مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

 مجله تحقیقات بازاریابی – Journal of Business Research

Moynat, a company founded in 1849, used to be one of the leading names in the luxury leather goods industry. The brand ceased operations in 1976 but Bernard Arnault, President of LVMH, acquired it in 2010. After 35 years of inactivity, Moynat opened a new store in 2011 and has since expanded worldwide. Other investors have also been trying to revive luxury brands from the past: examples include Roger Vivier in 2003, the Citroën DS in 2010, and the Orient Express in 2016. Managers refer to these dormant brands as “sleeping beauties”, a term that highlights their potential. Sleeping beauties are no longer active on the market, but retain potential brand equity that can be conjured up in the minds of consumers by rearticulating the brand’s heritage. Behind the revival of sleeping beauties lies the question of how to manage heritage brands, that is brands that embed their value proposition in their heritage (Urde, Greyser, & Balmer, 2007; Merchant & Rose, 2013; Rose, Merchant, Orth & Horstmann, 2016). This study aims to extend the theory on brand heritage by studying the transformation of a brand into a heritage brand.

To analyze the revival of sleeping beauties, we interviewed 20 executives, managers and experts working on both luxury and mass-market sleeping beauty reactivation strategies, in different product categories (leather, fashion, travel, automotive, watches, etc). A primary contribution of our paper is a better understanding of brand revitalization, by introducing the concept of the sleeping beauty and providing a typology of sleeping beauty reactivation strategies. Differentiated reactivation strategies emerge based on the sleeping beauty brand’s reputation on the market before revival, its orientation toward the past after revival, and the features of the brand’s heritage used in the reactivation process. This study also contributes to the literature on heritage brands by showing how managers can transform a brand into a heritage brand. The findings demonstrate that in reviving sleeping beauties, the key factor is the way the brand can resonate with the collective memory.