People tend to get used to things around them and lament their demise, even if they’re useless and unsightly, like the rusty Bronco in my dad’s field.

Two household names just died, and I am wondering—how?  Procter and Gamble launched one of them 72 years ago as a product marketing channel—the same type of channel a piece of meat wrapped around a dog pill is..   Guiding Light burned out a few weeks ago due to declining ratings—at the end, it boasted fewer than half of the 5 million viewers it had in 1999.  According to executive producer, Ellen Wheeler, “We ran the numbers every which way: upside down, backwards, sideways”..    It certainly seems to me, though, to be a quick death relative to a long ride of dominance.

Analogously, Gourmet magazine, the 69 year old pioneer of the food-as-an-experience genre will end next month since Conde Nast felt they could do no more with it.  Cooking is popular: more Americans watch The Food Network than any of the cable news networks.  Why, then, is this most recognized brand ‘cooked’?  How can the pioneer of a genre just…end?  Could Gourmet not have launched its own transitional show or cooking club or something?  Where were the rescuers of these paragons? 

Both icons were about the same age and both start with the letter G..  That’s where the situational similarity ends, though—Guiding Light seems to have done everything it could (even if misguided) to make itself more attractive to a modern audience, and it had few soap opera competitors.  Gourmet, on the other hand, refused to change amid a hyper competitive food magazine and blog market.  The message here, to me, is clear—if your brand has content, keep it and its delivery fresh.  Or it will die.

I have always been interested in and saddened by extinction, and that has undoubtedly influenced my outlook on branding waste and business cycles.  What seems different about this season, though, is the number of high profile, meteor-hitting-the-earth-style brand extinctions we’ve seen.   Guiding Light and Gourmet are testaments to the old adage, change or die—it’s just more poignant when the fallen were once mighty.

Tags: branding, Conde Nast, Gourmet, Guiding Light, P&G

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.