Let's call them "venerable." It's nicer than dried up, ailing or forgotten. They are the best of yesterday's brands, still alive and kicking but sadly in need of a mainline
shot of adrenaline. Sometimes it takes a new product push to stir things up: Think of Kodak's swan dive into the depths of digital photography. But for many companies, products
alone won't do the job. It takes PR savvy to inject that spark of life.
Cindy Rakowitz helped make it happen at Playboy Enterprises, where she served as corporate vice president of public relations from 1986 through 2001. "When I first got there
Newsweek had proclaimed the party to be over," she recalls. The Playboy clubs had closed, "and everybody just assumed the brand was dead."
To try and revitalize the brand Rakowitz initially went for the demographic approach. Simply put, the magazine needed to bring in younger readers before the older ones faded
away. To that end the PR shop worked with marketing to formulate an advertising campaign aimed at the younger set. The campaign hyped Playboy.com with clever twists: One ad showed
the Web site's name with a belly-button ring as the "dot." Another showed a shouting man, with his tongue piercing as the dot.
In concert with the ad campaign PR recruited celebrities to help dress up the Playboy brand. Working through PR firm Baker Winokur Ryder, Rakowitz was able to access several A-
list stars from Hollywood. "If you get pictures to the press of Christina Applegate hanging out at the mansion with Leonardo DeCaprio and Cameron Diaz, all of a sudden the press
cares" about the brand, Rakowitz says.
Yet there more subtle positioning effort. The PR team worked with the Roper organization to create "ManTrack," a research program following the habits of young men. By tying
the Playboy name to this research in the press, Rakowitz was able to position the brand as a product aligned with the younger demographic.
Time will tell
At bath and body products company Calgon, meanwhile, the effort to refresh the brand has been a bit less flashy, but also a model of persistence.
Now a vice president at LaForce+ Stevens, Arthur Gallego served as communications director for North America at Coty Cosmetics in 2000 when that company moved to boost Calgon.
The brand was selling well, but had gotten somewhat "old and dusty," as Gallego puts it.
The PR effort to revive the brand was multi-faceted. Extensive research showed the brand had picked up steam in the Latino market, so the PR team led a package redesign with a
new color scheme and new Latina faces. PR also drove a shift in ad buys. Ads still ran in women's titles Redbook and Ladies' Home Journal, but at the urging of PR, ads also
started to run in smaller publications geared toward new buyers, such as Latina.
The effort also included in-store promos demonstrating how to pamper yourself, as a way to demonstrate the overall brand proposition. All together, these efforts took about two
years to implement. "You cannot announce a new package and a new brand campaign and expect to see everything gel the very next quarter," Gallego says. "It may take six to 12
months. But that is to your benefit, especially if you still have a strong customer base that you do not want to alienate" by making changes too quickly.
Product as image
Another time-tested mode of brand resuscitation leans on the introduction of new products, not just as a way of garnering short-term news coverage but also as a means toward an
overall re-identification of the brand.
At the start of the millennium, Sharp Electronics was seen as "a good brand, a solid brand, but perhaps not as exciting as some if its competitors," says Dorothy Crenshaw, who
as president of Stanton Crenshaw Communications has worked with Sharp since 2000. Sharp's products were viewed as reliable, but nothing to write home about.
As Sharp prepared for the launch of its first flat-panel LCD TVs, Crenshaw drove the launch of a new sub-brand called Aquos. Both the Sharp and Aquos brand names appear on the
new TVs, offering a more upscale, high-style image to enhance the company's others brands.
To drive that image home, the PR firm coordinated strategic product launch events and previewed the new products for high-end consumer media, business publications and
newsweeklies. For these events the team placed the product in upscale settings, such as hotel suites, to sell the TV as a design element. "Is it high tech? Is it high style? That
was always the litmus test," Crenshaw says.
The PR team also undertook an aggressive product-loan effort, sending out TVs to technology and consumer publications, and even targeting fashion editors to get the product
featured in photo shoots for fashion and shelter titles. In fact, the product showed up as a fashion accessory in clothing shoots in Time Inc.'s InStyle and similar
publications.
The launch of the new product gave Sharp a badly needed shot in the arm. "With the technology press, we are dealing with a very sophisticated and very educated type of media,
so you have to startle them into seeing your client in a fresh way," Crenshaw says. In this regard, the flat-screen product "represented a real long-term shift in TV technology
and styling, and Sharp saw this as an opportunity to lead consumers into a whole new category." Thus, a once-predictable brand made its move to the cutting edge of technology and
style.
More of the same?
What do all these strategies have in common? Novelty. Brand revival typically involves a new age bracket, a new ethnic audience or a new product: Anything to take the brand in
a fresh direction.
But that is not always the best approach, according to Rhonda Sanderson, who, as president of PR firm Sanderson & Associates, has helped polish up such respected brands as
Fannie May Candies and One Hour Martinizing. She rejects the notion that new is always better in such cases, and espouses the opposite view.
"You take a look at the day the brand began, the day they started. What was unique about them? What were they offering that no one else was offering? You study the things that
made people embrace them to begin with," she says.
Coca-Cola has done it with little glass bottles and vintage jingles; Hardees did it with a return to its traditional menu, Sanderson notes. "What did you do when everybody
loved you? What were you doing right?" she asks. Find the answer, build a PR effort around that re-discovered strength, and get the brand back on track.
Contacts: Dorothy Crenshaw, 212.780.1900, [email protected]; Arthur Gallego, 212.242.9353, [email protected]; Cindy Rakowitz, 818.597.0700, [email protected]; Rhonda
Sanderson, 312.829.4350, [email protected]
A Brand New Day
How to play Dr. Frankenstein to a dead or dying brand:
- "Make sure that all your stakeholders are on board," says Dorothy Crenshaw of Stanton Crenshaw Communications. If the advertising folks don't have the new image in hand,
it will undermine PR efforts. - Continue the research. "Everyone assumes that you immediately need to go 'young,' but that is not always right. You might need to skew African American or Latino, or you might
need to shift from talking to men to talking to women," says Arthur Gallego of LaForce+Stevens - Get up, stand up (to the boss). As Cindy Rakowitz tried to revitalize the Playboy brand, she wanted to move away from the perception of tawdry gents' trench coats.
Unfortunately, a superannuated Hef insisted on being photographed among groups of scantily clad young ladies. Rakowitz was one of few with the guts to suggest to the icon that he
was hurting the brand. "He loved having the press, but he really looked like a doddering old man trying to get into an 18-year-old girl's panties," she recalls.