Brand reengineering — why and how?

Abstract

A few years ago when business commentators, including The Economist, were christening the 1980s as the ‘Decade of the brand’, the authors were concerned to point out the strategic risks of ‘overbranding’, that is, the corporate ownership of too many fragmented brands. This paper reviews their learning curve in the interim period: from the systematic diagnosis of ‘branding megatrends’ which provide companies with early waring signals of potential risks to their branding processes, to ‘brand reengineering’ which is the change management process that is necessary when old branding processes are putting a company at competitive disadvantage. In common with other areas of Business Process Reengineering, brand reengineering ‘breaks the china’ across an organisation's departmental functions. Change of this magnitude is never painless and should be led by a company's chief executive officer (CEO). But this solution is preferable to the death of the brand, which now appears to be a vogue prediction of many business commentator.