Danny Pemberton, formerly of Polaroid Originals, lately from IDEO leads the latest rebirth.

Several years ago, I walked through the deserted offices of the legendary Polaroid Corporation. The company HQ was set in a pine forest outside of Boston, a mix of stylish 1950s buildings that you had to guess were probably featured in Architectural Digest, et al.

On this overcast gray day, however, the Polaroid campus felt like the hollowed cadaver of a once thriving corporation. Security guards and essential maintenance personnel prowled the grounds in golf carts. We were led to an empty cafeteria. Along the aisle where people used to stand for food, was a chart that looked like a wall-sized organizational chart. However, the pyramid stack was actually the who’s who of Polaroid scientists and engineers — organized top to bottom of those who had been awarded the most patents. At the top was someone who held over 10,000 patents.

There was no guessing what mattered at Polaroid Corporation.

We continued to wander. From the cafeteria, we went underground — ducking under a steaming network of pipes and coils as an engineer explained that founder Edwin H. Land was an engineering student when he quit Harvard in the 1940s. He had come up with an idea to make a film that developed itself within a matter of seconds.

There were eight substrates to Polaroid film, the guide explained, and they had to be laid on the base material in eight perfect thicknesses (the chemical layers tended to pool when applied on traditional conveyor manufacturing).

The only way to do that, Land discovered, was to gravity-feed the chemical solutions. What does that mean? It means that before they could move Polaroid film into mass production, they first had to construct a manufacturing facility eight stories high.

Imagine the size of Land’s cojones: “Yes, I have this terrific idea, but first we have to build an eight-story building.”

Much different than building code in your dorm room.

Back at Polaroid headquarters, the guide unlocked a storage room filled with dusty brown bottles filled with chemical compounds that had been invented, designed, innovated and created by Polaroid scientists.

Those compounds were worth millions of dollars to industries like health care, food science, printing and elsewhere. Yet you had the overwhelming feeling that despite being worth millions of dollars, those compounds were in danger of being swept away by an overzealous cleaning crew. What? We weren’t supposed to throw those out? Shrug. Who knew?

Through the 1960s and 1970s, Land’s genius idea took off.

Polaroid was the selfie of the 1960s. The film made events like birthday parties, graduations, anniversaries, family reunions, and dating more spontaneous — more fun. Best of all, people didn’t have to take their film to the drugstore or wait a week to get their pictures developed.

Land’s invention was transformational.

Ordinary film scrambled to catch up. Hence the one-hour film processing centers that popped up in mall strips across America.

Over time, Polaroid lost its edge. The brand became less innovative, less relevant, and when digital photography evolved from being quirky electronics to something much like film, the markets for Polaroid wilted.

In the early 2000s, a holding company hijacked the brand and slapped the Polaroid name onto cheap T.V. sets. In 2009, Hilco Consumer Capital and Gordon Brothers Brands bought all the assets of Polaroid, including the Polaroid brand, intellectual property, inventory and other assets.

In 2017, The Impossible Project bought the rights to the name Polaroid and the saga continues.

Brand Resurrection

Under the right circumstances, Polaroid can be resurrected. With a well-conceived strategy, the new brand owners can capitalize on the hard-won equity and overcome whatever challenges are holding the brand back. As Mark Ritson points out, “No matter how badly mismanaged, great brands are indestructible. They may lie dormant for decades, but in the hands of a great marketer, with a mix of a vision for the future and an understanding of brand heritage, revitalization is always possible.”

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Patrick Hanlon, Author of Primal Branding

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That’s particularly true if you’re a brand that has fallen behind – where the shift required to even stay alive can feel huge. And yet for all the effort, the concern, the misgivings, where your brand lands can in reality be right in the middle of the pack – meaning that sooner rather than later, the company will need to repeat the same process in order to avoid being lost.

So often, it seems, those undertaking brand change misjudge impact. People assess what has happened from the point of view of how far they have shifted rather than looking at the two things that really matter: the active difference it has made for consumers; and where the brand now lies in relative competitiveness and interest to those in the market today and those on the verge of entering.

It’s not just brands that need to catch up that face this dilemma. Even brands that lead their fields and are widely perceived as shapeshifters can agonize over decisions that, to consumers, are perfectly sensible once they do appear. I remember having this discussion one day in an airport with the Creative Director of a global clothing brand I know well. Pointing to the new imagery on the posters in the display window, I commented that I liked the way they had extended the brand a little.

He looked puzzled. “A little?” he asked. Yes, I said. I thought the new imagery was whimsical and interesting but nevertheless strongly connected (in a good way) to the brand they had always been. “We agonized over that internally for months,” he told me. “I took a lot of flak for putting the brand in so much danger.”

“I’m glad you persisted,” I replied, “for the brand’s sake.”

It’s an encounter that comes with a message for every decision maker – aim for further than you feel comfortable with. Drive to the point of pain. Because, in the vast majority of cases, providing you stay true to the spirit of the brand, the change you feel in doing so will be significantly higher than the difference anyone else, including your buyers, actually notices.

What can feel like giddy revolution to the people who are so close to it will often be greeted by customers as a welcome refreshment.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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.

Newsweek
Once the biggest news magazine by circulation in America, now diminished by lost circulation and advertising revenue, it has finally been sold to a digitally savvy internet competitor.

Chevrolet
No brand was more iconic and embedded into the fabric of 20th century American culture. The problem is we are now in the 21st century and the game has changed. Chevy’s current advertising manta “runs deep” is a gallant attempt to reinvent itself by looking to the past. Good luck with that one. Most people seem to be paying more attention to forward-thinking Hyundai these days.

Xerox
It invented laser printing but held tightly to its dominant document company positioning while HP exploited the technology and became the industry leader.

Kodak 
It invented digital photography, but cemented itself into its dying film business.

And on and on the story goes. To reinvent, brand owners and managers need to accept the fact they must get better at doing everything differently. In many marketing organizations this is difficult to do, especially when they are tied to the same performance metrics the brand delivered in its hey-day. If you’re in the early stages of reinventing your brand, you’ll need to have clarity and confidence with the answers to these four questions:

To whom will you market?
It’s critical to know as much as you can about who the most fervent buyers are or will be. It’s customers that determine the competitive hierarchy of brands in a category. Everything starts with the customer. When brands reinvent themselves, chances are they’ll be serving a new and different customer segment.

Why they buy?
It’s critical to know what drivers bring the brand unquestioned relevance to the new target segment. What drives customer participation in the category, and more importantly, what drives their purchase behaviors and brand preference within the category?

What makes (or will make) your brand highly valued and difficult to substitute?
In a world of me-too products and abundant choice, the brand must represent a single emotional benefit that is highly valued by the tribe and difficult to substitute. To reinvent relevance, the brand must be the exception to its category and not the rule. Brands that stay relevant offer a simple, yet emotional benefit rather than a functional one.

How your brand competes?
Creating experiences customers love at every point in your value chain is essential. Brands that under-perform stop sharing the love. You’re not sharing the love when the product becomes stale and tired, or becomes a commodity, or your customer service takes a back seat to profit margins. Reinvention means creating new value, new meanings, rather than continuing to compete for the value nobody cares that much about.

The difficult reality for most brand managers is they live in a world of tactics and metrics. Most brand managers are hard pressed to think past 180-day cycles. Reinventing a brand is more metaphysical and there are no guarantees.

Before investing in new marketing tactics and advertising campaigns, its imperative to gain an objective and rigorous assessment of the brand’s current equities, it’s relevance to the consumer segment that represents the brand’s bigger future, and possibly to identify new opportunities for innovation and product development where the brand can once again lead a tribe.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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