标题：Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning
原文：Retro brands are relaunched historical brands with updated features. The authors conduct a analysis of two prominent retro brands, the V olkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace,that reveals the importance of Allegory (brand story). Aura (brand essence), Arcadia (idealized community), and Antinomy (brand paradox). Retro brand meanings are predicated on a Utopian communal element and an enlivening paradoxical essence. Retro brand management involves an uneasy, cocreative, and occasionally clamorous alliance between producers and consumers.
America has Our culture is composed of sequels, reruns, remakes, revivals, reissues, re-releases, recreations, re-enactments, adaptations, anniversaries, memorabilia, oldies radio, and nostalgia record collections.
—George Carlin, Brain Droppings, 1998 Brand extension, the use of an existing brand name to introduce a new product or service (Keller 1993,1998), is an important marketing tactic that has attracted considerable academic interest (e.g., Desai andKeller 2(X)2; John, Loken, and Joiner 1998). However,another form of brand extension strategy is gaining prominence and requires urgent research attention. Many long abandoned brands have recently been revived and successfully relaunched (Franklin 2002; Mitchell 1999; Wansink 1997),
of old brands and their Images are a powerful management option (Brown 2001). The rise of retro brands places marketing in an interesting conceptual quandary. On the one hand, marketers are continually reminded of the need for product differentiation, that today's marketing environment demands strong brand identities and decries imitation (Aaker 1996). On the other hand, contemporary markets are suffused with updated imitations, such as retro brands, many of which are proving enormously popular (Franklin 2(X)2; Naughton and Vlasic1998; Wansink 1997). Brand Revival and Retromarketing
There is considerable overlap among nostalgia, brand heritage, and brand revival. Revived or retro goods and services (we use retro synonymously with revived brands) trade on consumers' nostalgic leanings. Familiar slogans and packages, for example, invoke brand heritage and evoke consumers' memories of better days, both personal and communal. The success of the Museum Store, Past Times, Restoration Hardware, and similar retailers of reproductions and the continuing popularity of heritage-based campaigns for brands such as Budweiser, John Hancock, and Ivory indicate that demand exists for allegedly authentic reproductions of past brands. The problem with exact reproductions, however, is that they do not meet today's exacting performance standards. Retro products, by contrast, combine old-fashioned forms with cutting-edge functions and thereby harmoni
ze the past with the present (Brown 1999, 2001). In this regard, consider the Chrysler PT Cruiser, which amalgamates the shape of a 1940s sedan with the latest automotive technology to produce a futuristic car with anachronistic styling. Another striking example is Nike's Michael Jordan XI Retro Sneakers. These shoes may look like a monument to 1950s hoop dreams, yet their cushioned soles, aerated uppers, and recommended retail prices are state of the marketing art. Denny's retro diner is an homage to eateries of the 1950s, but its registers are computerized, the kitchen equipment is cutting edge, smoking is prohibited in the dining area, and vegetarian dishes are available for those unwilling to revert to carnivorous habits of yore. We define retro branding, therefore, as the revival or relaunch of a product or service brand from a prior historical period, which is usually but not always updated to contemporary standards of performance, functioning, or taste. Retro brands are distinguishable from nostalgic brands by the element of updating. They are brand new, old-fashioned offerings.uppers
Findings
The New Beetle
The original V olkswagen Beetle was the stuff of motor-enthusiast legend. Created by the pioneering
automotive designer Ferdinand Porsche, with a past grounded in the common classes of Third Reich Germany, the car proved wildly popular across postwar Europe and North America. The V olkswagen Beetle was globally cherished
for its durability, economy, user-friendliness, and idiosyncratic design.
At the time, it was considered an exemplary vehicle of the people. Everyone from commune-bound hippies and middle-class couples with children to eccentric multimillionaires drove Beetles. The Beetle even begot a series of live-action Disney
Tony argues from the perspective of a moderate rationalist laying out a logical argument to ease the tensions between two warring factions. Discounting the intrinsic value of the past, he insists that the old brand must be adjusted for a new time, place, and set of target consumers. Akin to Orrin, he shifts the argument about brand essence to superficial design elements and advertising-laden symbolic associations. The result, for Tony, is an up-to-date vehicle that still shares the enchanting personality of the old Beetle brand. Enchantment indeed is the operative word, as many Star Wars fans testify.
Star Wars
The original 1977 Star Wars movie attempted to disorient its consumers temporally by offering a faraway future world of spacecraft and intelligent robots subsumed within a fairy tale set in the distant past. Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace attempted to top this temporal dislocation. Setting the fourth movie three episodes before the first was a stroke of marketing genius that created the neologism prequel. This prequel demonstrates retro branding in the realm of connected products and services that characterize today's (Wolf 1999). As a retro brand.
The Phantom Menace stamps an established brand name. Star Wars, on a new movie that couples cutting-edge special effects with a cast of contemporary actors. As with the new Beetle, it imaginatively melds a familiar brand name with an all-new, up-to-date product.
Bill's diatribe offers opposing poles of the profane market and the sacred myth (see Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989). Zack's posting is resentful of the myth and moneymaking power manifested in George Lucas as a person. Both message posters demonstrate that though the brand is clearly recognized as a commercial creation, it is
also a deeply meaningful part of some consumers' lives—it is enthusiastically represented as a powerful metaphor for living and even for religion. These comments suggest not only that commerce
and the sacred are cultural opposites but also that their intermixing in brands such as Star Wars has considerable cultural power (see also Kozinets 2001, pp. 76-78). In support of these findings having wider marketing
cultural Bill's and Zack's postings express production of profound cultural
these important tensions in terms of a brand and the different responses to them. They respond to the brand paradox behind Star Wars's combination of creed and commerce,piety and profanity, mana and money.
Discussion
Implications for Brand Meaning Management
Marketing scholars from Alderson (1957) to Zaltman (1997) have recognized the importance of the experiential nature of the brand, but perhaps not since the heyday of motivation research (e.g., Dichter 1960) has there been such a resurgence of interest in brand phenomenology. The most succinct if overstated justification for this interest is the contention that some conceptualize a product as more than an artifact From the pioneering work of Levy (1999) and Hirschman and Holbrook (198
2) through the current wave of postpositivist inquiry (e.g.. Brown 1995; Fournier 1998; Fournier and Mick 1999; Holt 2002; Kozinets 2001; Penaloza 2000; Sherry 1998; Thompson 1997), the tendency to regard brands as symbolic creations has led to the conclusion that the management of meaning must underlie marketing strategy. That marketers are quintessentially meaning managers, shaping the experience of consumers, is intuitively plausible. That meaning management involves attending to the creative activity of consumers, or that consumers might justly be regarded as the cocreators of brand essence, is equally plausible, if less fully appreciated. Antinomy, the final element of our 4As abbreviation, is perhaps most important of all, for brand paradox brings the cultural complexity necessary to animate each of the
other dimensions. The brand is both alive and not alive, a thing and a personality, a subject and an object: This is the paradoxical kernel of brand meaning. The story is both truth and fiction, composed of clever persuasions and facts, devised by distant copywriters and real users. This is the central conundrum of brand story and consumer-marketer codependence. The idealized community is both a real community and a pseudo community, moral and amoral, in thrall to a commercial creation and a rebellious uprising, dependent and independent, a gathering of both angry activists and covetous consumers. For a retro brand, the tension between past and present—and even, as in our two exam
ples, the future—also vivifies brand meanings. Retro products seem custom-made to address a core paradox at the heart of brand management. Retro combines the benefits of uniqueness, newness, and exclusivity (with its hints of higher functionality, class, styling, and premium prices) with oldness, familiarity, recognition, trust, and loyalty. These intrinsic paradoxes underpin a product's elan vital, the creative life force at the heart of the retro brand's extraordinary appeal.
Conclusion
According to the acerbic comedian George Carlin (1998, p.110), contemporary consumer culture is beset by an inordinate fondness for revivals, reenactments, remakes, reruns, and re-creations. Certainly, the merest glance across today's marketing landscape reveals that retro goods and services are all around. Long-abandoned brands, such as Airstream (trailers), Brylcreem (pomade), and Charlie (cologne), have been adroitly reanimated and successfully relaunched. Ostensibly extinct trade characters, such as Mr. Whipple, Morris the Cat, and Ms. Chiquita Banana, are standing sentinel on the supermarket shelves once more. Ancient commercials are being rebroadcast (e.g., Ovaltine, Alka-Seltzer); timeworn slogans
long-established products are being repackaged in their original eye-catching liveries (e.g., Necco wafers, Sun-Maid raisins).
We have examined the rise of retro brands in an attempt to develop tractable theory that contributes to marketing principles and practice. We have reviewed the pertinent

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