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Introduction
In the past few years, a number of once-dead brands have been resurrected. After having made the difficult decision to say goodbye to a brand, companies who have deleted poor performing brands from their portfolio are bringing some of them back to life. While resurrecting a brand is odd enough from a strategic, organizational and portfolio perspective, the driving force behind these recent resurrections is even more bewildering: consumer power. Consumers who did not buy enough of a brand and led the brand to its death, years later demand its comeback. Cadbury Wispa, discontinued in 2003, was brought back to the market in 2008 and sold 41 million bars in the first 18 weeks of relaunch when the company finally heard the voice of Wispa lovers. Coca-Cola Surge, discontinued in 2002, was brought back to the market in 2014 after more than 200,000 people joined a Facebook page named “Surge Movement” and rallied to bring back the brand. Crystal Pepsi was resurrected at the end of 2015, and fully relaunched in Canada and the USA during the summer of 2016, after Crystal Pepsi fans and celebrities, including “LA Beast” who has more than 1.2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel and Kevin Strahle YouTube celebrity and competitive eater, led the #BringBackCrystalPEPSI social media campaign. Most recently, Nokia relaunched its iconic 3310 phone in response to consumers’ interest in simplicity and longer battery life.
The importance of understanding the factors driving a brand resurrection movement is underscored by the fact that these brands often hold residual value – i.e. customers may still have high levels of brand awareness and positive brand image (Thomas and Kohli, 2009). This residual value indicates some level of latent brand equity/positive affect of the customers toward the brand, which can be harnessed by organizations to both engage consumers at a deeper level and increase profitability. Often termed as “zombie brands” (Schlossberg, 2015), these brands still remain in the minds of consumers – addressing the concern of awareness – and hold a level of affinity that several existing brands are unable to match (O’Reilly, 2016). This is notwithstanding the fact that several of these brands were deleted because of poor brand management in organizations, rather than consumer rejection (Davari, 2016; Ewing