Flip this brand.

Find an old brand, revitalize it and get new buyers interested. A reimagining. A resurrection. Whatever you want to call it. However, all ‘flips’ are not the same. Take the new Old Spice stuff. It’s got an edge, appealing to the Axe crowd while leveraging boomer memories of that vile substance. Even though I hate the stuff, I like the work. Time will tell if they’ll move product, but when compared to the efforts behind another flipped brand I hate, I’ll still take the Spice.

That brand is Ovaltine.

I seriously don’t know why the target wants to be Wonder bread-eating, master race bred, Brady Bunch, gated suburban community-living 10 year-olds named Johnny. Done by the Himmel group, the radio spots that everyone has heard guarantee I will hate the Ovaltine brand for pretty much... forever. I’m sure there are certain moms from the demo above who won’t; I just don’t know any.

There’s the school of thought that says that as long as ads like these work, who cares about creativity. Lowermybills.com, Orbitz, etc., use this rational. Ok, so some in your audience love the spots while others don’t, let alone ever plan to use the brand. Why settle for a part of any audience though when you could go after a larger one, no? (Even HeadOn throws in the typical line “I can’t stand your commercial, but your product is amazing!” in their current spots.)

Others say that even if you hate our ads, we were still able to get some of that valuable consumer mind space (or insert other generic consumer term here), and that’s always good. Yes - but. Only if you got it for the right reasons and only if it’s a postive impression. If the ads annoy though, it doesn’t take a shrink to figure out that you’ve planted some negative impressions in my head about your brand and pissed me off.

I’ll never use Old Spice because it’s something I don’t wear. Likewise, I’ll also never drink Ovaltine. I just don’t drink chocolate mix drinks like that. The difference is important though. Because of the coolness of their campaign, the Old Spice brand left me with a positive impression to be used at a later date. Ovaltine? Banned for life.

Tags: Old Spice, Ovaltine, brands