Marketing Profs

Leading consumer-products companies are investing to revitalize their products and their brand packaging sooner than ever, and with more frequency.

Recognizing the need to contemporize packaging and gain or regain higher visibility on increasingly crowded retail shelves is important. But engaging in complete rebranding and repackaging with too much frequency can also raise a red flag.

Detecting that sales are beginning to table, or even slump, is generally symptomatic of a consumer-brand disconnect. Will rebranding and repackaging fix the problem? Will launching a new advertising campaign? Conversely, will cutting some of the advertising spend?

Or, will these exercises just put a bandage on a deeper sore that's beginning to fester? If that is the case, then rebranding, repackaging, and new ad campaigns will only result in fruitless exercises and wasted investments.

Yet, companies engage in this practice every day. It's far less painful to assess lagging sales in a superficial manner than it is to dig deeper into company practices, customer-service issues, and the actual product mix being offered—not to mention how customers are experiencing the brand and whether that brand is delivering on its promises.

Author and teacher Douglas Rushkoff puts it so well in his book, Get Back in the Box:

American companies are obsessed with window dressing, because they're reluctant, no, afraid to look at whatever it is they really do and evaluate it from the inside out. When things are down, CEOs look to consultants and marketers to rethink, re-brand or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived.

If companies truly want to reconnect with the consumer, maybe they ought to be turning their attention inward. Consumer product companies that really want to dig for the truth ought to seek answers to these questions:

• Which of our branded products form the core of our company—in the eyes of the consumer?
• Which of our branded products miss the mark—in the eyes of the consumer?