The Homa Files

Punch line: Some dead (and nearly dead) brands — called “zombies” — still have high residual awareness that can be leveraged for relatively low cost comebacks – and extended to adjacent categories …

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Excerpted from Business week: Imation Brings Dead Brands Back to Life, April 1, 2010

You might think a brand is dead when stores stop selling it. Imation doesn’t think so.

Imation initially made its name on floppy disks (remember them ? ) — then became the world’s largest seller of recordable compact discs.

The company knows that consumers are skipping past data-storage media like compact discs and putting their data on flash memory, where Imation is only a minor player, or on the Net.

So, Imation has spent the last couple of years acquiring so-called “zombie brands” and leveraging their built-in consumer awareness to reincarnate them.

For example, remember Memorex and TDK?  Most consumers do.

That’s why Imation is reviving them to expand into low- and high-end audio gear Imation is using Memorex and TDK to move into higher-margin products.

Memorex was a ghost of its former self when Imation bought it in 2006 for $330 million. Sales of blank audio cassettes had been declining since Sony’s CD-playing Discman came out in 1991.  Memorex dropped its signature TV ads, with their “Is it live or is it Memorex?” tagline, more than 30 years ago. And yet, research surveys showed that 95% of U.S. consumers knew the name, even among people in their 30s.

Imation came up with new product categories to refresh the Memorex brand.

Today Imation is selling Memorex-branded iPod accessories, digital photo frames, DVD players, MP3 players, karaoke machines, and TVs at retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores  and Target.

The company unveiled a new Memorex collection of Wii accessories. Imation is also bringing back another relic from the predigital age, TDK, as a high-end line of stereo gear.

The company plans to sell speakers, turntables, and other audio gear costing as much as $500 under the label TDK brand.

Imation says: “The combination of having good solid technology along with a portfolio of brands and a goal of differentiation is going to set us apart.”

Full article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_15/b4173064270743.htm?chan=innovation_branding_top+stories

This entry was posted on May 19, 2010 at 7:32 am and is filed under Mktg - Brands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.