘beating heart corpses’ and they have thrown open the whole debate of what being dead really means.

I can now sympathize with the pet shop owner who argued with John Cleese about his parrot – maybe the parrot was indeed just resting? Deciding whether a person or a parrot is dead, being able to pinpoint the moment at which they pass from life into death is not so easy. At every moment of every day, those of us who consider ourselves to be alive are in fact dying, at least parts of us are, but luckily other parts are renewing or at best hanging on, until either our brains or our bodies, or at some point both, give out altogether. We’re born, we grow, we mature, we atrophy and then we die but it is all a process including the last bit, death. We can appear to be dead but still be alive and we can appear to be alive but in fact be dead and it is not binary.

So I return to the question posed in my title – is your brand dead? I was once, in my consultancy days, asked to make a pronouncement about this. A large company flew me first class half way around the world to spend a day reviewing one of their brands to say whether it was dead or not. It was not precisely the way they posed the question – they asked whether it was worth investing any money in a relaunch to revive its fortunes after years of flagging performance. It was however the way I rather dramatically gave my judgement. Having looked at all the evidence I said that in my opinion the brand had no pulse, it was to all intents and purposes dead, being kept alive only by a very efficient sales and distribution system. They should look to invest their money elsewhere and give it a decent burial. Yes, I really said that, I suppose I wanted to give them their money’s worth as they’d paid a lot to hear my point of view although to be fair I also thought they needed something unequivocal as it was obvious there had been much equivocation about this brand. If I had known about ‘beating heart corpses’ I might have added that as a final flourish.

I’d contend there are lots of dead brands out there, lots of beating heart corpses that waste precious corporate resources that could be better invested. My test for a brand’s brain function would be whether it had brought any new ideas to the market, my test for a heart-beat would be whether it is building its younger user base. No innovation, same old user base dwindling with age then your brand is dead – just admit it and bury it.

Can you revive a dead brand? Well maybe. A chap called William Kouwenhoven, an electrical engineer from Brooklyn in the 1920s was fascinated by how an electrical shock could kill someone and wondered whether the right kind of shock could revive someone. His curiosity led to the invention of the defibrillator.

If you are intent on bringing a dead brand back to life you are going to need the equivalent of the right kind of electric shot administered to the heart of the brand. Old Spice did it, so did Apple and Fiat and a few others. Sadly, most die on the operating table at the shaky hands of would-be ‘doctors’. A belated happy All Saints day to you all.