I’m very taken with the much-held idea of brands being organic, as in they are living. Organisms of huge growth potential, but that require the right kind of tending, watering, light, and yes, love. Because the converse equally holds true, perilously true.
You can kill a brand.
It only requires the wrong kind of external stimulus, the right blend of opposing external forces, some kind of PR tsunami, a lashing culture-quake, and blink, the light goes out.
(When marketeers talk abstractly of “brand health” scores, they’re closer to the supermarket-shelf realities than they necessarily realise.)
Remember Proctor & Gamble’s Sunny Delight?
Marketed with the implication of sunburst goodness and a hearty orange juice content (actually only 5%), when Britain’s tabloids started running headlines to the effect, “Sunny Delight will turn your child orange”, there was little scope for comeback from P&G, little way of spinning something that had spun out of control.
The tangerine-hued kids in question were drinking more than 1.5 litres a day, over twice the recommended adult intake, and by consequence the (albeit harmless) carotene contained in Sunny Delight was altering their skin pigment. Of course, the scientific whys and wherefores were largely academic.
Here was a big American conglomerate peddling syrupy sweet soft drinks to which innocent children were becoming sufficiently addicted as to start looking like Umpa Lumpas.
The ad agency ran a TV ad showing a snowman turning orange, though not in some daring, ironic response, but before the fact, which just added to the PR disaster. And little to nothing the ad agency could then magic-up in riposte to the media blows offered any hopeful comebacks. (And rest assured, we tried.)
Parents who’d blindly allowed their children to drink so much Sunny Delight didn’t enjoy feeling complicit in the negligence of it all, but side-stepped responsibility by claiming that they’d been sold a wrong-un by an ad campaign that misled through suggestions of “natural goodness”.
“Long-short”, Sunny Delight was dead in the water. Drop six letters and "rename" it Sunny D, change the packaging, try and spin it all you want, over is over.
So yes, dear friends, you can kill a brand. No question. Public indignation, moral high-grounding, media bandwagon-ing: syringe it all up and you’ve got a shot of something Instant & Evil, with or without any air in the chamber.
Sunny Delight was a mid-90’s cautionary brand tale, with all the right kind of high drama, of unprecedented success followed by unfixable failure. But more interesting is how The Story of Sunny Delight is prescient of the way today’s brands, over a decade on, so actively and reactively bob on the pixelated wave of consumer-posted opinion.
Sunny Delight is, I think, an Analogue Pre-cursor to a “blog-post-submit world re-order” where brands (and much of their fate) now rests in the hands of a digitally mobilized, comfortably vocal and powerfully influencing public.
SP.
Reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3257820.stm
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