This is something I see all the time, especially when a company acquires a neglected brand without doing its research. Try as we might, some things are not worth fixing.

Think relaunch, but don’t afraid to rebrand. It’s not enough to quash the perception of your brand in the marketplace you need to be on the lookout for anything that could potentially work against your branding message.ģ. Next, look to make changes that will silence your most vocal opponents, then work to anticipate setbacks that might invite even more backlash against your brand. First, look for the low-hanging fruit, things you can change with very little investment. Any change needs to be meaningful, have resonance with your brand’s core audience. One of the first things you need to come to grips with is change for the sake of change is a bad idea.

With information coming at you from all sides, you need to know what/who you can trust. When faced with daunting criticism, the first thing you must do is block the noise. Anglers, vendors and even media can be invaluable here.Ģ. One word of caution: Don’t trust your gut. With some research you’ll uncover the core of your brand, those things that consumers appreciate and would never want to see changed. Like McDonalds, you need to change, but changing more than needed could be costly, or fatal. The thinking there is that if those elements that arouse negative feelings are no longer around, the brand is better off. The simplest (though certainly not the cheapest or the easiest) fix in repairing a brand would seem to be wholesale changes, removing everything that consumers associate with the brand, including logos. What lessons can our industry glean from this parable when trying to restore a lackluster fishing brand.ġ. The result? The company gained market share. What they did, in my opinion, was the smartest course of action: change where they must, but no more than they had to.

Notice they did not totally revamp the company, which would have (a) been dumb and (b) served to alienate its base. So, smartly, the company added more “healthy” items to the menu, including fruit and oatmeal, diversified by adding more smoothies and coffee-blended drinks, cut back on the portion sizes of offerings such as french fries and, maybe be most important, confronted the criticism head-on by reaching out to prominent bloggers, who were some of the company’s most vociferous opponents. But any changes they made had to be meaningful. As a company with tens of billions in annual revenue, abandoning its core menu items was out of the question. Everything from the company’s food production practices to its cheap prices, which critics say makes junk food much to easy to access, has been assailed in the media. With the nation’s obesity rate at public health-threat levels, the fast food juggernaut has been held up as the symbol of gluttony in this country.

For our purposes, however, let’s look at a more recent example: McDonald’s, the ubiquitous restaurant chain.

Rc submarine fishing