Tag branding

Don’t Let The Door Hit Your Ass On The Way Out

Around this time last year, the business website 24/7 Wall Street.com issued their annual prognostication about brands that would go the way of the dodo over the forthcoming year, as I mentioned here. Of the ten brands listed last year, all of them are still around today, even poor beleaguered Blockbuster Video, although that company was sold at auction for pennies on the dollar a few months ago. The remaining Blockbuster stores will indeed go away soon, and T-Mobile is being Borg’d by AT&T and will disappear sometime next year, but all in all the predictions didn’t turn out quite as well (or as badly, depending on your point of view) as one might have thought.

Here’s this year’s list, which includes Sony Pictures and Sony Ericksson, Sears, and the one one slam-dunk on the list, Saab (they announced last week that they could no longer meet payroll, which means they’re pretty much kaput). Some other obvious ones like Nokia somehow didn’t make the list.

Well, Paul the Octopus is dead now, so nothing makes sense anymore and who knows what the future will bring.

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Brand Name Deadpool

This post at the financial news website 24/7 Wall St. tries to emulate Paul The Octopus by predicting which companies and/or their well-known brand names will face the Vuvuzelas of Death in the next year. Among the likely octopus chow:

  • Radio Shack
  • Reader’s Digest
  • T-Mobile
  • Blockbuster Video
  • and, big surprise, BP

Some of their picks are simply going out of business, like Reader’s Digest and Blockbuster, while others are acquisition targets likely to be swallowed by some bigger corporate cephalopod (like T-Mobile), and some are just getting a makeover (BP, Kia Motors). Back in December, they correctly predicted doom for Newsweek, and before that they called it right on Saturn, but they have been premature on several others, so you might not want to bet your World Cup winnings on these picks, but it will be interesting to follow up on this six months from now to see how they’re doing.

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Killers Vs. Builders

This short piece at Advertising Age by Al Ries is an interesting look at the difference between products that are category builders and products that are category killers and why a company might want to choose carefully between the two when launching a new product.

He gives some well-known examples of category builders: Duracell was able to successfully position itself against Eveready and thus turn alkaline batteries into a separate product category from traditional zinc-carbon batteries, despite Eveready’s efforts to the contrary. Samuel Adams Brewing was able to capitalize on the popularity of its small-batch manufacturing to introduce the concept of “microbrewing” as distinct from the mass-produced beers, yet Miller Brewing failed to distinguish light beer as anything other than a brand extension. He concludes with the current situation with so-called “premiere” vodkas, which have been successful in separating themselves into a new category (even if the product itself isn’t really any different).

Ries says there are some factors to pay attention to: timeliness, speed of makret growth, and overextending the brand all determine whether the right move is to push into “builder” or “killer” territory.

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