| Abstrakt: |
A brand can remain alive in the public's collective memory bank for years after its use has been thoroughly discontinued in the marketplace. These brands can potentially be revived, either in the same class of goods or services as in their former lifetimes, or they can take a totally different direction after reincarnation. This article discusses two real-world case studies of such brand revival and canvasses the law and policies related to abandoned trademarks. Further, it proposes a specific measure for valuing the revival potential of a dormant brand name through an empirical consumer survey. Specifically, an online consumer survey conducted for this article questioned over 800 consumers. It measured any potential advantage provided to a new business using the mark "CIRCUIT CITY," as compared to a new mark "TECH TOWN" for the hypothetical launch of a chain of new nationwide retail electronics stores.2 Consumer survey results revealed that the dormant brand CIRCUIT CITY contained no statistically measurable goodwill-based advantage over the launch of a totally new brand, but the brand also did not possess any higher negative connotation among consumers, yet many consumers recognized the brand. Therefore, while there might be some economic advantage to harnessing the name recognition of a dormant brand, the dormant brand nonetheless faces the same obstacles to a successful market re-entry as any totally new brand in the same category. Verbatim responses revealed that consumers are sophisticated and are wary of automatically assuming that a newly-revived dormant brand would provide the same quality of products or services as before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
