Brand Failures

Rebranding failures 211
style that had made the brand so strong originally. For instance, Hilfiger
launched a ‘Red Label’ sub-brand aimed at the very top of the market. This
logoless range included such garments as US $7,000 patchwork, python-skin
trousers. Clearly these items were out of the reach of the average Tommy
Hilfiger customer. Another bad move was the decision to place stores in
locations such as London’s Bond Street and Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive. ‘The
London flagship store wasn’t open for a year when we realised we had made
a mistake,’ he said in the New York magazine interview. ‘And the average age
on Rodeo Drive is probably 50 years old. My customers are much younger
than that. We thought all the cool people in LA come to Rodeo. But they
don’t.’
Since 2001 though, Tommy Hilfiger has been learning from his mistakes
and going back to basics. ‘As a result of learning from our errors, we went
back to our roots: classics with a twist. We’re about colour, we’re about
preppy, we’re about classic, we’re about America!’ And as a result of this
turnaround, customers and investors alike are again comfortable with the
Tommy Hilfiger brand. ‘It will never again be the hot, sexy, overly talkedabout,
flashy, zippy, fast-growing company it was, but it will be a damn nice
company with lots of cash,’ observed one Wall Street analyst at the time of
the turnaround. ‘What you’ve got now is a company that went from an A-
plus to an F-minus. And now it’s going back to a B. And it’s a hell of a business
as a B.’
Lessons from Tommy Hilfiger
Don’t deviate from your formula. Known as the brand which produces
‘classic with a twist’, Hilfiger concentrated too much on the ‘twist’ and not
enough on the ‘classic’.
Don’t compete with irrelevant rivals. Tommy Hilfiger attempting to
compete with successful European high fashion brands such as Gucci and
Prada on their own terms was a mistake which even Hilfiger himself has
acknowledged.
Don’t over-extend the brand. During its bad patch, Tommy Hilfiger moved
into a lot of new product categories for which it wasn’t suited.
Don’t be scared of your logo. The logo is what made Tommy Hilfiger the
brand it is today. In fact, the Tommy Hilfiger brand is pure logo. When
the logo disappeared or was toned down, the brand ran into trouble.