Breathing Life Back into Ghost Brands

In the latest New York Times Magazine, Rob Walker offers an interesting study of dead brands and the tricky science behind their resuscitation. Names like Underalls, Salon Selectives, and Brin are all familiar to a lot of shoppers despite having become ghost brands years ago. Many of them, Walker points out, didn’t end up in the graveyard for lack of popularity or performance, but rather because they were acquired by larger companies who chose to phase them out. But many of these names are still remembered fondly – and sometimes falsely – for their brand values, their ads, their unique attributes.

Walker explains that the process of dead brand resuscitation relies on an understanding of not only the preferences of consumers but their heuristics, too: “What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories – and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.” What shoppers remember about a brand is malleable even if they don’t realize it; exploiting the good associations they have with old brands (i.e., “I used to love Salon Selectives green apple scent”) is the ticket to their reincarnation. Sometimes this includes memories of brands as things they never were – like one shopper who swore he had a Stanley brand ladder in his garage, even though Stanley never made ladders (this led to Stanley appropriating another hardware brand’s ladders and putting their name on it). Walker points out that in cases like these, a product’s success may be dependent not on a brand’s actual production of an item, but on the buyers’ trust of the brand’s recognition of the value of itself and its ability to uphold that.

Putting an old memory and brand onto a new product is a challenge, but one that has proven worthwhile for companies like River West who specialize in bringing ghost brands back to life. While the idea isn’t immediately intuitive (why breathe a second life into a brand that’s choked?), reviving dead – but still positively remembered – brands allows owners of the intellectual property to reclaim the values associated with the original product while giving the entire package an update. As the founder of River West Paul Earle told Walker, “All that exists is memory. We’re taking consumers’ memories and starting entire businesses.”

New York Times Magazine: Can a Dead Brand Live Again? – Rob Walker