Overstock BROUGHT Bed Bath and Beyond but gave up their name to upscale their ‘brand’…..
Bed Bath and Beyond was almost a goner….
But ONLY as an on-line store…..
Bed Bath & Beyond has strong brand recognition and a fervent customer base — two things Overstock needed, said Mindy Weinstein, founder and chief executive of the digital marketing company Market MindShift.
“It’s a very smart move from a marketing perspective,” she said, citing in particular the savings. “They cut so many of the painful processes and time it takes to rebrand yourself.”
Meanwhile, Overstock’s name has “been a liability for them,” said Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Consumers still associate the brand with its original business of selling surplus or returned inventory, even though it moved away from that model years ago.
The same was true for suppliers, Johnson said, noting that some brands were hesitant to sell their product on the website for fear of being associated with liquidation.
Customers may also still associate Overstock with its former chief executive Patrick Byrne, who resigned in 2019 after saying he dated a Russian agent and was involved in a “deep state” investigation of the 2016 election. Soon after, he and another executive were named in an investor’s lawsuit accusing Overstock of securities fraud.
The company already is seeing benefits from the rebrand, with suppliers it had been courting for years now “knocking on our door,” Johnson said. More than 600,000 new products have been added to the website since the Canada rollout started, he added.
That said, there are risks to such a major rebrand, according to Kahn. The company “has to meet customer’s expectations” of what they would expect to find at Bed Bath & Beyond, she said…..
image….CNN
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