In other words they can recover if they have enough momentum, or they can be reborn on the back of nostalgia, but once they’ve flatlined, and particularly if they have been in that state for some time, they can be very difficult to resuscitate.

Take the case of the Playboy brand. It’s powerful, sure. And it does have significant heritage. It’s logo is recognizable anywhere and there is huge history there. But can it just continue to trade on the value it had? Doubtful. It is, as Adam Gordon rightfully points out, “a classic failure of industry foresight” and even though Gordon observes that “Brand is value stored up in the past to be reaped in the future”, I don’t share his apparent optimism about the brand. Maybe you do?

Playboy cannot realistically expect to carry on as before and succeed under changed management. Declining sales would suggest to me that Playboy is no longer relevant, no longer competitive and its goodwill is running out fast. In fact, it has probably already traded on its past for too long.

That’s why I also don’t understand the company’s stated strategy to transform itself into a brand management company. Who would pay hefty license fees to associate themselves with the name? And – the same question I ask about Starbucks – what sectors is the name going to add value in that aren’t already brimming with powerful, relevant and competitive performers?

Every Rome has its day.

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Can everything old be new again?

As the publisher of BrandlandUSA, Garland Pollard is an expert on America’s legacy brands. A native of Virginia Beach, VA, he is active in historic building preservation efforts – and in a sense, his study of the value and tradition of “old brands” serves that same purpose for marketers and brand-builders.

We asked him about the lore of old brand names – and what they mean for today’s marketers.

Q: What are some notable brand names that are coming back to life?

Recently I’ve written about Hyatt bringing back its storied Hyatt House name, as a re-branding of its Hyatt Summerfield Suites extended stay properties. A Hyatt House was the place to stay in the 1970s – a smart, slick, modern hotel.

And it appears Nissan is driving the Datsun name out of the brand graveyard. Datsun will reappear in emerging markets such as Indonesia, India and Russia as an entry-level economy brand. It’s another example of how companies can re-use their brand names a few decades down the line.

Q: The brokerage firm name E. F. Hutton was well-known 25 years ago with their slogan “When E. F. Hutton talks, people listen.” Now the name is being revived for a boutique financial advisory firm. Your thoughts?

It’s a brilliant idea. It has incredible name recognition for people who are over 50, which is a target audience. Best yet, it really became a consumer brand because of all the network TV advertising. And Wall Street has such a bad reputation we need some “old school” folks who can bring credibility to it.

Looks like it was started by someone within the family, which makes it totally credible. Bringing notables from the past to any future launch event is also a good tactic because of the institutional knowledge in those folks.

Q: Are there lessons here about the future of brand names?

Brands let us travel back and forth in time; you are in a sort of heaven, where time is present, past and future at the same moment. When you step into Saks Fifth Avenue’s main store, you go into the 1930s, but you are also very much in 2012, and are also in part of something that has a future. It’s alive. Great brands move to a classic point, where the company knows how to keep them relevant without ruining the original appeal.

Q: But isn’t a “dead brand” evidence that the marketplace has simply moved on, and left that brand behind?

No. Certainly some brands are useless, but the failure is almost always one of management, not the brand itself. A great current example is Instagram; they are worth $1 billion, and Kodak is broke. The idea was the “snapshot” and Instagram is really just selling the new version of the same idea of the Kodak snapshot. Companies use the killing off of the brand to cover up their failure; it’s the “brand’s” fault, not the management. Most brand names are good enough to adapt to the times.

Q: So you’re arguing that a brand is more than its physical presence. True?

It’s sort of a collective idea plus a collection of physical items, a collection of stories and myths and a group of people who like it. The problem is when the companies begin to believe that the brand is theirs. They never just belong to a company. Of course, legally they belong to the company, but the minute the company starts believing that it can dictate everything about the brand is the minute they forget their customers.

Q: What are some examples of other brands that have come back to life?

Here are just a few: Mini Cooper, the Beetle, every revived Broadway show, Lilly Pulitzer, College of William & Mary. Hawaii 5-O is back. Jeep is bringing back the Wagoneer, that stately wood-paneled chariot of the Reagan era, to overseas markets.

Q: The president of J. B. Williams Company once said of his dated Brylcreem, AquaVelva and Lectric Shave brands, “There’s a franchise there that even neglect couldn’t destroy.” Does that mean there are opportunities for entrepreneurs in bringing back old brands?

Lots. It’s not just about trying to snag great some goodwill. It’s about looking at what the market needs, and satisfying it. But the hardest part is that even if you get the rights to the brand, you still have to figure out how to recreate it. And with that, you are bound by another story, another entrepreneur’s struggle from a long time ago.

Q: Is there a marketplace for people to buy and sell old brands?

This has been slow to develop, as companies still do not really understand the value in old brands. There is plenty of licensing, which even has its own trade shows, but even that market didn’t develop until Disney and the invention of motion pictures. There are of course business brokers, who can sell businesses and goodwill. And then there is private capital, which seems to me more interested, of late, in sucking cash out of companies.

I am more interested in some sort of neutral ground, where other executives can begin to see what other companies need, and how they might find new uses for these assets, perhaps in shedding old brands as ventures into new spin-off companies. The key to success is unbiased research and history; if you don’t know the history of why the company declined, you can’t revive the brand. You have to understand the brand, and that takes insight, not just trolling the Trademark Office for expired brand names.

Q: Finally, a personal question. You worked years ago at Colonial Williamsburg. Did that spark your interest in long-ago products and brands?

I worked there in college at William & Mary, and my great-grandfather was mayor during its restoration. In Virginia, the story of what happened in Williamsburg was a story of hope in the middle of the Great Depression. There was this dead town, where all the buildings were run down. But with Rockefeller money and a lot of inspiration, it literally came back to life.

Today, we think of it as a museum, but what was the most fascinating about it was that the Rev. W.A.R. Goodwin and John D. Rockefeller Jr. decided that the town’s business and industry needed to be re-created, too. So anything they found became a potential for reproductions or inspiration for interpretive items that were based on old items. In addition, they began to unearth bits of pottery and get companies like Wedgwood to recreate the patterns. The stores were also re-opened, so suddenly Josiah Chowning’s Tavern was real again after 200 years, serving up beer.

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While science is still struggling to unravel the neuro-dynamics of nostalgia, studies have identified some nostalgic cues that can be exploited and how images and sounds from the past can create favorable attitudes about products.

Despite being obvious, this strategy taps into something fundamental about the human mind and consciousness. Every time we remember a past event it not only evokes the earlier memory, but can re-cast the past into a more pleasing “remembered” version. Memory, thinking and feeling are an active, shaping process.

Music, Cars, Movies Live On Forever

The music, cars and movies you identified with when you were young stick with you throughout your life. Take music, recordings that were released when we were teenagers or young adults, are locked into our memories forever, to release a flood of vivid memories and emotions when replayed, especially in ads. For example, people who were 23 in 1964, when the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” will turn 70 this year, are a prime target for nostalgic marketing appeals.

For marketers, the key is finding the right music and images, which do not even need to directly relate to their products, as long as warm feelings are stirred up. It is the emotion generated from that good feeling that influences people’s evaluation of the advertised offer. Recollection provides context and context impacts on how we evaluate things.

Moreover, nostalgia can make us feel that not so much time has passed between then and now, making us feel young(er) again and that we still have a long ways to go and have the time to make it “there.” Nostalgia telescopes time and brings it more under our emotional orchestration.

Notaligic Case In Point -Valentine’s Day

Nostalgia becomes especially potent during holidays, like Valentine’s Day, due to their powerful call to summon up and renew bonds. Hope is the base coin of holidays, a time of ritual, which tends to reduce cognitive complexity through one’s participation in stylized and oft-repeated enactments. Through ritual, we play a mental trick on ourselves; if the ritual comes off well then we feel life will be good.

The ritual function of Valentine’s Day is similar to all rituals – to make up for the past and to reaffirm the past. To show that despite the press of daily routine and slights encountered, love endures, just as it was when two hearts first met. Most of the time we can be couch potatoes in soiled sweat-suits, but today is different, today is “romance,” a time to symbolically communicate that what we felt and did “then” still lives and will endure.

There is talk of “remember when” (also a song when Boomers were teens). There are flowers, signifying the bloom of Spring, renewal (and the olfactory sense is primitively / directly tied to memory). If allowance allows, perhaps a small diamond might appear (itself a sign of indestructibility).

The sounds, smells, and other accoutrements of Valentine’s Day all function in the service of three sentiments that make up the holy trinity of ritual: There is a shared past. There is continuity. There is future. For us!

Marketing Take-Away

In today’s environment of a perceived diminished future, playing up experiences that engender hope may be a good strategy that produces a mature outcome. A nostalgic approach might just help people see a clearer vision of what is and what is not possible. And, that’s not puppy love by any means.

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Some brands have to make up a past. Others have ancestry galore to utilize if the brand’s stewards can strike the right tone without relying too much on nostalgia. I call this brand mythos–the archetypal true back-story, the legend of itself told to itself and its fans.

The rule to “remember,” but not to be slavishly tethered to, is mythos. Crest started out as a cavity preventing toothpaste, but evolved into an “oral care system” that appeals to nearly every age. It’s a fine line to walk the organic trajectory of a brand’s DNA, staying within a logic that consumers can follow while allowing the brand to be alive, vital, and continue delighting.

Why I Love this Brand

Yet, there is another aspect of mythos to consider. The personal mythos – “How I Came to Love This Brand”- stories. These are part and parcel of passion brand legend and lore and are often kicked off by what researchers Harper and Michelle Roehm term “flashbulb memories.” Crucial elements of the “flashbulb” phenomenon are “vividly detailed, resistant to forgetting and enduring over time.” The flashbulb event is so powerful that many of the details become bound up in a profoundly personal context.

The Roehms (academics at different universities in North Carolina) looked at the phenomenon from a marketer’s perspective. They quote a twenty-five year-old memory as told to them of a first experience with Krispy Kreme doughnuts. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I was eleven and we were visiting my cousins, who lived in the South. As a special treat, my aunt and my cousin and I went to the Krispy Kreme one morning. There were some hot doughnuts that had just been made and we had them right after they were done. I remember the smell, the taste of the doughnuts. I remember my cousin making fun of me, because I ate mine so fast and I got glaze all over myself, on my face, my hands, everything.”

Novelty, Surprise Are Crucial Elements

The conclusion is clear: novelty is crucial. A sense of surprise can produce the requisite flash. Naturally, first movers can offer such novelty cues. BuildaBear Workshop is a brand the Roehms found that met the criteria. But novelty is more than innovation. Novelty is personal. It may not be new to the marketplace, but if it’s new to me there’s the opportunity for a flashbulb moment.

It seems that some brands are poised to enter our lives at key moments, when a flashbulb really does go off. In my work with Hal Goldberg, who hypnotizes consumers, I always have him follow that same syntax of questions: First, what is the most powerful and most recent memory of the category? Second, what is the most powerful and most recent memory of the specific brand for which I’m consulting?

We find that these first and most powerful memories meet the criteria of the flashbulb experience. Such memories, which are more easily accessed through hypnosis, are wonderfully rich, detailed, sensory, and contextual. The most recent memories, however, are typically dull, flat, and disappointing. It’s the dissonance between the promise of the brand experience -as felt in those early memories- and the let down of the reality of today’s mundane usage that points the way to reinvigorating a brand.

What we’re attempting to do is to get the current personal brand story back in line with the original compelling personal narration the consumer tells herself. It is these personal narrations that are the harbingers of a brand’s true equity, its profound connection woven through our personal memories. Every brand has this resource to rely upon, whether or not there is a fabulous back-story to the brand itself.

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May was undoubtedly marketing’s month for nostalgia. M&S ran triumphant three-day penny bazaars to honor its 125-year anniversary; meanwhile, Sainsbury’s out-heritaged its rival, with its 140-year celebrations capped by a beautiful ad from Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO.

In addition, Nestlé relaunched the Milky Bar Kid with a montage of half a century of uneasy blond, bespectacled children reading lines to camera. Persil and Virgin Atlantic also climbed onto the retro brand wagon with their own heritage campaigns. Meanwhile, Hovis announced this month that its ‘Go on lad’ campaign had grabbed a 3.5% increase in market share and added £60m to the top-line of the business.

This trend is surprising, given that one of British marketing’s biggest weaknesses is its Anglo-Saxon disregard for history and provenance.

It’s a deficit I have become familiar with as a consultant. I was trained in the US business-school model, which rejects focus on heritage in favor of consumer orientation. However, all that changed seven years ago when I started consulting for some of the great luxury brands. Personal discretion and an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement prevent me from identifying them, but trust me, they are great.

It took my new French masters more than a year to beat the historical reticence out of me and show me the power of using history to inform brand strategy. It might sound like merde de vache, but in the following years I have come to appreciate how right they are.

For example, I truly believe that Tesco is the leader in private-label because of its brand origins: in 1924, founder Jack Cohen marketed a shipment of tea he had bought from T E Stockwell using the first three initials of the supplier and the first two letters from his surname to brand the product.

Similarly, the reason Burberry can claim ‘accessible luxury’ so successfully is not its astute repositioning strategy in 1997, but rather its provenance: a brand created by a working-class draper from Basingstoke who made overcoats for the King.

An equally persuasive case can be made from the many brands that have forgotten their origins, to their cost.

If only General Motors had stopped trying to be so 21st-century and studied the actions of Alfred Sloan, its greatest past leader. Sloan set up the initial house of brands structure at GM in the 20s. He emphasized the need to position each brand in a specific market segment, and with total autonomy from the other brands in the portfolio. He also warned of the dire consequences for GM if these rules were ever forgotten – a lesson the company is now learning the hard way.

Similarly, if Northern Rock had stopped focusing on becoming ‘the most cost-efficient bank in Europe’ and paid attention to its thrifty Northern origins, it seems to me that it might have become apparent to it that its chosen path was not only fiscally irresponsible but at odds with the brand itself. A few hours in the company of Fuller Osborn, who led Northern Rock in its various forms from 1949, could have reminded the team of the bank’s roots.

Are British marketers finally breaking free of their Anglo-Saxon myopia and taking French lessons in brand heritage? I doubt it. Most of the heritage we saw last month was used superficially, for ads and events. To truly understand brand heritage and respect it is to use that knowledge at the very heart of every major brand decision. That may be a step too far backward for most British marketers to follow.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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