To successfully reinvent your brand, you need to rethink your approach to product, story, culture, and customer. Brand rebounds often seem simple, logical, and inevitable when taught in business school courses and cited in the media. But few attempts at resuscitation are successful, and in the rare event that they are successful, it usually takes years or decades to achieve significant results.
Notable brands like Apple, Gucci and McDonald’s renewed their marketing strategy and successfully renewed customer interest. Each of these companies succeeded by focusing on a new approach to product, story, culture and customer. Driven by organizational and operational changes, these four elements have become the pillars of sustainable brand change.
Start with the product
During Gucci’s 101-year history, the fashion retailer’s popularity has risen and fallen, and its business results have stalled and rebounded. Today Gucci is the second largest luxury brand in the world. The most recent revival began in 2015 with the appointment of CEO Marco Bizzarri and Creative Director Alessandro Michele. The changes made in the first year – specifically a new creative vision, store renovations and improved digital offerings – resulted in an annual sales increase of 7.8%, an annual increase in operating income of 21.7% and an increase of 86% in the first quarter online Revenue compared to the same periods in 2015.
When Michele Gucci’s creative director took over, he founded the Gucci look: an androgynous hippie-renaissance mix of flowers and sequins, glamor and glitter, surprise and mood, subversion and creative expression, accessories and prints that are reminiscent of equestrian motifs. Today, this maximalist, neo-romantic look is immediately recognizable as typical Gucci on the street and on the catwalk. “I feel Gucci!” and “That’s so Gucci!” are part of our culture lexicon.
Apple went through a similar product transformation. Shortly after returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs convened a meeting and cursed his employees. “Do you know what’s wrong with this company?” He asked. “The products suck. They don’t have sex anymore. ”This meeting is believed to have inspired the invention of the iMac. In the first five months of the iMac’s existence, Apple sold 800,000 units and made profits of $ 309 million in 1998 and $ 601 million in 1999. The iMac marked Apple’s return to profitability.
Apple and Gucci understand that having a distinctive brand aesthetic is critical to brand recovery. The more defined the aesthetics, the more curatorial rigor it offers for design, merchandising and styling and the more these functions can be coordinated to offer a new, shared brand experience. A characteristic brand aesthetic is implemented in core products, which are the purest distillation of what defines a brand. For Gucci, those products include GG Marmont and Soho bags, Princetown slippers and loafers, the GG belt, GG canvas print, and 1970s-style suits and dresses. For Apple, these building blocks are the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods.
These brand building blocks help to focus on refreshments. Every brand, no matter what products it sells, should develop such building blocks as it tries to rebuild its brand. Even fast food restaurants have signature products. McDonald’s has the Big Mac, McNuggets, and French fries, but it struggled in the early 2010s trying to expand its menu to appeal to a larger audience. In 2015, McDonald’s reduced its menu offer and focused on price and quality. This “less but better” decision helped McDonald’s sales top $ 100 billion in 2019 and operating margin up 43% year over year. Since focusing on core products, McDonald’s market value has nearly doubled to $ 160 billion.
Refine your brand story
A clear and convincing brand story gives products context and narrative, which can help make them more attractive. When a brand sells products, it sells a story. When consumers buy products, they buy into this story. The story unifies the organization internally and streamlines decision-making. It connects the brand editorial with its product collections, controls the design to integrate narrative anchors (such as recognizable patterns, clasp, color or seams) into products, and streamlines merchandising, styling and marketing. Brand storytelling is not only a valuable brand currency, but also crucial for customer acquisition and loyalty. Once consumers choose a branded story, they are less likely to opt out or switch than if they just bought one product.
When Michele took the position of Creative Director at Gucci, he immediately began to revolutionize brand narration. He changed Gucci’s branding narrative from an overt focus on sexuality to a well-defined maximalist, dream-like and aesthetically excessive universe. His story takes place in a world of secret gardens and mythical creatures. Crystals, ruffles, vibrant color schemes, and baby dragons are all aspects of the Gucci brand. His wildly creative, diverse and integrative world is consistently presented in shops such as the Gucci Garden, a museum experience in the Palazzo della Mercanzia, in which only unique items are sold; Gucci Osteria da Massimo Bottura, a range of fine modern restaurants; and its other 483 global stores. In 2016, following Michele’s appointment, sales in the directly operated stores grew 28.2% in the fourth quarter, with all regions delivering strong results. The rapid growth in sales – Gucci’s fastest in the last 20 years – is directly related to Gucci’s new brand history.
Connect with pop culture
Cultural hooks reflect the role of a brand in the world and secure its credibility with its target groups. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc often said, “We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in show business. ”McDonalds recently partnered with celebrities J Baldwin, Travis Scott and BTS on the Famous Orders collaboration, which named high quality meals after celebrities.
While new and trending connections to pop culture help revitalize ailing brands, the quickest route back to cultural relevance for them is to deconstruct what made the brand successful in the first place. Brand archives are a gold mine for beloved and often abandoned brand classics. As a brand grows and matures, it often forgets the spark that started it all. Old favorites that are part of the brand’s story have the power to quickly rekindle both old and new fans by tapping into their real or fictional nostalgia.
Gucci’s 100-year campaign celebrated the brand’s history and influence on pop culture. It featured an exclusive collection of items that look back on the brand’s century of fashion. Gucci launched 100 pop-up stores, as well as Spotify and Apple playlists, of music that paid homage to the company’s enduring aesthetic. By highlighting the brand’s themes through music while mixing them with Gucci’s new and archived products, Gucci continued to act on its legacy and extend its product life cycles.
This strategy can help to transport the history of a brand into the present and to remind of the product innovations that made the brand great in the first place. But it’s not enough to just remix old products. Brands need to convey this legacy to new customers and modern values. Gucci recently launched Vault, a website where the brand mixes old favorites with new designers who emphasize Gucci’s brand values like diversity, gender neutrality and sustainability.
Know your customer
Apple, Gucci, and McDonald’s all had one thing in common when they began their brand revitalization – they knew exactly what their respective customers wanted. This is not always an easy endeavor. Companies have a lot of customer data, but often lack customer insight. Customer data resides in various organizational functions that do not communicate with each other and when presented it is usually difficult to digest and act on. To fill this gap, brands should create a customer framework that is trend-setting, actionable and appeals to multiple internal stakeholders at the same time. This framework translates quantitative data into qualitative insights that are just as understandable for product designers as for media buyers, creatives and merchandisers.
The first step in building an actionable customer framework is to focus on the customers’ core goals and delve into their motivations and interests, media habits and key influences, core buying points and buying barriers. Identify the most important properties that they value, including attributes such as trendiness, functionality, convenience and status signaling. This will be different for every brand, which is why it’s important that any brand trying to make a comeback conduct this research before making any critical planning decisions.
Successful brand recovery doesn’t happen in a single moment. There are no shortcuts. There is only one continuum of strategic, creative and operational decisions that, if implemented consistently, will bring a brand on the path to cultural relevance, consumer love and business success. This story is much less exciting to tell, but much more effective in the long run.