While consistency in branding your business and yourself is important, every so often that image could use a makeover. Your image has become out of style or out of date and people no longer respond.
But there needs to be balance. If you have been highly successful in creating your image, if you go to far outside the norm, the changes you make end up hurting your reputation.
New Coke came about because company management felt its brand had gotten stale with the result being market share was slipping. However, it went too far outside the norm and it became a public relations disaster for Coca Cola.
Right now, Chuck E. Cheese is trying for an image makeover of its own. The place where "a kid could be a kid" now has a rock and roll guitar-playing mouse as its representative. The company apparently has been losing market share as of late.
Disclosure time: having two boys, 8 and 5, my family is a regular (on average once a month) customer of Chuck E. Cheese.
What the mouse looks like is probably more important to my kids than to my wife and myself. The company's ads sell the place to the kids.
A marketing image that might appeal to parents is that Chuck E. Cheese is a place where we feel safe bringing our children because of all of its safety measures that its competition seems to lack.
That being said, kids are the ones who want to have to go there so the marketing has to speak to that audience. Will the new mascot have the same effect on those children as the current one does? The jury is still out on whether the new image resonates with them.
The lesson for mortgage marketers—make sure your brand image still speaks to your audience. If you need to, make changes but make certain those changes connect with your desired target market.
