Brandicide – how to kill a brand

Yes! Brand do die. You don’t believe me? Just look around you or cast your mind back a few years and you will remember the names of several organizations that rode the waves of fame and popularity in their halcyon days. In the Nigerian banking sector, you will remember Owena Bank, Habib Bank which later morphed into Bank PHB (which itself is now defunct), Intercontinental Bank.

Daily Sketch, Triumph, National Concord and New Nigerian were titles that strode the Nigerian newspaper landscape like colossi. In its days of glory, National Concord was one of the leading newspapers with several titles in its portfolio. Its circulation was nationwide. Whoever headed the organization or edited its flagship had a direct line of access to the highest authorities in the nation and commanded nationwide reverence.

But today, any Nigerian under the age of twenty-five is unlikely to have heard of any of them except in a history class or a piece of literature referring to them like this one is.

Michelin and Dunlop were heavy players that dominated the tyre market but today, remain filed in the memories of history. On the international scene, you can recall Worldcom, Arthur Anderson, Circuit City. These companies operated at dizzying heights of corporate success but today have become bywords and case studies in analyzing the debilitating effects of dysfunctional corporate governance. Circuit City was easily America’s largest and most successful electronics and computer sales outlet. It is one of the companies celebrated in Jim Collins’ classic “From Good To Great” as an example of a company characterized by great management, resulting in business growth and profitability. A few years later, Circuit City declared bankruptcy. Kodak at a point in the not-so-distant past was synonymous with photography. From cameras to films as well as the processing accessories, Kodak enjoyed a near-monopoly. Today, it is a totally different story.

So what are the factors that slay brands, whether giants or Lilliputians? The following factors would probably immediately come to mind as emerged in a recent survey I conducted on the matter. The first is hostile de-marketing. This happens when a particular brand comes under attack by presumably an adversarial competitor or the mischievous mind of a vile, disgruntled customer. In the age of social media where the digital space is practically democratized, such negative news would have travelled very fast before a rebuttal would come from the manufacturers and may have started telling on the reputation and the bottom-line of the maligned brand. This happened in the heydays of Intercontinental Bank when it was de-marketed by a competitor.

Following closely on the heels of this is the involvement of or implication of the brand in a scandal. A good example of this is Cadbury Nigeria and the scandal of doctored financial accounts that occurred some years ago. A more recent example is the Nigerian Bottling Company and its range of products which was said to have tried to export substandard products outside Nigeria. Even though the Coca-Cola brand is expected to be an international brand and franchise with identical products in all its manufacturing plants globally, the ones produced in Nigeria were said to have unacceptable levels of a certain chemical used in bottling them. On the entertainment scene in Nigeria, we have examples like the P-Square musical twins whose musical career has been hampered by a scandalous family feud.

One other factor identified has to do with the scarcity of the product in the market. If for some reason, a product goes off the market for a season and a new model of it does not come as a replacement, the market might soon get used to its absence and seek alternatives. Sometimes, the owners of a brand may decide to withdraw it or restrict the quantum of circulation in order to create artificial scarcity or rarity that in the short term shores up prices. However, badly handled, this kind of action could backfire if not carefully handled. If for any reason, customers get used to not seeing it and they have settled on an alternative, that may be the death-knell of the brand. This is why the attrition rate in the entertainment industry is rather high. A highly-rated artiste emerges on the celebrity stage with a bang and his rating goes through the roof. Suddenly, he goes underground and later re-emerges with what his handlers sell as a repackaged brand. By then, his admirers have moved on and no matter what he comes up with, they don’t want to give him another chance!

Another reason adduced for the possible death of a brand is hostile, aggressive competition that will spare no expense at running the brand out of the market, including buying it in a hostile take-over exercise that simply dumps the brand or makes it effete after acquiring it!

A brand is also said to be on its way to the undertakers when it begins to lose its relevance to and in the market.

However, experience has shown that while these factors may be instrumental to the demise of a brand, none of them is strong enough to constitute a stand-alone factor for a brand’s demise. For that result to be achieved, it would take a combination of two or more of these factors and perhaps more. At the time it was being de-marketed locally, Intercontinental Bank scored an A in Fitch Ratings! Even though it later went under, it was not because of the de-marketing. It was because of a combination of other factors that exposed its underbelly as a warehouse of sleaze!

I am wont to believe that the entertainment world actually profits from scandals. Rihanna, Beyonce, Bobby Brown, Tiwa Savage, Tonto Dikeh, P-Square have had more than their fair share of scandals, yet their public continues to root for them. So, in a way, the adage that one man’s meat is another’s poison holds true here.

There was a time when, in a savage act of vicious competition, a bottling company was buying up every bottle it could find of a competing brand and crushing them for recycling to produce its own bottles. But that did not kill the other brand. It actually won public sympathy!

Why is it difficult to make any of these issues on its own nail a brand’s coffin? Two factors come to play here. The first is the market. Loyalty can sometimes be blind. When people have come to trust a brand over a period of time, they hardly switch allegiance unless they have very serious reasons to. Rabidly loyal customers can sometimes exhibit behavior akin to the proverbial heady fly that insists on following a corpse to the grave!

Sometimes, taking a brand off the market can actually create a scramble for it, leading to higher prices!

Secondly, it should be noted that all the things mentioned, with the exception of irrelevance, are external to the brand.

Competition is not what kills a brand. It is the brand’s patent lack of distinction that ultimately does. And that is essentially an internal issue as we will subsequently see… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!