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. The brand could be under-performing because it is not a good product, or the timing is wrong, competition in that part of the market is too intense or the pricing is out of sync with expected returns. So the under-performance in the numbers could be symptomatic of anything from lack of quality to lack of value, lack of interest, unavailability or overly aggressive discounting.
A simple way to assess this is to benchmark the performance of your brand against that of a parallel offer by your competitors. If their sales volumes have increased, for example, when did they start doing so, what were you doing to support your brand in market at the time and has the situation for your brand stabilized or continued to degrade?
The other factor I would consider is the impact of that under-performing brand in the wider portfolio. Is the presence of that brand inhibiting or enhancing the performance of other brands in the line-up? And if that brand was to be removed, would doing so open up a gap in your portfolio that a competitor could exploit? In other words, should you be valuing your brand based on its stand-alone sales and worth, or does it have a wider value in terms of building intrinsic value within the overall portfolio?
Armed with these insights, you are ready to make decisions about your brand allocation:
1. Retain – you may decide to leave the brand in market and give it more time to work through its issues. This is the least disruptive measure obviously. If, for example, the brand has been an historically strong performer and has only slipped relatively recently, that change could be an aberration or a temporary set-back (or it could be a sign that the brand is losing ground or relevance). Removing the brand could also be more trouble than it is worth (literally) in terms of changing supplier agreements and reorganizing teams. If you do decide to go down this track, set clear success metrics, a timeframe for turn around and provide the team with the resources they judge necessary to bring the brand back.
2. Remove – you could decide to take the brand out of the portfolio by shutting it down, selling it off, merging it with another brand or giving it stand-alone status outside the core portfolio. The key reason for doing this would be that the brand is diluting or confusing the effectiveness of the portfolio overall. By removing the under-performing brand, you can re-intensify the portfolio by spreading marketing resources over fewer, higher-performing brands. This is a powerful way of lifting the returns within a portfolio and concentrating your brands in specific market segments where you are best known and most likely to get more back from having a presence. Be aware that when you do this, you may at the same time make the portfolio more susceptible to counter-measures by competitors. If for example you remove your least expensive brand from the portfolio mix, a competitor may choose to undercut you. The best options therefore in my view for removal are middle market, middle of the portfolio brands that have not kept pace with the portfolio overall, because their removal can be quickly covered by the brands that were all around them in the portfolio.
3. Reposition – if you find that you have a number of brands closely bunched in a part of the market but the brands themselves are all well known and have strong brand equity, removing one brand or more would make no sense, and selling that brand would mean handing over all the work you’ve done to build that value to someone else. In such a circumstance, you might decide to shift the market positioning of one brand or more to give your portfolio a better spread and to prevent the risk of cannibalization. You might choose for example to focus one brand on a specific segment of the market and to close that segment off to other brands in your portfolio, or you may want to take the brand up, down or across the volume/value matrix. Be careful though that when you reposition a brand, the new positioning makes good sense to consumers, that there is clear continuity with what they know and that the shift provides strong story opportunities that your agency can draw on to give the repositioning energy and intent.
4. Relaunch – if you have a brand that simply has not received the success you think it deserves, you could look to relaunch or revive the brand to make it feel more relevant and interesting to buyers. This is a great strategy if you believe that the brand has inherent value that the market has missed, or something has happened in the wider world that renders the brand suddenly more valuable than it has been. Sometimes, companies drive these revivals themselves. On other occasions, the brands are “discovered” by consumers and the marketing team needs to act quickly to capitalize on the word-of-mouth that is being generated. Sometimes, the revived brand will align with the brand as the business intended. On other occasions, the brand can take on new meaning for consumers when they infuse their own interpretation into the brand meaning. The critical challenge in this situation is to take on-board those elements of the re-interpretation that are acceptable and to then coax consumers to follow the brand they feel they have found on its new journey. That journey may be from within the portfolio, or it may require the brand to be removed or even sold to another party, depending on how compatible the new meaning is with what the company feels comfortable with.
5. Revise – if the brand is inherently strong but is susceptible in specific ways, it would be irresponsible to discard the brand altogether. Instead look for ways to upgrade or amend the brand’s positioning, story, marketing or look and feel to add freshness and vitality. Today’s consumers expect brands to constantly freshen, and sometimes that’s all that’s required to bring a brand up to speed. If you choose to pursue this course, do so within the context of the wider portfolio. Don’t revise the brand in such a way that it impinges on another brand in the portfolio. On the other hand, if you have a brand that is flourishing, you may be able to apply some of the broad learnings from that brand’s success to add new oomph to the brand that is under-performing.
Depends on the industry, the product life cycle, the political will of the brand owners, and of course competition. In today's environs it is almost better to cut off a withering limb than waste time trying to revive the dead.
1. Influence and shape the brand with a series of brand promises. In order to arrive at those promises, Stoutenborough suggests gathering key employees who have contact with customers in any way and ask the following questions:
“Discover what your company stands for first, before you decide on a brand,” Blue adds. “If you don’t like what you stand for, change that first.”
2. Obtain customer feedback. “Use whatever means you have—phone calls, online surveys, an email survey, your blog—to ask your customers and prospects what they think, feel and expect when they see your name or products,” Stoutenborough says. “Doing this will help you get a feel for how uphill your job at instilling your brand promises will be.”
3. Find out what's not working. "Identify the part of your brand that’s failing to connect to your target market," Wechner suggests. “You aren’t going to know what you really need to change until you figure out what is failing to connect the target market you covet so much with the brand you want them to notice emotionally.”
4. Develop your story. “Your brand’s look, feel and message should tell one story, and that story should be heroic and memorable,” Blue says. “Consider what is at stake for customers in terms of their problems and how you solve those for them. The story should be one that your employees and your customers can get behind, believe in and admire.”
5. Permeate all your company communications with the new brand. That includes website, social media, sales tools and signage. Make certain that every employee understands them and can communicate them effectively.
6. Never stop supporting and promoting your brand. Successful brands are a living presence in the marketplace with a tangible, ongoing relationship with customers, Blue says. “It’s easy to support a brand in boom times, but much tougher in down times; however, study after study shows that brands consistently supported during a down cycle gain the greatest sales and market share when the economy turns up.”
7. Be consistent and persistent. “Don’t decide you’re rebranding yourself today, but next week refer to things that point to your old brand,” Wechner says. “Commit to building your rebrand. If you're rebranding for the right reasons, don’t second-guess yourself. Become that new brand, and eventually people will follow.”
Stoutenborough agrees. "Once you have established who and what you want to be, do not change it except for tweaks and slight adjustments. It takes 10 to 12 'touches' for a customer to even notice you. Keep going long after you think everyone must have seen the new brand. Trust me—they haven’t.”
Always start with SWAT analysis.
That will define you possible marketing and budget plans.
You will see are you able or not to achieve or not re-branding when you put all together into basket.
Define are you dog or star is another method, but not so proper in these global environment.
Here are tips to keep your rebrand on track and implemented successfully:
Influence and shape the brand with a series of brand promises. Obtain customer feed-back. Identify the part of the brand that is failing to connect to the target market. Develop a story that is heroic and memorable relating to the brand. Develop new communications related to the brand to be appearing in website, social media, sales tools, signage, etc. Never stop supporting and promote the brand.
Its depend on the product and category
Analyze - the underperformance in one of the foll : Product category, Price segment or Placement issues.
Correct - Prepare a step by step approach to correct the issues/policy decisions.
Repositioning & Rebranding comes in handy if above all are correct.
If the brand is new, kill it and make a totally different one.
If the brand is going through a bad phase, study the biggest segment of your clients then change something minor about your product then campaign!
Making a new in trend strategy , new ideas , and even atl/btl activities too can help.Given exact comapny details i can submit sample plans too
FIRST WE SHOULD MAKE MARKETING RESEARCH TO MAKE BENCH MARKING ON THE EXISTING PRODUCT IN THE MARKET AND START TO DEVELOP A BRAND NEW PRODUCT WHICH IS MORE VALUABLE TO MARKET.
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