10 Dying Brands
Kevin Goll | Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7:49AM There was a very interesting piece the other day on the business blog 24/7 Wall St. entitled “The Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2010.” It speculates which struggling brands may not be able to survive the upcoming year. Here are some excerpts from the piece:
Newsweek: “The New York Times reported that Newsweek’s advertising fell 29.9% through the first three quarters of 2009. According to the 10-Q for The Washington Post Company, Newsweek ad revenue plunged 47% in the third quarter from the year before. The magazine has lost almost $30 million so far this year.”
Motorola: “The time has come for the company to break itself into pieces and allow buyers to scuttle a brand with a bad reputation.”
Borders: “Borders Group lost the online and brick-and-mortar bookstore war years ago to Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com… Borders has been dead for over two years, but no one has been able to dispose of the body.”
Blockbuster: “It lost its chance to be in the online video rental business to NetFlix and its chance at IP-based VOD to a number of internet streaming services and cable set-top box based products. The market value of the company is only $125 million.”
Fannie May and Freddie Mac: “These two former government sponsored entities are now in government conservatorship. Their influence has largely disappeared. In the 1990’s it was believed that the government would never allow them to fold. It seems today that the GSEs are being kept afloat merely because it is cheaper and easier for the government to keep them in limbo than to repossess them and assume their liabilities.”
I don’t have a particularly profound point to make with all of this. I just thought it was interesting fodder. I would only add that no one, of course, is rooting for failure, but failure happens and it is healthy and inevitable. Most of the brands are collapsing either because of a changing marketplace, replacement by competitors, poor management, or a combination of those factors. Woolworth went out of business in 1997, at the time it seemed like a big deal, but it shortly became irrelevant. Today, nobody misses them. It is natural for brands to fail and be replaced by better or more adaptive ones.
Reader Comments (1)
Kevin-I agree. I could not find a scintilla of "profound" in your comment. Keep up the good work.