Is your brand a Sleeping Giant?

Harnessing the power and potential of stagnant brands.

So what is a sleeping giant?

It’s an established brand that has gotten a little sleepy over the years. Revenue and sales are flat. Growth is non-existent, and it’s been that way for a while.

Right now, if it existed, Black Anvil Laundry would be a challenger brand. A daring upstart. A rebel. Unabashedly unapologetic and unafraid, Black Anvil Laundry is about to blow the doors of an entire industry and create a whole new category — high-end, beautiful, luxury, heirloom-quality washing machines and dryers that last for generations. 

It’s got a sexy little red Corvette of a campaign called “Inheritance” that will run for 15 years or so. As Marketing Director, you’re about to grow Black Anvil Laundry from a challenger brand to a market leader in a mere ten years. After that, you’ll get an offer from Google. “Hm…” you will think to yourself, “it might be fun to fix that mess.” So off you’ll go, and you will leave Black Anvil Laundry in great shape and in good hands. 

Now let’s hop in our time machine — TARDIS, DeLorean, Hot Tub, take your pick — and head 30 years into the future. It’s the year 2055.

Nearly all of the OG designers and engineers moved on years ago. You’re now the CMO of Apple (go you!). The founder of Black Anvil Laundry cashed in her chips and retired to San Miguel de Allende to paint, sculpt and be awesome. 

The newer leadership team doesn’t seem to have a clear direction for the brand. However, Black Anvil Laundry has been dependably profitable for years, so no one seems too worried about it. 

Enough time passes and enough people come and go that no one quite remembers the energy, focus and drive of those early days. There are more departments and more fiefdoms and less internal communication and more layers of bureaucracy. A kind of cultural amnesia sets in. 

To be very clear, everyone is busy. Everyone is doing their jobs. And every once in a while, someone feels the need to Do SomethingTM, but they’re not sure what or why.  

The CMO writes a new positioning statement … something about bringing the world together one rinse cycle, one clean shirt at a time. 

Finance keeps trying to wring pennies from the penny sponge by cutting corners here and there, but efficiency is not a growth play. Fortunately, the quality of the washers and dryers remains mostly unchanged. 

Marketing used to be involved with product and product innovation, distribution, pricing and comms. Now it mostly makes pitch decks and sell sheets for the sales team. And we don’t talk about the time Black Anvil Laundry focused almost their entire marketing budget on short-term performance advertising. Those were not good years. Thankfully, there were only a few of them. 

At one point, a team of outside consultants suggested product diversification, so Black Anvil Laundry launched a line of beach towels, podcast microphones (still a thing 30 years in the future, apparently) and frozen dinners. Weirdly, none of them quite caught on. 

Then there was a collaboration with the fifth reboot of the Wonder Woman franchise. Instead of creating a gorgeous set of limited edition, metallic red, blue and gold machines with stars and silver detailing, Black Anvil Laundry released a limited edition, completely transparent, “invisible” washing machine and dryer. Why? Well, Wonder Woman has an invisible jet, so why not an invisible washing machine? The answer is because soap residue, grime and lint are quite visible. The machines looked super gross after a few weeks. Also, sexist much? 

Why not an Iron Man-inspired washer and dryer? Tony Stark can do laundry! Whatever’s left of the internet in the year 2055 got hella mad for three minutes, and it was all a bit of a miss. 

After a lot of silly, directionless floundering, marketing investment dwindles and innovation slows to a crawl. Profit, revenue and market share go down and keep going down. Growth is not happening. 

To make things worse, Samsung, LG and Maytag launched their own line of luxury washers and dryers 10 years ago, and they’ve been chipping away at Black Anvil Laundry’s market share ever since. The once proud, rebellious, luxury brand slid from #1 to #4, where it has remained for years. 

Black Anvil Laundry has become a Sleeping Giant. It’s kind of doing okay, sort of, maybe, but it’s losing ground. A couple of private equity firms — and not the good ones — are starting to sniff around. 

What made Black Anvil Laundry great in the first place is still in there somewhere. The brand still has a lot of equity and a metric shedload of potential. It could climb right back to the top of the laundry pile. 

Yorkshire Tea made it happen. Lego made it happen. Marvel, Old Spice, Dove (the soap, not the chocolate) and Cadbury all did it. They all found themselves losing mental availability, physical availability and market share, and they all managed to right the ship and then some. 

What does this mean for you? 

The Black Anvil Laundry story is probably not your brand’s story. We’d be very surprised if it were. Here’s the thing: It is entirely possible to wake a sleeping giant. So if you suspect your brand has lost focus, lost its way or lost the plot, give us a call. You may have hidden, forgotten or untapped potential that we can help unlock. We’ve done it before. 

Next week, we’ll talk about what it takes to awaken a Sleeping Giant. Spoiler alert: It takes way more than a new ad campaign. 

We’ll see you next time!