Rebranding: Not Beyond Credibility
The bad news mounts for BP as the petrol giant has admitted that efforts to plug its Deepwater Horizon well and prevent any more crude oil escaping continue to fail.
NEW THINKING
The bad news mounts for BP as the petrol giant has admitted that efforts to plug its Deepwater Horizon well and prevent any more crude oil escaping continue to fail.
First, a sincere apology for my last blog post. The OLOF spectacles that rendered all advertising invisible and Prail, the company behind the specs, were both anagrams and part of a really bad April Fool’s prank. I promise no more joke’s for a long time. That’s an important commitment, because today’s post might also seem a bit foolish at first sight, but I can assure you, this one is for real.
Rebranding efforts are tricky things. Once in a very blue moon they can prove to be the turnaround that the management team was hoping for. Sports brand Puma, luxury brand Gucci and the gurus at Apple all provide notable examples of great brand revitalizations during the 90’s. The strategic lessons from these turnarounds do not emanate from what these brands did, but rather what they did not do.
I found myself in a rather unusual position last weekend – on a pew in a church in Glasgow.
Conventional brand repositioning wisdom is to alter the brand’s position incrementally from the established position, playing off of current assumptions about the brand.