i am always a little bit suspicious of the practice of ‘reviving’ brand names. I want to believe that a thoughtful and insightful company could find a way to re-animate the brand by attaching it to products and experiences that express the brand’s identity as well as (or better than) the original incarnation. For example, I’d love it if someone could bring back the Laura Ashley of the early & mid-1990s… and fix the problems of ever-extension and bad financial management that ultimately brought that brand to its knees.

However, this doesn’t seem to happen very often — lack of creativity gets in the way, as does the probably real problem of re-creating a profitable business where one has already failed for good (e.g., product-related) reasons. If the failure was due to an unappealing brand itself, then it’s hard to imagine how it could be revived effectively.

Even worse, I think, is to take a venerable brand name and attach it to something quite differnt (and often not as good) in an effort to add some patina of fake authenticity to a business (can you say “Abercrombie & Fitch”?).

I don’t think it’s good business practice to use a brand name to cover over inferior products and services. Not only does this degrade the value of the brand over time, but also it sets the consumer up for disappointment right after the purchase, when the product’s inferiority is discovered. That’s bad business.