Here’s a throwback of sorts. A Hartford Courant article in 1999 spotlighted brand images—including Aunt Jemima and sports mascots like the Washington Redskins—that were slow to evolve with the progress of society. Hey, it only took over 20 years after publication of the article for the corporations behind such culturally clueless characters to finally do the right thing.
When Brand Image Falls From Favor
By Matthew Kauffman, Courant Staff Writer
Think you’ve got a Y2K problem?
Sixty-four years ago, film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck put together a new studio and dubbed it 20th Century Fox. The name, christened with a modern tone, has since mellowed into solid nostalgia.
But come New Year’s Eve, it may sound nothing so much as old.
Fox says it has no plans to retire the venerable name. Still, at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., take a guess who’s filed an application for the trademark “21st Century Fox.”
Fox’s dilemma points up the problem businesses face when their hard-built identities become dated or fall out of favor. Companies often spend years and millions building the value of their brands. But what is a company to do when its carefully crafted image begins to conjure the wrong image?
It’s enough to kill a brand. In the 1930s, pharmacists began selling an appetite suppressant called Ayds, which for a time was the top-selling weight-loss supplement.
And then the AIDS epidemic struck.
Sales plummeted, and within a few years, Ayds was off the market.
“There are just some things you can’t overcome,” said Ken Love, president and creative director of Lippincott & Margulies, a New York identity management firm.
So the Exxon Valdez oil tanker is now the SeaRiver Mediterranean.
Similarly, Valu-Jet jettisoned the name and repainted all of its planes after a disastrous 1996 crash in the Florida Everglades that killed 110 people. Goodbye, Valu-Jet. Hello, AirTran.
But experts in brand management say killing off a brand name—even one that’s tainted or dated—should be an option of last resort. The reason: In a crowded commercial marketplace, a familiar brand name can be a company’s most important selling asset.
“Brands help customers make decisions, and they’ve never been more important because the world is so confusing and cluttered,” said Allen Adamson, managing director of the New York office of Landor Associates, a brand-management company.
So companies such as Landor spend a lot of their time helping clients salvage a tainted or outdated image.
The chubby Campbell’s Soup Kids were hearty ambassadors for the company, but faced an image problem during the health-crazed 1980s. So Campbell’s kept them on the payroll, but put them on a crash diet.
Kentucky Fried Chicken may be the most famous six syllables in fast food, but as the chain grew, the company concluded that the name was too long, focused on too narrow a portion of the menu, and highlighted fried foods, which had fallen squarely out of favor. It might as well have been Kentucky Fat Chicken.
So the company capitalized on what Adamson calls the “FedEx Syndrome” and took a cue from consumers who were already abbreviating the restaurant as KFC.
“It really is the best of both worlds. The people who know and love us as Kentucky Fried Chicken still know and love us as Kentucky Fried Chicken,” said Michael Tierney, a spokesman for KFC. “But it also allows people to think more freely about our menu, and not just one part of the menu.”
KFC faced another challenge with the death of the company’s founder, “Colonel” Harland Sanders. Sanders died in 1980, and although his face remained on packaging, KFC had lost its most valuable spokesman.
So last year, the company debuted an animated Colonel, voiced by Randy Quaid. The new ad campaign preserves the familiar salesman—and adds hip-hop dance steps to project a more modern image than the elderly, white-suited Southerner.
That could easily project the wrong image, and companies often face their toughest challenges when they realize their icons are culturally offensive.
In the sports world, universities and professional teams have struggled for years over the fate of their often stereotypical Native American mascots. In the business world, some companies dumped offensive marketing symbols, such as the Frito Bandito, and others have been put through dramatic metamorphoses. And none was so dramatic as Aunt Jemima.
Aunt Jemima was created in 1889 as a classic Mammy figure, a crudely drawn, cartoonishly proportioned black woman with a rag tied around her head. According to the history created by the company, she was the revered cook on the plantation of a fictitious Colonel Higbee. Revered throughout the South for her skills in the kitchen, Aunt Jemima, the story went, had finally been persuaded to part with her top-secret recipes.
It may have been an early use of black people in American advertising, but this was a message aimed squarely at white people, and one that began to trouble consumers.
So in the 1950s, the company, owned by Quaker Oats, began slowly updating Aunt Jemima’s appearance until a dramatic makeover a decade ago remade her as a sweet, modern young grandmother. The head rag was gone, replaced by pearl earrings and a modern perm.
“As American culture has evolved, so has the trademark,” said Margaret Cohen, a spokeswoman for Quaker Oats.
The makeover preserved the familiar icon, but Love isn’t sure to what end.
“She has become so homogenized that I think she has lost all her character. I don’t know who she is,” he said. “It’s almost like they’re handling it like they’re embarrassed to have this brand.”
If not embarrassed, perhaps sensitive. Aunt Jemima is not marketed primarily to African American consumers, but since 1990, the company has sponsored an awards program honoring black female community leaders that is run by the National Council of Negro Women (which, incidentally, is one of a number of black organizations that have found themselves with out-of-date names. The most prominent of them, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has resisted a name change in recognition of the organization’s powerful heritage. But the United Negro College Fund a few years ago began marketing itself as the College Fund/UNCF.)
Cohen said the sponsorship is part of the company’s long history of community support, particularly with programs aimed at women, the brand’s primary consumer.
Adamson said it is important to update images, but he said the original premise of the Aunt Jemima brand—that it was superior because it was the secret recipe of a black plantation cook—may no longer have any sales value.
“Sometimes, the distinction is no longer relevant, and you have to come to grips with that,” he said.
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