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What Causes Great Brands to Fade Away?

Jun 20, 2019

KEN BANKS’ BLOG JUNE 2019

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WHAT CAUSES GREAT BRANDS TO FADE AWAY?

Our recent trip to Glacier National Park in Montana was one of the most spectacular of our journey’s over the past several years to national parks around the country and the world.  Most significant memory, however, is the comparative photos that have been taken of the glaciers over the past several years and how fast and how significant these mammoth ice flows are disappearing.  Some say it’s simply a matter of nature taking its course. However, the surge in ice melt is more likely the cause of global warming and the use of fossil fuels that have contaminated and increased the temperature of the atmosphere.   I couldn’t help but think of this as an analogy for the way many great brands are disappearing from the marketplace at an ever-increasing rate and that this not simple an evolution of business cycles.  Rather,  like our disregard for the air we breath has had an adverse effect, the disregard for building brands that last and adjust to the changes in customer preferences has had a significant effect on the disappearances of some great names in marketing that (like the glaciers) we thought would be on our shopping horizon for years to come.

Glaciers have retreat some 15 miles in past 30 years!

We’ve talked about great brands like Toys r Us, Sports Authority, Payless Shoes, Abercrombie, Banana Republic, Gap recently in these articles, and we’ve also seen the same retreat not in aerial photos but in sales and market share reports for brands like Sears, Penney’s, numerous banking organizations, insurance companies, Circuit City, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Mercury, and the list goes on.  All of those now empty storefronts and brands, in my opinion, could have survived successfully if the senior management, especially marketers, had developed an ongoing brand strategy that evolved to meet the customer trends and attitudes.  Great brands like Amazon, Costco, Walmart, Geico, Lexus/Toyota have recognized that to succeed in today’s market, a company has to adjust and consistently innovate with a premise that appeals not only to the mind of the consumer but also the heart.   That’s where the relationship begins and, I believe, if many of our industrialists in the past had experienced the beauty and specter of our national parks and, particularly, glaciers.  They would have had a plan to protect the brand that is our natural environment. 

I was talking with our postman a few days ago, as he sat in his over-heating mail truck.  He was complaining about how inefficient these trucks were and how Amazon was changing the world of retail delivery.  At the same time, I viewed a feature on a news report about the growth of electric vehicles in China and that inexpensive electric vehicles are here, now and being mass produced as fast as the infrastructure could keep up with it.  I thought about how efficient mail delivery with electric vehicles that could be  charged every night.  How the streets of New York (and Chicago or Vegas) could be less polluted if all those taxis and buses were electric instead of gas.  These are major improvements that can be made now that not only benefit our environment, but also improve the brands of the postal and transportation services to help build those businesses. Great branding can save a company with a reason for being by adjusting its benefits and messages to more people and creating demand.  It takes a vision and a conscious effort to create the value and a relationship that endures.