Bad brand management has more destructive force than the Death Star

So taking that to mean that Solo (the adventures of young Han Solo for those not in the know) is objectively a good film I was surprised to read that it has performed so badly at the box office and that Disney has now put all future Star Wars spin off films on ice (or carbonite).

For owners of a franchise with heroes that can see the future, Disney should have known better. This is a case of a great product being decimated by a failure of brand management. The franchise forgot the role of its brand. And then squandered the value of its distinctive assets in its marketing.

When Direct Line relaunched in 2014, the key to unlocking the brand’s potential was the realisation that insurance meets a hugely important need for our customers; fixing problems when things go wrong. It was a hop and a skip from there to successfully reinvent the brand with Winston Wolf from Pulp Fiction as an unlikely frontman.

So, what’s the role of a pulpy space movie? There’s a clue in the crowds that my boy and I shared at the opening night every December for the last three years. It’s families. Often fathers and sons (and a few textbook geeks in regulation black t-shirts)

When ‘The Force Awakens’ hit screens just before Christmas in 2015, it started an annual tradition that re-bonded me with my son after my year at work and his at school. And it wasn’t just us. These were event movies that brought generations together as the year came to an end.

Bringing Solo out in the middle of the summer was about as smart as trying to flog advent calendars at Easter. It robbed the Star Wars brand of the social role it had carved out for itself.

And there’s the distinctive assets. Solo likely spent a nine figure sum on marketing worldwide. With a campaign that seemed hellbent on binning what made it Star Wars. It might as well have changed the title to “Generic Space Movie”.

The Star Wars logo was barely visible in posters. The Millennium Falcon was unrecognisable with its front prongs filled in. Chewbacca lurked in the background. Alden Ehrenreich pulled off an excellent approximation of Harrison Ford, but he looked nothing like him on billboards. And in the absence of the word Han, even the title ‘Solo’ made no link to the franchise. And who the hell is Qi’Ra?

Even if the target audience got past it being a Christmas family event, the campaign went above and beyond in quashing any excitement amongst its fan base. It’s like the famous story of the orange juice brand that decided to change its logo and colour palate, take any link to fruit off its packaging and assume that consumers will recognise a subliminal link to oranges built into a spherical lid.

There’s a lesson here for all brand owners. Our job as marketers is to understand what our audiences want and then to make it easy for them to choose and buy from us.

Solo got the product right, but failed to connect it with its audience. Instead, a series of bizarre choices actively jettisoned the Star Wars brand’s most valuable assets. And earned the franchise its first ever flop.

If a Hollywood phenomenon with a ravenous audience can fall into this trap, it should be a timely reminder to all of us in the more mundane worlds of FMCG, financial services or utilities marketing. Ignore the role your brand plays in your customers’ lives, or squander your brand assets, and you risk a heavy commercial price.

And putting the business impact aside, I probably won’t be bonding with my son over the adventures of young Boba Fett in some Christmas future.

Piers Newson-Smith is the head of brand planning at Direct Line Group.