We talked about the trend with Cheryl Swanson, Principal of the Manhattan-based branding firm Toniq LLC. Swanson has worked to revive dozens of brands with her firm, located on East 32nd Street.

Q: What makes a brand a good candidate for revival?
Swanson: Brands that have a strong heritage – ones that can evoke a sense of nostalgia.

Q: What is the difference between a classic brand and a vintage brand?
Swanson: Classic brands are brands that have come to define their category through quality,heritage, and brand loyalty. They are iconic brands that can be easily recognized. For example, Coca-Cola, Kleenex, Band-Aid, Barbie, Chanel, Levis, Ford, Chevrolet, and so on. Vintage brands, on the other hand, are brands that were popular for a certain period of time. They may define a decade or a generation, but are not a mainstay in the product category today. Many vintage brands may be a model or style from a “classic” company. You see many vintage brands in candy, cars models, and clothing. For example, Necco Wafers, candy buttons, Hot Rods, 1950’s Chanel suits, etc.

Q: What is the age limit on brands. I have had some calls from people looking for 1980s “vintage” brands.
Swanson: Well, vintage is generally defined as anything that is over 20 years old. It’s scary to think that products of the 80’s can now be considered vintage. However, I think it depends on the product category when dating and classifying products to be vintage. For example, vintage cars are usually built between 1919 and1930. Vintage watches are usually those produced before 1960. Vintage clothing is broader encompassing brands and styles between 1920 and 1980 (pre 1920 is usually referred to as antique). As for CPG, I think the 20-year rule is applicable.

Q: How have companies missed this trend over so many years? After all, it started
with the New Coke fiasco.
Swanson: It probably has to do with all the marketers and execs now getting older and realizing the potential of the emotional strength these classic brands have with the consumer. And with everything going on in the world, the brands that are taking note and producing these “throwback” packages are providing a sense of familiarity and comfort for consumers. It allows consumers to think back to a better time. As for “New Coke” that was more of a formulary change that scared people. It was the mid-eighties. Things were good. Timing was bad for Coke. The resolution to the fiasco led to the introduction of “Coca-Cola Classic” which in-turn helped their market share.

Q: How much of this sort of thing is “enough”
Swanson: Well, we think it’s really a trend that’s going to continue. The largest consumer market is the baby-boomers and brands will continue to target their brands towards them. Turning back to tune-in to this group is a marketing strategy that works.

Q: Is the success of this really more about authenticity, or is it that we just get bored by the new?
Swanson: It’s about authenticity and proving brand heritage. These are the brands that have been there with you through the good times and bad and will continue to be there for you. There’s a market for “new” but classic, nostalgic, and throwbacks will always have an appeal to ageing consumers – of any generation. Even the Gen-Y consumers are finding 8-bit technology as retro cool.

Q: Some favorite revivals that they have not worked on? Do you recall some brands
that were once personal favorites, but are now forgotten?
Swanson: Ivory Soap, Tang, Bonnie Bell, Kaboodle, Aqua Net, Sun-In (hair lightener) and Hungry Man TV Dinners.

About Swanson and Toniq: Swanson founded Toniq (www.Toniq.com) in 1999 after leading several design firms to world-class status with her emotions-based, visual approach to brand strategy development. At Toniq, she continues to evolve her strategic expertise by seeking new ways to connect with consumers. Toniq has used this process successfully for leading consumer packaged goods product development, retail and on-line brands, including: Target, Unilever, Lycos, Kraft Foods, Gillette, Ralph Lauren, Saks Fifth Avenue, Pepsi, Con Agra, and Nestle Purina to create or redefine brand personalities and visual positioning recommendations for new products and established brands.

Companies are also doing this, searching their product lines for old marketing approaches or packaging that might draw in a new audience. A class at University of Dayton is working on this idea, too, and asked me for my impression of what makes a valued old brand.

Companies are desperate to do this, looking at examples such as the rebirth of brands Lilly Pulitzer and Mini, and seeing the potential moneymaking possibilities. (Pictured here, Paul McCartney’s Morris Mini at the Sarasota Classic Car Museum.)

Here at BrandlandUSA, we try to chronicle some of these great old brands, and help define what is a good brand, and what is not. Stepping back from the issue, you can’t exactly quantify what makes a good brand revival candidate; you just have to take each case on its own. Nevertheless, there are some criteria that I use when looking at an old brand, to see if there is “goodwill” left that can be turned into a revival. Many believed Shulton’s Old Spice deodorant was dead, but P&G tried some new marketing and line extensions and brought it back.

Certainly, accountants can look at “brand goodwill” and put a value on it, but I happen to think a lot of that is still arbitrary. Still, if a brand has decades of investment in advertising, that “goodwill” does have a value. What are some other factors?

1. Residual image: They have a distinct allure that can resonate with me, and others, after the product is gone or has disappeared.
2. Integrity: There is truthfulness in some part of the product’s past that makes coherent sense. This means that at one period of time, they had authenticity and an agreement with their audience.
3. Divine Inspiration: I happen to be a Christian, and others might see it other ways, but in many of the cases of the beginnings of the brand, there is an a-ha moment where someone takes an idea that comes from nowhere, and makes something happen. When you tell the story of a good brand, it has that spark of life in it. The great Jewish department store entrepreneurs had this God-given vision, as did the great Kemmons Wilson, who started Holiday Inn after a family trip to D.C. went awry as he tried to find suitable places for his family to stay at a fair price.
4. A Good Story: The story does not have to be all good, but the good has to be the  central part. A brand evolves over the years. Key to a good story is the people who worked, over the years, to produce the brand. Did they value what they did? Then if that is the case, you have something there.
5. Nothing Contrived: There is a decided lack of manipulation and the approach to marketing. Too many brands today are over marketed and have no authenticity. People today are looking for what is real. How else would brands like Pabst be revived if that were not the case?
6. Family Values: There is a family connection. Very often these great brands are connected to a family company, and are not mere products conjured up out of a marketing study. Many have family names connected to them.
7. Quality: At one time, there was a quality approach. At sometime during the product’s lifetime, the brand’s owners were desperately concerned about quality, and that reflects not only the making of the product but the packaging, distribution and staff who made it.

Agree? Disagree? Are there other factors to consider?

Does it surprise you that L’Oreal (and most other beauty brands (both luxury and mass merchandiser) went the expected route and found a high-profile beauty to front for their brand?

We weren’t. But just because it’s predictable doesn’t mean it isn’t practicable, and there are two basic ways a celebrity can positively affect a brand.

The first is by creating what might be called “borrowed equity,” when the celebrity causes more attention to the brand than otherwise might be the case, an approach usually used when a brand is seeking high levels of awareness. The second is when the spokesperson association actually increases the brand’s equity that is, when the values inherent in the spokesperson significantly reinforce brand values. If successful, the brand is then seen to better meet, and can even exceed, expectations consumers dream about for the ideal in the category.

That measure – the brand versus the real, unconstrained-by-the-marketplace ideal – is the very best measure of brand engagement and loyalty because it takes into account real emotional values, something that imagery and good-looking celebrities can’t bring about on their own.

Ms. Margulies won’t appear in advertising for L’Oreal Paris until 2011, but until then, we turned to the Brand Keys’ 2010 Loyalty Leaders List to see which brands were currently engaging loyal customers.

Here’s the top-10 ranking:

1. Mary Kay
2. Maybelline
3. Estee Lauder
4. Clinique
5. Avon
6. Lancome
7. L ‘Oreal
8. Cover Girl
9. Chanel
10. Max Factor

Coco Chanel is said to have offered this bon mot: Women have two weapons, cosmetics and tears. Happily, these days beauty brands can arm themselves with something more than outdated clichés: the loyalty driven by real emotional connection.

About the author: Robert Passikoff is Founder & President of Brand Keys, Inc. and a sought-after speaker and thought leader on engagement and loyalty.

What does this have to do with branding? Flash forward to adulthood, and “Jim” and “Karen” and “Mark” and “Hildegard” are not just random syllables. They’re signifiers of personhood and personality. Or as we say in branding, identity.

And that brings us to the brand naming conundrum: Does the name create the identity, or does the identity give meaning to the name? The answer: yes.

A name is a relatively small verbal unit. It can only convey so much. And contrary to the most earnest client aspirations, it can never tell the full story about a brand or product or service. It can suggest that story, but the experience of the brand (or product or service) is what invests the name with meaning.

On the flipside, a brand name is like shorthand. It’s a verbal label, an emblem. It stands for everything the brand represents, just like your name represents everything that makes you “you.”

Let’s go back to people names. If I described my friend “Fred” to you in detail, some of that explanation might stick. But chances are you would need to meet Fred in person to form an opinion of him, which you would then retroactively associate with his name. Your experience of my friend Fred is what gives unique meaning to his name. You might even know other Freds. But your specific knowledge of my friend gives the name Fred specific meaning in his case. It’s a contextual thing.

To take it a step further, think of an expression like “That’s so Fred.” That’s a person’s name acting as a brand in everyday speech. We’re able to take the attributes that make Fred “Fred” and apply them to someone or something else, just by using his name. This is something celebrities are fully aware of—and why they often legally protect their names.

That naming conundrum I mentioned? It’s not easily solved. And maybe it’s not supposed to be. But here’s what I know: People tend to learn more easily through experience than being told. Which is why the better you get to know someone, the more likely you are to remember his or her name.

Does this mean all names are just blank slates? No. Even coined names, which have no dictionary definition, cause our synapses to fire. The challenge is to make sure you’re activating synapses—as opposed to not activating them—with a brand name. Ultimately, how people perceive your brand is how they will understand its name. And somewhere in there, the name will come to represent the brand.

Tom Parrette is Director of Verbal Branding at Addis Creson, a California-based strategic branding firm dedicated to creating positive change for clients and communities. See www.addiscreson.com

1. De Facto Job Rationing: After World War II, when the men came home, the women went home too. Rosie the Riveter fired? Well, the problem was obvious. There were not enough jobs to go around, and society had survive. When you talk about it with family members who went through it, you get a different story than documentaries. While not all wanted to quit, they gave the jobs back to the men as long as the other women did it too and all the men had jobs. It was called realism, and while it is not pretty, and not fair, there was a rational reason. Today, this sort of discrimination would be illegal, but it could return, de facto. For instance, when a sole-breadwinner loses a job, networks of friends pay more attention to finding a job to one spouse, then efforts move to another family. Or if there are layoffs, and a choice is between a single mother or second-income mom, guess who gets the boot first.
2. Sharing Pay With Underlings: When employees at CBS were grousing about Katie Couric’s pay package earlier this year, they brought back the old commie idea of sharing pay with staff. Here was the situation. You have Couric making millions. And CBS is laying off staff. The ratings for CBS Evening News are lousy. So employees do simple math. If she made $1 million less a year, we would be able to hire 10 full-time underlings, or 20 part-time. Now, she has a contract, but what fun is a contract when your staff hates you. Beneficiaries? Companies with star payrolls that can be cut back. And lucky for the U.S. we have a “pay tsar” or looks after this for us!
3. Door-to-Door: Recent articles about the revival of life insurance and home selling businesses have illustrated this trend of commissioned employment. Avon calling? Tupperware? Term or whole? Some of these types of businesses sell overpriced goods through guilt and social pressure, but of the ones that create value can continue to do well.
4. Government Make-work: The stimulus was all about projects like re-paving, and funding intricate schemes created by bureaucrats. What was fascinating about Roosevelt-era programs was that they did all sorts of interesting things, on the fly, with the money. Build a park! Clean up the swamp! Neoclassical airport! Go for it. Today, how much longer can we afford to keep extending unemployment benefits? This rewards some at the expense of others. If as a society we need make work, we need to call it that, but do something useful other than repaving old roads.
5. Civil Disobedience: The array of rules stacked against home-based businesses varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the common denominator is that governments favor regulated businesses over small businesses. But looking back at the case of Paula Deen, she began to sell homemade sandwiches to put meals on the table and fulfill her life’s mission. From living in downtown Richmond, where the economy had collapsed in the 1970s and 1980s, there were rules flouted every day that even the busiest Richmond bureaucrats would not dare enforce for fear of making their lives miserable. Auto shops in alleys. Nip joints. Boardinghouses. Admittedly, bureaucrats like to enforce laws, but at a certain point at the growth of bureaucracy, underground economies come in so that people can survive.
6. Back to the Farm: A few weeks ago, Clear Channel’s WFLA 870 was running commercials for Saturday seminars at Home Depot to learn how to grow vegetables. While relearning agriculture after generations takes longer than a single season, it can be done with only a little effort and attention. In addition, there is a mania for home-grown and truck farming that has not been seen since World War II. Even Walmart is trying to subsidize local truck farmers by selling their goods, and every one of the Seven Sisters magazines is promoting grown at home.
7. Hunting, Gathering: In most states, hunting and fishing are approached as leisure hobbies, and taxed and regulated as if we are all wealthy sport fishermen and part of Edwardian shooting parties. Instead, state governments would do well realize that many folks actually eat their plunder, and try to come up with balanced policies that protect resources while encouraging responsible subsistence hunting and fishing. Here in Florida, the BP mess could a toll on the small fishing boat operators, but there is plenty of fresh water. If you think I am overly gloomy with this, go ask someone sitting on a bridge if they are going to eat what they catch.
8. Hobby Income: Back in the Depression, some women would pull apart knitted yarn to re-use it. That won’t happen now; we have cheap Chinese wool from Walmart. But what it did make me realize that when people have free time, they like to create things with it. Certainly, the average housewife won’t be able to sew her way into a new home-based job, but a hobby that pays for itself with a small amount of income from Etsy or local woman’s exchanges and farmer markets? That’s useful, and benefits companies like eBay, Jo-Ann, Walmart and Michaels. Some of these turn into real businesses. Municipalities would do well to ask some of these folks what it would take, policy wise, to encourage more of this.
9. Magnetic Sticker Businesses: In my home state of Florida, and because it is a tourist economy, many are content to come here and make less, and enjoy life more. That means there are hundreds of little one-man businesses doing unregulated, cash-intensive professions like yards, painting and the like. They all have magnetic stickers on their cars, telling what it is they do. Framing. Exercise. Cleaning. Painting. Most are not technically “employed” but have a spouse who is. There are two policy directions with these companies. Government can either target them and chase after them, or they can create real incentives so that these businesses can begin to report their income and move into the real economy and add employees. A year ago, I argued for the return of more dealer repair shops; I still think that’s a good idea. Why is there only one Briggs & Stratton dealer near to me?
10. Domestic Service: I am going to get into trouble on this one. But if you have able-bodied people and no cash, those people will have to take up residence somewhere. During the Depression, middle class Americans became even more used to cheap help than they already were. Where I grew up in Virginia, most middle class houses built before 1940 had maid’s rooms. These pre Social Security “rooms” were often Spartan quarters in the basement where the maid, cook and yard man could stay. While this era will never return, officials at the IRS would do well to come up with easier ways to encourage Americans to hire part-time staff legally, to help rebuild Social Security coffers and ensure that the least protected are protected by wage laws. Even if wages are low, citizens on the edge should have some income, and all the protections of a legal payroll.
11. Prodigal Back Home: We all know the story of the Prodigal Son, who returned home to his father after his profligate ways. Well, it’s happening now, as families double up to save on expenses. With aging parents, less money and an empty house, this option becomes yet another way to absorb the impact of fewer jobs. For instance, Baby Boomers who do not have the money to retire will are moving move home to take care of aging parents, or moving in with their children to help with child care, something that mostly happened in the inner city. A cash-poor Boomer can choose between working into retirement, or taking Social Security and staying home and fiddling with the Harley. Good news is that the housing market explodes when and if the economy recovers, and Carnival Cruise Lines, Starbucks, Barnes & Noble and even neighborhood bars benefit when “Prodigal” needs to escape for a few hours, or a week.

Take the example of Jasper branded peanut butter. We heard about Jasper from reader Sam H. Vance. He was catching up with a Navy submarine buddy who had been nicknamed Jasper because he looked like the Jasper on the peanut butter jar. It got him thinking. What happened to that brand of peanut butter?

It was either Jasper Spread or Jasper Peanut Butter, he says. He believes the brand was submarines only; most of the boats came out of Groton, Connecticut, but his boat was in Scotland when he recalls the brand, but it was based in Charleston, S.C.

All we could find out from our friend Google was that Jasper had other fans, including in the British Navy:

• The blog Submarine Food Slang had a mention of it. “Little Jaspers – An obscure offbrand of peanut butter that got us through numerous NorPacs. Jasper was the little bear on the label. “
• Another person online talked about Jasper, a “peanut butter higher in quality than JIF”

We could not find anything about Jasper on the USPTO Tess online service, or in the U.K.’s Intellectual Property Office, so readers will have to help us out with the product history.

But back to the idea of brands, and how they develop a following. Companies sometimes go to sophisticated lengths to invent people who love a brand. They try to steer it, or create new goodwill. But instead, they may well look at the people who are fans of the brand, to see what is valuable about it. From this email, I now have a marketing angle for peanut butter. The Sailor’s Favorite.

One other  point. People who are obsessed with products are not just collectors or enthusiasts. Like reader Vance, they are just normal folk who had a fun experience with a brand.

People are still trying to understand the most important thing of all – how the healthcare bill affects them and their families. Patients make the decision as to their care provider based on their perception of that provider’s brand. Any industry where the service provider has a unique skill set that is not commonly understood by the public will always be driven by perception. At no time in recent history has a medical professional’s brand been as important as today. With 32 million Americans who did not previously have health insurance now gaining access, the medical profession is sure to see an uptick in demand.

Today, the web is the most powerful branding tool available. The web provides more access to branding opportunities than ever before with extremely low barriers of entry.  The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years – from 8 percent in 2005 to over 40 percent today. Facebook, for example, currently has in excess of 350 million active users on a global basis with 50 percent of active users logging into the site every day. This presents a unique opportunity for direct communication or “digital direct marketing”.

A recent Forrester Healthcare online survey pointed out that even for “older: disease categories with average ages of 50-60 years, roughly 20 percent of all patients turn to social computing for health information.”

Your usage of these tools should be in line with your brand. If you are the doctor who is perceived as cutting edge, innovative and accessible than you will be well off to utilize a lot of social media. If you are renowned as the conservative expert in your field, using online press releases to distribute information about your latest accolades will bolster your brand.

In addition to the web, now is a unique time for medical professionals to utilize the services of a public relations arm to position themselves as leaders. From small practices looking to make a deeper connection into their local communities to large national healthcare corporations seeking national exposure, there has never been a better opportunity for big brands to expand, and smaller brands to grow and compete. Close to 95 percent of all Americans get their information from a seemingly unbiased third party source (television, radio, magazine, newspaper, blog, etc), which can lend credibility to a brand looking for higher visibility and long-term presence within the healthcare industry.

There are tremendous opportunities to effectively brand your self in a cost effective manner. Your brand and in turn, business, will grow with properly executed initiatives.  Medicine is a profession where patients make decisions based upon reputation, and you stand to gain immensely by being proactive in creating the perception your target audience has of you.

BrandlandUSA guest columnist Adam Bierman is president of The BRANDX GROUP, a marketing and branding firm in Los Angeles, California.

BeautyBank is the entrepreneurial think tank division of The Estée Lauder Companies. Led by Veronique Gabai-Pinsky (who is officially global brand president, Aramis & Designer Fragrances) BeautyBank and IdeaBank, the section’s mission is to identify opportunities across product development, channel diversification and regional expansion and bring these concepts and brands to market.

That would be an excellent model for other companies who have a large stable of brands, and are not sure what to do with them. Put these brands in a stable, and experiment. Have one person accountable. Give them a mix of underperforming brands and new concepts, so that no one gets stale. This would be the perfect solution for companies like GM, with old brands like Oldsmobile and Pontiac, and Macy’s, with a large stable of house brands and defunct department store brands that could be house brands. Most large companies have Intellectual Property departments that sort of look after licensing and such, but Lauder concept is much more evolved and prominent, as it has been singled out in a press release.

The Company’s products are sold in over 140 countries and territories under the following brand names: Estée Lauder, Aramis, Clinique, Prescriptives, Lab Series, Origins, M•A•C, Bobbi Brown, Tommy Hilfiger, Kiton, La Mer, Donna Karan, Aveda, Jo Malone, Bumble and bumble, Darphin, Michael Kors, American Beauty, Flirt!, Good Skin™, Grassroots Research Labs, Sean John, Missoni, Daisy Fuentes, Tom Ford, Coach and Ojon.

His question? What pieces do I have that are good that I need to keep around? What things can I leave in place so that the project can come in on budget? It was always a question of quality or utility.
{+++}

The reason? Well, objectively, there was none, except for budget. His gardens were new designs, very often for new houses, and there was no need. But he knew something. Having something slightly out of sync, just for fun, made the new creation far more interesting visually. And sometimes, an old feature was just too hard to make disappear. At other times, it just made more trouble to get rid of it. But the main reason something good remained was that it was good.

The landscaping Gillette designed for Richmond’s Ethyl Corporation had a trademark “lone cedar.” Ethyl regrettably bulldozed a large number of great old mansions on Richmond’s Gamble Hill to build a massive Colonial Revival complex that overlooks the James River, and destroyed a great old neighborhood. On the massive, grass-covered hill, Gillette left a small, brick retaining wall that was obviously a leftover from the late 19th century or early 20th. No one notices it, but it makes the hill more visually interesting.

Brands and companies often utilize this idea, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. The best example of this is Carnival Cruise Lines. Brian J. Cudahy, in his seminal book The Cruise Ship Phenomenon in America, tells how it played out.  When Micky Arison and Meshulam Riklis wanted to start a cruise company, they used the name, Carnival, and an out-of-service CP Ships liner, the Empress of Canada. CP Ships was the revised name for Canadian Pacific, and various parts of CP empire (rail, ships, air) had different versions of the same multimark logo, which had a triangle and crescent inside a square. (Folks will remember the mark from the old Canadian Airlines, which was a successor to CP Air.)

The Carnival name was the brand for the small package tour company AITS, owned by Riklis, and it worked perfectly for the new company. When Arison converted the Empress of Canada to the Carnival brand, they needed a logo, and revised the funnel multimark design and changed the colors from green, white and black to blue, white and red.

The launch of Carnival was terribly creative in other ways. When the Empress of Canada was refitted into the Mardi Gras, Arison, with the assistance of the Roper family at the shipyard Norshipco, even scrounged discount mattresses from the Norfolk, Virginia area.

Utilizing pieces of an old company in a new logo can be insipid if it is done for stupid reasons. For instance, in the merger of First Union and Wachovia, some of the green of First Union made it into the newly created Wachovia logo. The gesture was meaningless; it was obviously done to please executive types during the merger. It was a harbinger of future stupidity; the merger was a disaster and those responsible ruined many lives in the process.

When building a brand or company, what things are you bringing together to build the operation? Find good pieces, throw out the bad, and build something new. Our story last fall on the history of Saturday Night Live also addresses the issue; namely you want to use elements and assets to build new creations. Not only will you have a better product in the end, but you will have a great narrative to go along with it.

I have been thinking about a pot of red mums that sit by the walkway into my house. Different things happen to mums in different economies. When things are booming and we all have cash, we tend to get some new ones if the old ones aren’t blooming. But in a time like now, and for most of the 20th century, most folks would “deadhead” the flowers on the plants, so you can get a few new blooms out of them. In a deadhead economy, people reduce consumption and fall back on both quality and price. In my case, the mums have finally re-bloomed, though not to the extent I would have wished.

It got me wondering; if many people like me are changing their buying patterns, how does this affect not only the immediate economy, but the next five to 10 years? And if and when the economy finally turns to prosperity, will sales recover, or are we creating another Depression-era generation that sees being a skinflint as the height of success and good citizenship? If that is so, success will come in different ways.

A few weeks ago, Capitol One CEO Richard Fairbank was quoted in The Wall Street Journal saying his company was seeing a “striking” lack of demand for credit. That made sense, because the night before, I had seen Fox Business News’ Dave Ramsey celebrating the umpteenth caller who had quit buying new things and sold all his “stuff” online to pay down his credit cards. These sales weren’t coming back. After suffering 25 to 29 percent interest rates that would have run afoul of usury laws just a generation ago, this caller was not about to go and charge a bunch more, well, crap. The same week, I heard a sermon from a priest at The Falls Church tell parishioners that he had bought a used car from someone who saw in a Craigslist ad that Dave Ramsey had “told him” it had to go. Just this week, I heard former IMF economist Simon Johnson speaking to Congress on deficits. He saw a “substantial slowdown” in the second half of the year. Yikes.

Technology magnifies this reduced consumption. My Apple iPod includes apps that were dozens of separate products only a few years ago. This one device has replaced a multiple products I have purchased before, including an Etch-a-Sketch, Boy Scout compass, Sony clock radio, Superscope AMFM Receiver, Garrard turntable, Sharp tape player, Panasonic Tape Recorder, Kodak Instamatic, Rolodex, Super 8 movie camera, TI calculator, Realistic Weatheradio, Rand McNally Maps, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, New York Times, AAA Triptik and Day Runner calendar. It has eliminated the jobs of travel agents, photo processors and dozens of different factory workers here and abroad. What happens when iPods will eliminate the need for fast food cashiers?

I mentioned this idea a bit as it related to Sears Holdings (SHLD). In August during the Sears Roebuck back to school season, vast amounts of square footage dwarfed the lean merchandise assortments. And last year during that scary fall retail season, I wrote about retailers who were surviving by doing repairs.

The question for me is what retailers, products and brands can thrive in this “deadhead” market where millions of unemployed and underemployed have more less money, more time on hand, and less need for things.

1. Creative genius: My daughter turns Starburst wrappers into purses and sells them on Etsy. She also gathers weekly at Sarasota’s Darling Pottery Studio, where students of all ages each week fill their cabinet with gorgeous bowls and pots they pitched themselves. People have time; when you have time many knit, bake and make for amusement and little luxuries. Beneficiary? Craft stores like Michaels Stores and Jo-Ann Fabrics, local craft shows and little online retailers.
2. Your brand is an app. So your product is not needed any more? Turn it into an app. A Radio Shack (RSH) Realistic Weatheradio app? An AAA Triptik app?
3. Cheap, really cheap. Stuff that’s either really extreme value (Dollar Tree (DLTR), Supervalu’s Sav-a-lot (SVU), or has real quality combined with remarkable price points, where Walmart (WMT) is going.
4. Extreme value, or perceived value. Two weeks ago, I went to our local VW dealer for a car show, and it was packed. Volkswagen is increasing its market share, opening a new Tennessee factory and hoping to double sales volume in the next year. Local, luxury chocolate shops in Sarasota seem to be doing well. That may be a function of the uptick in the Dow, though value priced luxury can do well no-growth economies.
5. Hacking and remaking. Trendwatcher website Springwise last week featured Sugru, a silicon putty that you can use to “hack” and remake old items to suit, including changing the shape and making handles easier to use. You can even mould it into new things.
6. Repair, not replace: I am not alone in talking about this issue; the New York new ideas consultancy PSFK has written about the idea, citing the Repair Manifesto of Platform 21. The repair manifesto’s main idea is that fixing stuff can be made interesting if it is more creative, and fixing things is the most green friendly thing you can do. The hipster art group Fixer’s Collective gathers in Brooklyn to repair stuff as an art form. As much as these all might seem like niche market ideas, these trends percolate down to the mass market. Our local Florida Tops sewing machine and vacuum chain is pushing deals on Dyson and Electrolux, as well as repairs.
7. Shades of Havana, ’59: My uncle, an ob-gyn and car enthusiast, bought a rebuilt Dodge Neon for his college-age daughter from a North Carolina fellow who rebuilds them, with interchangeable parts from other Neons. It is the perfect solution for a cheap, cheerful college runabout. The twentysomething guys on my street spend their entire free time rebuilding and fixing trucks. All of their extra time.
8. Quality brands win: Tiffany & Co. (TIF) has survived every downturn. They are luxury, but they know how to sell items with low price points to keep every income group in their stores.
9. Small size, high markup: Sanrio’s Hello Kitty has trained kids on the idea that small, well produced items can be sold for high markup. Consumers who have less will still want quality, even children. You can have high markup in a slow economy by making everyday items that have high perceived value. My daughter’s SIGG water bottle that she takes to kindergarten is made in Switzerland (around $17!), and is of extreme high quality. It lasts. She won’t need one for another few years.
10. Local is good. Big article this month March’s The Atlantic on how Walmart “The Great Grocery Smackdown” is now pushing local produce at its stores, and will be searching out nearby truck farms to supply its stores.

The main house is old, but new details fit with the old:

Floors are covered with boldly patterned ingrain carpeting, the wall-to-wall of the 1800′s, and archaic push-button light switches give the impression that Lee Hall was last rewired around 1900. It’s an artifice that conforms to Mr. Ohrstrom’s belief that alterations to an old house should follow what he called ”a plausible chronology.”

So how does a “plausible chronology” fit with branding?

When you have an old brand, what is done with the brand today needs to fit with what the brand was. That doesn’t mean you need to follow the old slavishly. It just means that you need to have precedent. And when there is not a precedent, the consumer gets confused, and the brand identity and idea gets muddled.

So when you redesign a package, or think about a spin off, the spin off needs to relate to what has gone before. Like a law court, you need precedent. And if you decide to take the law into your own hands and do some civil disobedience, you better be sure that a jury will side with you, or you are prepared to take the consequences because you have a longer term view than the next few months.

In preservation, there are basically three approaches, to restore the building exactly as it was, renovate the building to something like what it was, or to go through a process called adaptive reuse, where you take existing elements of something old to create something new.

Often, adaptive reuse is a better idea than straight out restoration, and is more faithful to the original. For instance, internationalists who were inspired by the idea of internationalism did not try to resuscitate the League of Nations. Instead they tried again with a new name and twist, the United Nations.

For businesses, what assets do you have that can be adaptively reused? How can you stay with the times, yet not waste great resources of the past? Below are a few examples of business and organizational ideas that are adaptive reuse. The idea is to find assets, then look at market needs, and recombine them in new ways to add value.

Older, large companies can do this easily, as they have unproductive assets. Smaller companies would have a harder time with it, because there are fewer assets lying around. Here are some examples:

1. SNL: Saturday Night Live is a perfect example of adaptive reuse. In 1976, NBC was an unsexy network with little to lose. It did, however, have some great assets. One asset was its empty sound stages, including 8-H, where Toscanni performed for NBC radio. Another asset was its leadership after 11:30 p.m with The Tonight Show. Another asset was its network overhead of publicists, cameramen and talent, including booth announcer Don Pardo. So when it needed to try some new ideas, Lorne Michaels hired a cast and they created Saturday Night Live. If NBC had chosen to try to recreate Your Show of Shows, it probably would have been a disaster, as an exact recreation would have always been tied to what the original was. SNL, however, had its own spirit. In a sense, it became the spirit of Your Show of Shows, with a current twist. (Read about 8H in Tom Wolzien’s address.)
2. BA London City Flight: British Airways had a problem. No more Concorde. So what did they do? They found a small Airbus and decided to run an all-business flight from London’s City Airport to JFK. The flight (number 1) has a number of unique elements, including the fact that passengers clear customs in Shannon, Ireland. That means that passengers arrive in New York as a local flight. Brilliant. Whether this idea pays off is yet to be seen, but it illustrates the same idea. See the Financial Times review of the flight, which includes an interview with Chris Stubbs, the British Airways product manager, talking about the flight.
3. Pan Am Shuttle: What is now the Delta Shuttle was created in 1987 at a time when Pan American World Airways was struggling. It had an old fleet, and a poor domestic route system. Persistent recession and fuel issues hindered its success, and while passengers still relied on its international service, it did not have a powerful domestic passenger base. So what did it do? It took underutilized assets like a bunch of old 727s, the old Marine Air Terminal  at LaGuardia (which had been home to Pan Am Clippers), and created the Pan Am Shuttle. By 1989, it was making $20 million a year for Pan Am.
4. Metromedia and Fox Television: Few remember it, but when Fox television network launched, it was created with the pieces of the old Metromedia network, mostly channel 5 stations in big markets. Metromedia itself was a re-casting of the failed DuMont television network. Most could not understand how it would succeed, but it did. Notice, Murdoch did not call it DuMont, but he kept the idea of the fourth network alive, and recast it and added value.
5. K-Car and the Minivan. In 1981, Chrysler had a big problem. It was not only broke, but its cars were crap. I can vouch for this, as I grew up with a Plymouth Volare. (Once all the recalls were fixed, it was actually a good car). That meant that there were some good pieces to work with. So they took a Torqueflite transmission and other off the shelf elements, added them to a new platform, and the K-Car was born. Later, the K Car platform was modified to create the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan.
6. Magnum, P.I. In 1980, CBS had a problem. When Hawaii Five-O was canceled after 12 seasons, they had a whole crew in Hawaii. The slavish adherent to the brand would have made a new version of the show, calling it something like Book Em and having the same cast members. (CBS has actually talked about this idea recently. Lame.) What CBS did was far more brilliant, and kept the idea of the Hawaii private eye alive. They simply used the crew, and created a new show, Magnum, P.I. Magnum ran for another eight years.
7. Kmart: The chain went through a messy period. Some things that were memorable were its low-income roots (i.e. lay-a-way) and its Blue Light specials. A few years ago, the “blue light” came back, in the guise of an online retailer. It flopped. But Kmart didnt give up, and Mr. Bluelight was reborn as a mascot. They then brought back lay-a-way.

What assets do you have laying around that might be valuable? Old brand names? Real estate? Old products? Archives? Yes, you can sell them off at the dump. And that might be the right idea. But a better idea might be to see how you can combine old physical or intellectual property assets with old or temporary employees. That’s when it really gets interesting.

Recently, The Fantastiks came back. That’s quite interesting. And then a version of the old Horn &  Hardart Automat returned, in the format of Bamn!

It got us thinking. What are the other tourism opportunities out there involving brands or classic things that have gone missing in New York?

Here are few ideas, all a bit wacky, we admit, but designed to make folks who are paid to think about these things think about something other than boring junk:

1. Permanent World’s Fair: The old World’s Fair in Queens is still there, and people still love to stand by the Unisphere. It needs to come back as a more utilized urban park, with some of the park elements revived to create a more dynamic experience. Face it; Manhattan gets all the attention for tourists, but Queens deserves a bit, eh?
2. Proctor & Gamble Soap Opera Land: So Proctor & Gamble’s productions are gone, except for As The World Turns., except for Young and the Restless. Guiding Light’s sets were thrown out into the streets. Why wasn’t this developed into something before it was lost? Good news; you can always start it back. Here’s what it looks like. Sets for soaps, combined with P&G products, all mixed together. The Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow and As The World Turns will go on forever in Internet versions that guests can walk onto. In the land of the Internet, bandwidth is cheap, and everyone wants to be a part of the show and will pay for a walk on bit. They make a reservation, give their name, sex and age, and get sent the “script” the week before. Shows are short, only 15 minutes. Apparently, P&G is doing some web with live couples and Pampers (no, not that sort of thing!), but seriously they aren’t with the TV brands that people know, like Guiding Light. Big bore. Bring them back.
3. Sesame Street: Why oh why, when Children’s Television Workshop was born in New York, did they open a theme park with Busch near Philadelphia? New York needs an urban attraction that is all about the production of the actual show. It could be connected to other PBS programming in New York, though Sprout is through Comcast in Philadelphia, home of Sesame Place. It does not have to be elaborate, just authentic.
4. Colgate World. When the old New Jersey Colgate clock was set up on the ground, it lost all its oomph. I want a Colgate factory tour, thank you. Their factory building was torn down in the 1980s; thankfully the clock was saved. Well, let me tell you. It is time for manufacturing to come back to New Jersey. I am sure Colgate could get some nice old tax breaks if it rebuilt a factory. The factory needs to actually employ human beings, and it needs to have glass windows so folks like me can get my jollies by watching the tubes in the factory line. Colgate World would have a number of additional features including reduced price teeth cleanings (all market research), product samples and photos up on the roof with the clock, with the New York City skyline in the background. Take that P&G!
5. World Trade Center: Call me a stick in the mud. But when sand-bandit sent his creepy minions to destroy this place, we would have shown him by rebuilding it better, not smaller. And then nothing is yet rebuilt.
6. Lost Retail: All of these great retailers are gone. Quite missed. Retailers we miss include Abraham & Straus, Gimbel’s, Peck & Peck, B. Altman, Rumplemayers and others. These could all return. Not ALL of them could return, but certainly they could return in reduced form. Some ideas:
   • Macy’s Brooklyn returns as A&S.
   • One other idea is Abercrombie & Fitch, Original Store. Yes, this chain is known for tarted-up teens, but it could actually have an “original” N.Y. store where it sells sporting goods to encourage tarted-up teens to do things outside, rather than procreate.
   • Times Square Howard Johnson’s: This place could have been cleaned up with a bit of Clorox. Well, actually LOTS of Clorox. Where to buy those subliminal clam strips?
7. S. S. United States: As a Virginian, I admire the National Historic Landmark ship, the S.S. United States. It was built in Newport News Shipbuilding. It rusts in Philadelphia, all rust. Perhaps it needs to come back to New York? Jersey? Near the Statue of Liberty? Underwater? Who knows, but the beautiful thing needs a home and maybe there is a solution in New York.
8. Pan Am: While the old airline is gone, and I will forever be sad about that, remnants of the airline survive, in the name of the Delta Shuttle terminal at LaGuardia and the Pan Am WorldPort, now Terminal 3. Delta could exploit these branded experiences more, without switching to the Pan Am name. How? It’s all about Delta claiming the Pan Am legacy. And what the heck happened to those Hebald Zodiac sculptures?
9. HotelPennsylvania: It’s still around, but it could be bold and grand again. One other thought. In the UK, the regional railroad brands were revived when BritRail was privatized. How about reviving some of the regional railroad brands to add some oomph to commuter rail? New Haven, Pennsy, that sort of thing.
10. The Biltmore: The Grand Hyatt New York, connected to Grand Central Station, was once The Commodore, and a sort of cousin to all those other Biltmore Hotels across the U.S. The chain could be revived, though there would certainly be some issues as to who exactly owns the Biltmore brand (perhaps it has become genericized). There is also a Biltmore apartment building in New York, and the clock is in an office building.
11. Chrysler Building: How about some way to get to the top of the Chrysler Building and look at some Chryslers, Dodges, Fiats and such in the lobby? And what the heck happened to the Cloud Club?

1. Co-branded VISA and Mastercard. I mean, how great is that for a brand to get yourself connected to a bank that’ll rack your customers with 25 to 30 percent interest, an interest rate that used to put folks in jail. Perhaps it does have an affinity with big-ticket higher education.
2. Anniversaries. OK, so a 10-year anniversary is ok to celebrate, but what’s with it on the 5-year? Maybe, we can see a 25-year, though.
3. Horny boy advertising humor. We are tired of the “duh” school of advertising where “size matters” and idioms are stolen from the bawdy side of life.
4. Brand extensions and combinations ad nauseum. Do I want Kraft Mac and Cheese variations on snacks? Peanut butter Oreos? 20 types of Crest? Stop! That being said, I do like Dawn in the Cascade, so maybe I am not being consistent here.
5. Using reality show actors for promotions. We don’t get the appeal of Donald Trump, and we can list a few others who we just can’t understand why they are everywhere.
6. Erectile drugs. So over it. Our great medical/pharmaceutical complex in the United States has been taken over by sex therapists. How is it that these great companies are now doing latter day medicine shows, but on television? Shame, shame.
7. Branding as a religion. Brands are merely words that connote things. While some companies are good at it, there is nothing magical about brands. While we will gladly talk of the brand personality of a hospital, the reality is that if the hospital is good, the brand will be good, and vice versa. So let’s stop turning brands into magic.
8. Made up names. I wish people would use their names more when they sold things, and not coin new names. Not going to happen, especially as the world gets more complex, but it would be nice.

Which leads us to the phenomenon of brand names that go bad.

In the 1950s, a top US automaker decided to elevate one of its existing brands to the level of luxury car, creating room for a new sub-luxury brand. The company did its due diligence and came up with a plan. The brand would represent a new business division. It would place the parent company in a parity position with other major US automakers.

The car launched with significant fanfare. But in just a few short years, the party was over. The company was Ford, and the brand was Edsel—a name that has become synonymous with colossal public failure. Speculation as to why the Edsel failed is endless. But one thing is fairly certain: it wasn’t because of the name alone. If that was the case, then brands like DeSoto, Chrysler, Buick, Cadillac—names that are no more or less odd-sounding than Edsel—would have failed just as quickly.

Consumer research done after the Edsel proved unpopular revealed, among other things, that the name was a problem. That’s a bit of a post-rationalization. What’s more likely is the car was a flop and took its name down with it. If the car had been a popular success, the brand name would be upheld as an example of how an unusual family name (Edsel Ford was the car’s namesake) can have breakthrough brand significance and stimulate record sales.

To this day, innocent brand names can go bad because of product shortcomings. Take the recent example of Microsoft’s operating system. Over the course of just a few decades, the company has achieved record-setting equity in Windows, which today is a household name. It’s a technology standard. No one pointed out that actual windows get stuck, can shatter, and offer a limited view of the world outside. The operating system worked, and so the name worked.

Until Vista came along.

It’s easy to imagine the scene at Microsoft corporate headquarters when the Vista name was under development: “We need a name that families with Windows, but takes it to the next level. This is a technology innovation, not just an operating system. It has to be aspirational yet approachable. It has to convey possibility. It has to accommodate future product developments. The name has to signify the next thing in PC-based computing.”

Fair enough. Vista might be somewhat expected as far as Microsoft brand names go, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the name. It has positive connotations. It implies expansive view and freedom. It broadens the range of possibility established by Windows. But the product itself has not been the success Microsoft hoped for. In fact, it’s been the source of significant consumer dissatisfaction. And the name Vista has come to stand for the operating system’s shortcomings.

Strangely, part of Microsoft’s strategy to address the problem was to launch a campaign in which the name Vista was replaced with “Mojave” in focus groups. Users were introduced to the capabilities of Mojave, then told it was actually Vista. This was the “Mojave Experiment.” The operating system was, in essence, given a different name to represent its positive qualities. Rather than improve the perception of Vista, the campaign created a two-headed monster, each head with its own name. You never saw the operating system at work in the TV ads, making the situation seem slightly implausible—and adding to the perceptual divide between the names.

The problem is not the product, it’s in users’ heads, according to Microsoft. But Vista/Mojave continues to be unpopular, as evidenced by users who are voluntarily downgrading to the more predictable Windows XP. A bad product by any other name stinks just the same.

In the end, even the best names can suffer the same fate as the products they stand for. No brand name has ever concealed product failure. Consumers just aren’t that naïve. So when it’s time to name your product, remember that success doesn’t just come in linguistic terms. If the product succeeds, the right name will more than likely succeed, too.

- – - -

Tom Parrette is Director of Verbal Branding at Addis Creson, a Berkeley-based strategic branding firm dedicated to creating positive change for clients and communities. For more info, see www.addiscreson.com