Consumers Mourn the Loss of Favorite Brands

Consumers' attachment to brands can be emotional. Though not everyone feels compelled to tattoo the logo of their favorite product on arms, backs or calves, that phenomenon is becoming more common.

Marketers understand that in this devotion lies the secret of enhanced profits since a repeat customer is generally more cost efficient due to lower cost of sales. They dont require the same level of marketing or discounting to drive purchases.

In fact, consumer loyalty is usually a growth stimulus as those so inclined will pay up to get what they want, whether it be for ice cream, motorcycles or mobile phones. Product loyalty is not dissimilar to cult behavior. Researchers have studied gang and cult membership, including initiation rituals, attempting to deconstruct the factors that drive such devotion so that they can be applied to consumer products.

But this degree of dedication also presents brand managers with a conundrum: sometimes products just do not deliver the growth and profitability contemporary corporations demand. Discontinuing a brand is generally a hard-nosed business decision but it can affect loyalty and so must be handled with care, as the following article explains.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream may be extreme in creating a Flavor Graveyard at their factory to which distressed fans can go actually or virtually to mourn the passing of favored tastes. But they have identified with humor and marketing savvy a way of acknowledging consumer preferences without having to continue to producing unprofitable brands. Many product features stimulate psychological touch points rooted in childhood memories. In other words, marketers do not want to mess with such deep-seated feelings.

As neurological research enhances our understanding of human impulses - and as social media broaden the appeal of what would have once been quite limited followings - businesses are going to have become more sophisticated and adept at tapping those impulses to drive sales. Consumers may be philosophically ambivalent about such manipulation, but their behavior in response to such stimulae makes the power of such tactics compelling. JL

Rhymer Rigby reports in the Financial Times:

The UK confectionery maker Cadbury still gets calls asking if it will ever bring back its Aztec bar. This would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that the Aztec bar was discontinued in 1978 – years before many of today’s chocolate eaters were born.

“Chocolate is very emotional,” says Tony Bilsborough, Cadbury’s head of external communications. “It’s a bit like Proust’s madeleines – it takes you back to your childhood. Often, the letters we get are wonderful. When people write about their love of the chocolate bars of yesteryear, they can be almost autobiographical.”

Graham Hales, UK chief executive of branding consultancy Interbrand, says: “Discontinued consumer products can become collectors’ items for people and you see them going for vast amounts of money on eBay.”
As well as chocolate bars, consumer devotion tends to centre on other fast-moving consumer goods such as soft drinks and ice-cream. It can also extend to items such as cosmetics and beauty products and, occasionally, manifests itself in more unexpected places.
In March Google announced that it was closing a number of its services as part of its “spring cleaning”. Most of these went largely unremarked, but the closure of the web feed aggregator Google Reader caused an outcry from disappointed users.
Google’s experience points to a key difficulty with discontinuing products. While most of them slip away quietly, every so often there is a significant and unexpected consumer backlash. This may now be hugely amplified by social media, presenting communications departments with new challenges.
Businesses considering killing off brands need to think about whether and how they break the news to loyal customers and how they might cope with calls for the brand to be brought back.
“Generally, we wouldn’t advertise a withdrawal,” says Mr Bilsborough. “Although we do talk to the trade so they can plan stock.”
Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology, a book about market research and the psychology of shopping, agrees that a quiet withdrawal is better. “The best thing you can do is be as surreptitious as possible. Any time the organisation draws attention to what it’s doing with brands you risk a backlash. Typically, you’ll get two consumer responses. First, you get their attention and second, you trigger loss-aversion. It’s a little like telling kids you’re going to throw their toys away, even though they haven’t played with them for six months . . . if you just chuck them out, they probably won’t notice.”
When consumers do notice, he says, “you need to engage with them and the response needs to be congruent with the brand. Say you understand they love this product, but there are not enough people who support it. The people who deal with this should be empowered to do so. Even if the person complaining is someone being an idiot on a public forum, you should respond well.”
Mr Hales notes that businesses have become more adept at dealing with calls for resurrections on forums such as Facebook and Twitter. “In the early days of social media, companies treated it as a conventional medium and tended to be arrogant,” he says. “But now they no longer preach at consumers.”
He adds that airing the possibility of a brand’s demise can be useful if a company is still pondering whether to withdraw a product. “You can create a situation where people talk about it being under consideration and even create campaigns to save it,” he says. This needs to be undertaken in good faith, and can only be done once.
Sometimes, however, the calls for reintroduction of a brand that has already been discontinued – or has even been discontinued for several years – become overwhelming. Mr Bilsborough points to Wispa bars in the UK, which were first introduced in 1981. “By the late 1990s, Wispa sales were very poor, so we discontinued it in 2003. Within 18 months, people were asking us to bring it back.
“Obviously, you can’t bring a product back for 20 people, but with Wispa there was a real groundswell and we saw a lot of online media then, later, social media. So in 2008 we bought it back,” he says.
However, mindful that there is a difference between making a lot of noise and buying a lot of chocolate, Cadbury brought Wispa back initially as a limited edition. “We said if it’s successful we’ll continue it. It flew off the shelves and has been at the top of the chocolate charts ever since.”
Nestlé’s Vice Versas, a UK brand, have performed even more of a complicated dance with consumer opinion. The brand launched in 1991, relaunched in 2004 and then discontinued in 2005. In 2012, it was relaunched again. Social media played a big role here, too: the company decided to reintroduce Vice Versas after seeing 29 different Facebook pages with more than 10,000 members dedicated to bringing the chocolate sweets back.
While social media tends to be where consumers agitate for brands to be brought back, companies must also keep open the traditional lines of communication – via sales reps, for instance. Diageo withdrew the Malacca variant of its Tanqueray gin in the US in 2003. However, the calls for its reintroduction from mixologists and cocktail drinkers were such that it bought the gin back. “We recently reintroduced Tanqueray Malacca as a limited edition, available only for bartenders in top bars in North America, the UK and Spain, where gin cocktail culture is the most buoyant,” explains Edward Pilkington, Diageo’s global category director for vodka, gin and rum.
Some business have museums – physical or online – where customers can look at bygone brands. “Having a reminder of discontinued products isn’t a bad idea, as it enables you to see if there’s a lot of interest,” says Mr Graves. “If there is, you might bring them back or let them influence future launches.”
There is also the possibility of limited resurrections, which many businesses undertake to satfisy customers who miss brands and gauge interest. In the US, Estée Lauder has a “Gone But Not Forgotten” helpline, which promises to help customers track down remaining stocks of products discontinued in the past two years.
But, if the business in question is offering nothing, customers have to seek solace in consumer-generated Facebook pages and forums where they can gather with like-minded people to mourn the brand or flavour they still miss.
One company, however, takes a very unusual approach to helping bereft consumers achieve closure. The Vermont-based ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s has a “flavour graveyard” behind its factory, with granite headstones commemorating varieties, such as Georgia Peach and Sugar Plum, that are no longer made.
“Our factory gets 300,000 visitors a year,” explains spokesperson Elizabeth Stewart. “Diehard fans love their flavours, miss them and really do mourn their passing.”
The response to the graveyard, she adds, has been great. “You see visitors down on their knees and I think people have even cried. Flowers are left quite regularly.” And occasionally, a much-mourned flavour does rise from the dead. “When we resurrect a flavour, we usually remove the headstone,” explains Ms Stewart.