We hear about ReBranding a lot. That’s a concept that is exciting, especially when people have been either going through a process of Strategic Planning and are enthusiastic about the plan for the next year, or a new leader who thinks that if they change the brand, they can establish their own path.
The problem is, new branding or rebranding hardly ever works. People already know the brand. You can polish it up a little, maybe look at it from a slightly different perspective. The thing you can’t do is just make up a brand. People see right through that. The most famous example is the New Coke disaster, where the leaders of Coca Cola thought that if you have enough money you can convince people that the new brand is reality. I think that what we learned from that is– you don’t EVER have enough money to pull that off.
I’m thinking about this today because I just read a blog post by Mitch Gooze where he talks about what a failure Kentucky Fried Chicken’s ReBranding has been. Here’s how he sets us up at his blog Value Acceleration…
- “As you may have noticed, a while back KFC corporate decided to reposition KFC into the grilled chicken market. (I guess they figured if you turned the word Fried into “F” then you could also change the menu and its focus.)
- “To put it bluntly, grilled chicken has been a disaster … as far as the franchisees are concerned. Same store sales are off 7% and grilled chicken is only about 16% of chicken “on the bone” sales.”
To read the rest of his post click here!
Tags: Branding, rebranding
