Marketing A Brand - Success & Failure

November 19, 2009

Interview with Jack Trout, author of the book REPOSITIONING: Marketing in an Era of Competition, Change and Crisis

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Mike Carruthers:
In the attempt to grow, businesses often stretch themselves – sometimes a little too far.

Jack Trout:
I mean Xerox is a classic they tried to become a computer – well that didn’t’ work. Any Xerox machine that can’t make a copy is in deep trouble.

Jack Trout

Jack Trout author of the book REPOSITIONING , says the automobile industry has done this a lot. GM for example…

GM fell apart because they destroyed their brands. In other words what’s a Chevrolet? I have no idea it’s big, it’s small, it’s expensive, it’s a truck, it’s everything. Buick – same thing cheap Buicks, expensive Buicks – an Oldsmobile what was that about? – Well long gone. So, their problem today now that they’ve got four brands left, their problem is how do I reposition those four brands for the future, going forward?

But sometimes businesses don’t stretch far enough.

IPod, who’d they wipe out? They wiped out Sony’s Walkman. Where was Sony? They should have built a whole new brand around digital... walking around with your digital IPod type of stuff.

And Jack says some companies know exactly who they are and succeed because they stick with what works.

My hero for seventy-five, eighty years of never changing is White Castle. McDonalds essentially is number one on a sales per unit basis, number two is White Castle – they outsell Wendy’s they outsell Burger King per unit. So in other words there’s an operation that has never changed and I think that’s what’s made them so great.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.