The 20th annual Retail Week Conference last week featured a self-deprecating tour de force by the former owner of the most calamitous brand in Retail Week’s lifetime.

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The 20th annual Retail Week Conference last week featured a self-deprecating tour de force by the former owner of the most calamitous brand in Retail Week’s lifetime.

Gerald Ratner single-handedly presided over the demise of his own name on the high street, even forfeiting the subsequent right to use his eponymous brand online, despite its equity value by then barely rivalling that of an old prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencer.

M&S, the diamond brand in British retail’s crown, saw its chairman honoured last week for his lifetime achievements, alongside those of the chief executive of the UK’s biggest, most successful, retail brand, Tesco.

The overseas excursions of M&S and Tesco (despite the latter’s phenomenal international record) have not always been plain sailing. But they are power brands with universal acclaim.

FMCG companies are consummate brand marketers but Tesco shows how their supermarket customers have become front-runners in the brand-building stakes.

Private label is an old-fashioned phrase in the lexicon of Tesco Brand. And it is no surprise, given his Heineken heritage, that the new chief executive of M&S has declared his intention to transform labels into brands, taking his brands to those parts his labels failed to reach.

As consumer brands become ever more adept at being a retail force in their own right (Apple being the primus inter pares), it is appropriate that retailers are marketing their brands more authoritatively; vide the accolade for JLP’s advertising last week.

A brand’s identity and its longevity, its ability to reinvent itself and/or overcome assaults on its integrity, self-inflicted or not, are issues that remain as crucial as ever.

In this respect, consumer brands are arguably more resilient to damage than retail brands. Perrier re-purified itself and Burberry’s latest results show that the contamination of luxury brands (in its case by chavs) can become but accidents in time, not mortal blows.

Galliano’s outrageous anti-Semitic remarks in Paris last month, rightly leading to his dismissal by Dior, are unlikely to have any lasting impact on that design house given the history of its founder’s reported wartime collaboration with the Nazis. (He was not alone, emulated among others by Coco Chanel in Paris, and by Herr Hugo Boss in Berlin, who enjoyed preferred status as uniform tailor to the SS.)

In parenthesis, one might speculate what M&S and Tesco’s Jewish founders would say on these matters. Or, for that matter, Mr Ratner.

Reputational damage, audible or anecdotal, is clearly serious. But the damage to failed retail brands is visibly more life threatening. When store chains collapse, be they cherished like Woolworths or less-lauded like MFI, their chances of resuscitation (other than maybe online) are virtually zero.

The emergence of lifestyle and cult brands - notably Jack Wills and Superdry - point the sure way to retail success today. They are the new retail-consumer multiples: multichannel and multi-market - with valuation multiples that rewrite the rulebook.

Michael Poynor managing director, Retail Expertise