My Brand Strategy professor at NYU (exchange) was an activist investor focusing on companies that have great brands that the current management were killing. He was pretty good at organizing friendly (but could be) hostile takeovers of the board. May I now humbly suggest that Scott turn his attention to Radio Shack. It’s illogical that the current management and Board of directors want to kill the company, so let’s just assume they’re incompetent.
Apparently, rather than embracing their niche (little gizmos that are hard to find like soldering equipment and radio controlled cars) they want to become, uh, well known by a nickname and well, you know, compete against every private mobile phone seller in the nation.
Here’s the story: http://bit.ly/9JtiF
My favorite quote from their current CMO, Lee Applbaum.
“When a brand becomes a friend, it often gets a nickname — take FedEx or Coke, for example,” said Lee Applbaum, Radio Shack’s chief marketing officer, in a statement. “This creative is not about changing our name. Rather, we’re contemporizing the way we want people to think about our brand.”
And the appropriate response would be, uh-huh.
A few implications on just this quote – first if you went to U of M Amherst for your MBA – I wouldn’t talk too much about distinguished alumni who work for Radio Shack; second is that the Ad agency for ‘Duh Shack’ err, The Radio Shack, clearly has no clue on how to really solve RS’s issues so they threw in the old ‘Rebrand’ idea so they could sponge some more money off client before Best Buy or someone else buys their client.
Why do I seem upset? Because I like Radio Shack and know it has a very profitable place in the business world of the US. It’s the same animosity I feel toward Yahoo. And GM; Chrysler (just bad cars),
Scott – if you’re still out there – go get’em man because while I don’t own soldering equipment right now, but I may want to in the future.
