Giving brands a good death is an underrated marketing skill

I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Not the human kind, but the marketing kind. The sort of thing that happens when a brand shuffles its commercial coils and shuts its doors forever.

Released in 2011, Tweetbot was a very useful little app. Billed as Twitter with a personality, it had a lot of features that the native Twitter app didn’t have or that were added later. With its 15-year existence, $5 price tag, and award-winning features, the app has become his Twitter face for hundreds of thousands of users, and the app itself has been upgraded and improved.

Curiously, until January 12th, Tweetbot was unable to access users’ Twitter feeds. Five long days later, Twitter has secretly announced that it is “enforcing” API rules. This prevented third-party apps from accessing social media sites, rendering these apps fundamentally useless.

A few days later, the Tapbots team that created Tweetbot in 2011 had no choice but to announce the demise of the brand. It is usually at this point that I elaborate on the strategic reasons for this situation. But this time it’s not about Tweetbot’s strategic agenda, but how it dies. His Tapbot team, which describes itself as creating “fun” and “engaging” apps, has used these unique properties in the last moments of Tweetbot’s existence as a last resort for brand consistency. applied.

The company created an online obituary for the now-defunct brand. Her one of the app’s signature symbols, a cartoon elephant, looks sadly at its grave. A halo appeared above the brand’s beloved logo.

“We’ve been building Tweetbot for Twitter for over a decade and it was shut down in the blink of an eye,” the app’s obituary explains. “We are very sorry to all of our customers who have chosen Tweetbot as their way of interacting with our services. We appreciate all the support and feedback over the years. It’s going to be better than the Tweetbot we’ve ever had.”

For a long time, I’ve been semi-obsessed with how brands die. Fifteen minutes before the final sale, he wandered through the old department store. We tasted the last wines from the vineyards long ago even more abundantly. There’s something dark and special about the way the brand closes its doors, and the team often created it or are the ultimate custodians of it, unplugging everything, turning off the lights, and going out for the night. I have to say something.

Marketing tends to follow the Western/Christian approach to life and death. We respect and exaggerate the former, and ignore and avoid the latter. It’s crazy because death is as common as creation in the world of brand management, except for some very old luxury brands. There must be just as many businesses closing unless you missed out on Marketing.

Always focused on launching, scaling up and growth hacking. No one in our profession kills a product, says a proper goodbye and sends them off on that good night, ends the brand story with a coherent last minute, or gives employees and consumers the perfect ending. I’m not talking about making you feel full of catharsis.

Despite the silence, we need to think about death in our industry. One aspect of marketing theory that most marketers overlook is the idea that some (perhaps most) of the products an organization is trying to launch should be shut down before they see the light of day.

The first question is not “how” to sell this product. In the first place, it should be “whether or not” to sell this product. And marketers are the best people to ask these questions because they’re the least likely to smoke the pipe of innovation or mainstream the heroin of new product optimism. Despite our reputation, good marketers are always wary of new products and the claims of companies obsessed with their launch.

We represent the market. A reality that happens when the dream of feverish innovation ends. Perhaps the greatest gift a marketer can give an organization is to point out that “hot” new products are not like that. That “hotness” didn’t come from actual market potential, but rather because the development team lost their plans long ago and the sales team counted future bonuses as much as chickens.

Marketers can use the marketing process to test new products against the target customers the new product is intended to delight and the competitors it is intended to disrupt. , and should. And we should be able to do this before the wheels of mass production start rolling and costs sink.

I once flew to India to participate in a country review of a marketing plan for a major pharmaceutical company. One of the final branding plans of the day came from a junior his marketer assigned to a highly-heralded new product. Her data and market assessment revealed that the product is very suitable for India. it simply doesn’t work. Her final suggestion was not how to launch the product, but how to shelve it.

After the presentation, the general manager of India was approached and stripped her for embarrassing him in front of the global team. Executive visitors expected a launch plan. what was she thinking? she failed him.

After he finished his work, my big boss who is in charge of international marketing came over and very quietly said to her:

We need more marketers like her. And there were more bosses like him. Saving the company £10 million by blocking the launch of a crappy product is just as valuable as making the same amount from a successful launch. In marketing, we don’t think of it that way. About the brands we killed. Products that we destroyed. money we saved. There is a stigma about killing products that we need to get over.

Even when a product is successful, it often fails to assert itself. Customers change. Competitors innovate. The cost structure will change. Again, marketers are meant to accept death. Seeing the portfolio of brands not only as an opportunity for growth and expansion, but first through the eyes of a death gimlet.

Only Western culture sees death as something negative. It can and should be viewed as an opportunity for renewal and progress and refocus for what it really is. Over the past decade, killing brands has been a far more rewarding and important core competency for companies than launching new ones. All companies, from Coca-Cola to his P&G, are shadows of their former selves in terms of product portfolios. And it’s much better.

Learning when and how to kill Brand is a vital skill. Just ask google. Last week, we completely shut down the Stadia brand. Launched in 2019, the cloud service aims to make modern network games accessible to devices ranging from PCs to iPads, thereby shattering the notion of clunky consoles of the 20th century. . But almost from the beginning, and even during Covid, the service failed to attract the right number of gamers to make it happen.

Again, this story isn’t about the reasons for Stadia’s death, but rather the expert ways Google pulled the trigger. The termination was announced in September, and although the cloud system was still playable, Google stopped accepting in-game transactions. The company has also delivered on its promise to refund Stadia purchases. I was. And then, in a final emotional moment, the Stadia team kicked off their final game. Worm Game is original software created by the Stadia team to test the functionality of new network sites. This was the last title available, just days before the site was permanently shut down.

Brands must embrace death as the last and most important part of their existence. Those of us who can understand the nonsensical nature of Pearly Gate and the “afterlife” are in a far better position to enjoy a life that can only be enjoyed for a short time and a death that might end it once and for all. . “Fear of death stems from fear of life,” Mark Twain once said. “People who live to the fullest are prepared to die at any moment.”

Similarly, a well-managed brand should not only be successful and profitable. Their excellence should extend to their extinction. A brand his manager who predicts, plans and executes a “good death” for his own sins must deserve a little more respect and coverage in the marketing literature than it does now. Anyone can launch a hot new brand, but most of them end up failing. However, closing one in class and jointly is a much rarer skill and one that is not recognized.

By the way, Twain was as good as he said. Born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet appeared in the night sky, he intended the exit to coincide exactly with the first entrance, and the famous comet’s next. In 1909, he told friends, “If I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet, it will be the greatest disappointment of my life.”

He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet passed overhead. Twain didn’t just die the way he predicted, he died exactly the way his life suggested: mysterious, lyrical, and symbolic.

For exactly the same reason, I love the story of how John Le Mesurier died. The kind and gentle British actor, best known for his role as Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army, fell ill in Ramsgate. He took his wife’s hand, smiled and said, “It was so lovely,” and fell into a coma, never to recover. His final moments are the perfect epitome of himself.

The death of Hunter S. Thompson is strikingly similar. Not because he died like the urban Le Mesurier or the romantic Twain, but because his death was equally coherent and continuous with his life that led to it. The inventor of Gonzo journalism shot his wife in the head after writing the poem “Football season is over.” His ashes were later fired into the sky from a cannon by Johnny Depp, and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” blared on the PA system. Gonzo until the end.

Let’s embrace the idea that brands have to die, just like us. And as a marketer, I take pride in both that deadly fact and the professional way Killing demands of us. A perfect coda for an optimistic tale about innovation. As a marketer, be sure to consider what lies behind the curtain and the ideal moment the curtain falls.