Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [99]
Chapter Eleven
Tired brands
All brands will eventually fail. There is no such thing as a brand that can last forever. Some go out with a bang, others with a pitiful whimper, but they will all, at some stage, come face to face with their own mortality.
But what about Coca-Cola? What about McDonald’s? Well, they are unlikely to disappear tomorrow, or even in the next few decades, but is it really impossible to imagine some future, more health- conscious society rejecting these in favour of brands more in tune with the age?
According to the study, The Living Company: Habits for survival in a turbulent business environment, the average life expectancy of a multinational corporation – Fortune 500 or its equivalent – is between 40 and 50 years. The author of this study pointedly notes that a third of companies listed in the Fortune 500 at the start of the last major economic downturn were not around 23 years later.
Many of the strongest brands of the last century are starting to look very tired. Many more have already failed. This chapter is therefore devoted to formerly successful brands, which are either no longer with us, or are looking gradually weaker day by day.
89 F. W. Woolworth
On 6 January 2009 the last of the 813 Woolworth stores that had operated for the best part of a century in the United Kingdom closed their doors for the last time. At one level this could just have been a story about another victim of the prevailing credit crunch, but Woolworth’s brand problems predate that.
The Woolworth story starts on the outskirts of Utica, New York in 1879. Twenty-seven-year-old Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first store based on his experience with a previous employer who had held a successful clearance sale. He saw the possibilities for a discount store, with the added twist that the merchandise would be on open display rather than behind counters. In addition prices were plainly marked so eliminating the need for time-consuming haggling. The venture was not a success and the store closed the following year. However, Woolworth correctly deduced that poor location rather than having the wrong strategy was his problem. He opened a new store in downtown Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1881 and soon he was opening stores around the North American continent. At one point a new store was opening every 17 days. By 1913 Woolworth was a millionaire with a shiny new headquarters in New York’s Woolworth Building – then the tallest building in the world.
Woolworth was America’s largest restaurant chain throughout the 1940s and by the late 1970s its 4,000 outlets made it the world’s largest department store chain.
But by the late 1990s business was in decline. In 1997 the company closed all of its American department stores, renamed itself Venator, selling off the Woolworth Building. In 2003 Venator renamed itself after the conglomerate’s most successful division, Foot Locker, Inc, which in 2010 operated through 3,641 stores and claimed, with justification, to be the world’s largest retailer of athletically inspired footwear.
Though the Woolworth brand died in the USA under separate ownership, Woolworth stores still operated in Austria, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
The first store in England opened in 1909 following much the same model as in the United States. Woolies, as it was affectionately known, became present on nearly every high street over the next half century, hitting its peak in the 1960s operating over 1,000 stores across the UK. Woolworths was defined by such products as pick’n’mix sweets and shoppers could rely on it for anything from stationery to garden furniture