Brand Resilience

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  marcbostian07/16/08 Report as spam
  1

  Brand

  I think that it is incredibly important for a company to internally look at their Brand. No one else knows as much about the product as those who made it. The more time that can be devoted internally to looking at your customers experience is critical.
  
  Brand Managers and Consultants are useful when you need an outside opinion. People tend to get to close to their brands and loose there objective opinion, or make false assumptions based on what they want to be true.
  
  The Ford Taurus / 500 debate without any outside information is a tough one. When they launched the 500, I was actually interested in the car. Once I went and looked at it, and read about it, I figured out it was basicly a Taurus.
  
  Had the product been an actual luxury car it might have been a good move...
  
  I think a better plan would have been to appeal to the core users of the Taurus. Market it as a Taurus 500 and keep pushing it to the rental agencies and company car fleets as the new mid-level executive car or a splurge car for the younger guys.
  
  Similarly to the SHO Taurus of the late 80s and 90s.
  
  But without having any more information than what I have seen as a consumer, I may be way off. Any other thoughts out there?

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  Michael Fitzgerald07/17/08 Report as spam
  2

  re: resilience

  That's an interesting point -- why not extend the brand, instead of killing it?
  (and personally, I didn't like the Five Hundred name). By the same token, Ford
  management at the time probably was sick of hearing about what a dull car the
  Taurus was. The Corolla or the Accord were in my memory never hot, which the
  Taurus once was. Those brands stand for reliability and a certain kind of value.
  it may have taken an outsider to see that Taurus was still meaningful.
  
  And one thing these authors don't address is whether the rebranding of the 500
  has worked. I'm not sure it has.