Refreshing a Stale Brand

A few weeks ago, we had a blog post about the difficulties of branding and highlighted the ongoing issues with Subway and their former spokesperson. You can read up on that blog post for all the information and backstory thus far.

As Subway continues to distance themselves from their previous alignment, they appear to be taking this as an opportunity to refresh their brand. This looks to be a fantastic move as, to make the easy bread joke, the Subway brand has been stale for quite some time.

This is not to say that the last 15 years of Subway’s marketing and branding have been in vain. In fact, years ago they were the forerunner in the concept of healthy fast food eating. The Subway diet and Subway “Eat Fresh” became the mantras of the anti-burger and fries crowd that surged into Subway. This led to a massive explosion of Subway restaurants that then outnumbered McDonald locations in the United States.

However, as any business owner or marketer knows, trends change and so must you in order to stay ahead of the curve and maintain success. Subway neglected to evolve with the health trends and was passed by companies such as Chipotle that offered new healthy offerings such as non GMO options and meat that was antibiotic free. While they continued to lose ground to these other competitors, their only marketing response seemed to be a reduction in price. This was contrary to other businesses that raised prices in order to offer better ingredients.

With the current PR snafu, Subway appears to finally be going through a very large brand and personnel refresh. It was announced that not only was their chief marketing officer stepping down, but they would be changing marketing agencies as well.

They have already expressed changes to quality of their ingredients to be implemented in 2016. They have cited the sheer volume of meats needing to be sourced as a main reason for this delay.

Additionally, they are looking to do a complete brand refresh, both digitally and physically. There are already rumors of changes being made to the layouts and designs of franchises as well as changes to uniforms of the employees. Their new marketing agency will indeed have its work cut out for them with a complete overhaul of all their marketing strategies and branded interactions.

Subway has cited that recent bad press has not affected any of these decisions or even a decrease in sales (which have been declining over the last few quarters) but the timing is a little suspect.

Will it be enough to revamp this business and bring it into a more modern healthy landscape? Or have they missed the boat entirely?