Once the decision has been made to continue to invest in an under-performing brand, brand owners will be faced with a new set of challenges completely foreign to them. The temptation is always to do more of what got you there. That rarely works when brands face reinvention. 

By that I mean brand relevance. The main reason brands begin to under perform is that people no longer care. When that happens, like it or not, you’ll be starting over from scratch. This is a hard pill for brand owners to swallow, particularly if the brand was once an iconic leader in its category. 

For brand owners and managers, the process of brand reinvention begins with having an open mind. You can’t look at the issues driving your brand’s under-performance by looking at the problem through the same lens that built the earlier success. Brand reinvention requires openness to many possibilities. What got you there, won’t get you there. Brand owners must first acknowledge their organizational complacency — which is the root of an under-performing brand. Nothing breeds complacency like previous success. 

Consider the fate of these iconic brands that held on to their under-performing heritage at the expense of innovating a bigger future: 

Sears    
Once the dominant leader in the mail order business, now an “also-ran” against big box retailers. Their relevance lost by disruptive technologies. The very principles of “mail order” that made Sears a great iconic brand, were reinvented by Amazon. The rest is history.