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Refreshing Brands: 3 Case Studies on Transitioning Your Customer Base

By Nate Riggs on August 30, 2011 |

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What happens when your tried and true customers start to age? It seems like that question has been haunting brands, forcing them into a position where they can either refresh the brand and retarget a new customer segment, or watch their profit margins slowly fade quietly into the night.

Let's take a look at a few examples of this, shall we?

1. Your Man Could Smell Like Mustafa

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I tell this story sometimes when I do talks.

Buying Christmas presents for my Paka was always easy. Nick and I knew exactly what he wanted from us every year, since it never changed. Christmas morning, my grandfather would get to the gift marked from Nick and I and the room would echo with jovial comments:

"I'll bet I can guess what that is!"

"Looks like Paka will smell good for another year!"

His gift, was the timeless scent of Old Spice cologne and he loved it. Paka would immediately open the package, untwist the top and splash a little bit of "smell good" on his neck. We'd smile and then move about opening the rest of the presents. I still keep one of his bottles of Old Spice on my desk for good luck. My Paka was a mover and shaker for American Greetings.

All that said, I would have never bought Old Spice for myself. And actually, I kind of enjoy the scent. But, it will forever be the cologne that my grandfather wore, and way to senior for my taste.

Enter W+K and the now famous viral YouTube campaign centered around Isaiah Mustafa, better known as "the man your man could smell like". This brilliantly executed campaign that's still in process today worked to refresh the Old Spice namesake and make it hip and cool once again.

I'll admit - at age 30, I now use Old Spice Swagger body wash as a regular customer. Although, I'm still waiting for my falcon in a top hat, and my six-pack abs to develop. Meh...

2. Your Father's Oldsmobile Was Better

First off, your father's Oldsmobile was way cooler than the Oldsmobiles we have today. One of my high school buddies had a father who was the proud owner of a 1979 Cutlass Supreme. It was an amazing vehicle, fast, loud and sleek, and we'd sometimes take it screaming up state route 21 when we were 18 years old. (I still have no idea what his Dad was thinking in letting us pilot that wonderful machine...)

Somewhere around the early to middle 1990's, Oldsmobile's sales went into decline. Honda Civics and Volkswagon Jetta's were all the rage with the kids of the day, and lack luster design changes and engineering problems with Oldsmobile models had attached a negative stigma to the brand.

The marketing folks at Oldsmobile did what any self-respecting but desperate brand would do - they called in Will Shatner and his daughter Melanie (college age, at the time) to help fix the problem with a dose of side-by-side comparison sprinkled with celebrity. Creative director Joel Machak even went as far as to arm the campaign with the infamous tagline: “The New Generation of Olds.”

Unlike the example above however, Oldsmobile guessed wrong. Their problems had been rooted in a poor product, not poor marketing. This campaign pretty much fell as flat as it's sales did after it was launched.

3. Craving White Castles ... At 2AM

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In was probably one of the most genuinely legit portrayals of the changing reality of a brand as it's attributed by its customers, White Castle made huge gains from playing along with the college humor comedy of New Line Cinema's 2004 release of the hit movie, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. I'll admit, I saw it in theaters and laughed my ass off the entire time.

The movie plays on the commonly known fact that at 2am, there's no better way to cure the social munchies than waiting in the drive-though line at your local White Castle location, on a 45 minute quest for the prize of a sack of onion-laden sliders. You know ... you've been there a few times in your life.

What's brilliant about how White Castle leveraged the buzz of this movie lies in some operational changes to the brand. For instance, when you drive through the line at White Castle, you see bright and bold colors and lots of messaging around the idea of late night craving. They even package up product and named it, "The Crave Case".

Now, move inside the restaurant during the day and you'll notice a stark difference. Black and white pictures of some of the first White Castle restaurants, customers and cars from the 1940's and 1950's proudly adorn the walls in a sort of heritage-centric approach to retail design. Typically, the sit-in diners are a concentration of seniors, sipping coffee, reading newspapers and talking about the news of the day.

In essence, White Castle has succeeded in delivering two very different brand experiences to two drastically different audience segments in a single restaurant location.

{queue the applause}

5 Unwritten Laws of the Brand Refresh

If you're successful enough as a business over the long-term, you might actually have to refresh your brand someday. If you do get there, congrats! You've done an amazing job building your brand in the first place!

For now, here's some tasty nuggets you can take away from the examples above:

  1. Avoid alienation of your core customers. Never alienate the folks who've built your brand. Instead, keep the integrity of their relationship and trust by finding ways to isolate them from your new desired audience.
  2. Make sure you really understand your new audience. You're going to be making a big move, so do your homework. Research or hire someone to research all the nuances of the lifestyle of your desired audience. You might even go about building out personas and training your staff to call them by name. This is an approach that I've seen work at Lippe Taylor (she), Best Buy and dozens of other brands.
  3. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Don't go all crazy on your brand experience. First, dig into what's working, find out why it's working and how to preserve it. Then look for the things that are broken.
  4. Refresh with everything you've got. If you're going to go for a brand refresh, you need to be committed from the top down. Once you've figured out the plan for what you need to change, be willing to put in the resources and man power to change it dramatically and quickly.
  5. Never compromise a stellar product, but be willing to reinvent. Old Spice did this masterfully with the move into body wash. You never want to change an iconic and high performing product, but you can find ways to innovate and apply your brand integrity to new, audience-right products.

What's your take?

Have you ever refreshed a brand? How did you approach the task?

Content Marketing Strategy

Nate Riggs

Written by Nate Riggs

Nate Riggs is the Founder and CEO of NR Media Group, a Certified HubSpot Partner and inbound consulting firm. He leads a team of experienced strategists, content marketers, creatives and technologists that help organizations deploy and use HubSpot’s marketing, sales, and service software to operate more efficiently and accelerate growth. Nate regularly presents keynotes and workshops at top industry conferences like INBOUND, Content Marketing World and Oracle’s Modern CX. In 2017, Nate was recognized by HubSpot for his contributions to the development of the HubSpot Education Partner Program. Nate regularly presents keynotes and workshops at top industry conferences like INBOUND, Content Marketing World and Oracle’s Modern CX. In 2017, Nate was recognized by HubSpot for his contributions to the development of the HubSpot Education Partner Program.
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