Friday, November 13, 2009

The shrinking lifecycle of brands

10 years back we all swore by MSN and Yahoo search. Have you ever wondered how these two giant brands were so effortlessly overshadowed by Google? So much so that the word "Google" has started to gain acceptance in being used as a verb synonymous with web search! Google stuck to the old fashioned textbook style of making a strong product speak for itself and came up trumps. And in what way! But what's noteworthy is a gradually increasing trend of mammoth e-brands having an ever decreasing shelf life. In fact this trend can also be comfortably extrapolated to brick and mortar brands too. Look at Motorola. A decade back it was the leader in handheld phones and commanded the lions share in the market. Then one fine day a rubber manufacturer from a nondescript Finnish town(Nokia) decided to foray into the market and again in the space of a decade another bigwig brand was reduced to an almost rubble. Point to ponder is whether this trend is dangerous or encouraging to new age marketing specialists. A quarter of a century back things were seemingly easier. Create a strong product, market it well enough to create a differentiating brand and add a few small stitched up innovations in time to keep it alive for perhaps half a century or more. Look at brands like Maggi(Nestle), Surf/Rin/Nirma, Kissan(Jam, Ketchup etc.), Ambassador(Car) - they've all stuck to the age old formula and have thrived in the domestic market for decades on the trot. But all rules were turned headlong with the advent of the information age. The tried and tested formulae of elongating the lifecycle of super brands have rudely gone for a vicious toss. There's a constant trepidation that what you brand as a superbrand today might as well be gone for ever tomorrow. So as we keep ourselves occupied with the hunt for a key to evade this blink and you miss phenomena, let's have a minute's silence for all brands which have died an untimely death in this e-age!