Fashion is fickle. One day you’re hot, the next you’re not. Why does a brand stop being cool and what can be done to turn it around?

French Connection FCUK INDEX

Question: What do Burberry, Moleskine and Polaroid have in common? They’re all highly desirable brands that have been brought back from the brink.

What makes one brand appealing and another not is a tough question. So too is how a brand can slip from one category to another (think Blackberry) and, in rare cases, back again (think Apple).

While from an outside perspective it can seem that companies are simply in thrall to a fickle consumer, there is logic to the rise and fall of brands and common threads in every story.

How a brand stops being cool

To understand how a brand loses its edge, we first need to understand how a healthy brand builds and maintains its appeal.

One of the must-own brands of the past decade is Superdry.

Founder Julian Dunkerton believes the secret to maintaining appeal and riding out tough markets is down to constantly “getting better”.

“The biggest thing about being a brand is the constant focus on quality of product and on the demographic that is purchasing your product,” he says. “You have to keep getting better.

“It is not about lowering standards to gain margin, you need to get better all the time.

“You need to constantly ask yourself how you improve the product for the consumer.”

“Maintaining a brand means that you need brilliant and extraordinary products because they all need to do justice to what the brand is and what it means to people”

Rita Clifton

That dedication to product is important, says Brandcap chair and founder Rita Clifton, but retailers cannot forget that any product needs to “serve the brand”.

“Of course, you need to make great products,” she says. “Maintaining a brand means that you need brilliant and extraordinary products because they all need to do justice to what the brand is and what it means to people.”

Although that requires hard work and unwavering focus, it isn’t rocket science. So how do brands end up suffering?

Trouble comes knocking for a number of reasons but there are two very common factors.

The first is forgetting what a brand means to the people who buy into it and losing touch with the customer. The second is leaning too heavily on existing brand power and sacrificing product quality.

Dunkerton believes that it is easy for companies to succumb to this.

“It is very easy for people to get into a brand exploitative mindset,” he says.

Warning signs

Of course, brands don’t go down these paths purposely.

Instead, at the beginning at least, they operate on the assumption that all is well. Any problems are often attributed to a tricky market or other external problems – until it’s too late.

“It’s easy to have a particular perception of yourself  that is not necessarily true,” says Joules chief customer officer Lysa Hardy.

It’s a truism echoed by retail veteran and former British Fashion Council chairman Harold Tillman.

“Generally, people are so involved with their companies that they just don’t realise it’s happening to them.”

But there are warning signs to watch out for, and act upon.

The first, and most obvious, is customer feedback.

“You have to stay connected with your consumer groups,” says Pentland Brands global marketing director Sean Hastings. “The brand is what exists in the minds of consumers, not brand managers.

“Understanding what consumers want has to take precedent over how the business is set up or what you’ve done before. Lots of brands have found this out the hard way.”

Another is how your employees behave.

“What your employees think and do is often an early warning system,” says Clifton. “Are they going to brands more interesting than yours, are they going to other sorts of businesses? They need to feel as though they are part of a vibrant business.”

A word of warning to any start-ups here: Clifton adds that just because a business is new, does not mean it is vibrant.

“It can be easy come, easy go,” she says. “Unless you build a really strong brand and consumer franchise that has deep roots and won’t be supplanted by the next great idea then you are as vulnerable as a more traditional brand.

“You need to wrap yourself around consumers. That is a real challenge for new entrants  – they may be more nimble but they have shallower roots.”

A third is the waning of excitement from shoppers, says Dunkerton.

“There has to be an emotional engagement,” he says. “You have to be excited to buy into a product, it has to be fresh and exciting. If you lose that excitement as a consumer then the money will disappear in front of your eyes.”

How to turn it around

Bringing a brand back from the brink of extinction may seem like an insurmountable task but it can be done, with Apple, Burberry and French Connection demonstrating what is possible.

Burberry’s comeback during the noughties was dependent on it wrenching back control of its brand equity from various licensees.

Burberry sold licences to other companies to allow it to put its iconic check print on products, which ran the the gamut from baseball caps, which became ubiquitous on football terraces, to disposable nappies for dogs.

The brand’s adoption by former Eastenders actress Daniella Westbrook –  who was famously papped decked out in a Burberry mini-skirt, handbag and pram, with her young daughter also clad in the famous beige checks - firmly cemented it in chav-culture.

Under successive chief executives Rose Marie Bravo and Angela Ahrendts, Burberry took the bull by the horns, spending eye-watering sums buying back 23 licences.

Tactics such as that are often necessary, Hastings says. “You need to be ruthlessly focused on who you’re for and what you offer, which may mean moving away from things that make you money in the short term.”

Of course, moving the heritage check away from market stall bargains was only the beginning of Burberry’s turnaround.

“The interesting thing about Burberry was that it was in danger of only being that check,” says Clifton. “And it is now the best of British: it is style and craftsmanship with an imaginative digital point of view about the world. That combination has renewed Burberry and kept Burberry Burberry.”

Burberry is just one example, of course, but the principles of fashion’s most famous comeback hold true for every brand.

“The key is to be clear about where you want the brand to be, understand the gap between that ambition and reality, and be open-minded and creative in developing options to close that gap”

Sean Hastings

What retailers facing similar situations need to do is identify the central problem and pinpoint  what makes them them,  then close that gap.

“The key is to be clear about where you want the brand to be in the mind of consumers, understand the gap between that ambition and reality, and be open-minded and creative in developing options to close that gap,” Hastings says.

Consumers may be fickle but its businesses who are really in control –  just remember to use that power wisely.