They are about to relaunch a reinvented MySpace.
Good for them. Will they succeed? I doubt it.
This is where technology and organizational communication come hand in hand. Their brand is dead. Amazingly dead. Sure MySpace still lives on and it still has millions of users, but it has been surpassed by facebook.
I always wonder about the number of users they provide. Here's why: Take my friend Sam for example. She has an account at MySpace, but she never uses it. She never bothered to close it is all. Sam is more of a Derridian Spectre or Trace than an actual Space. I will suppose that MySpace counts her as an active member since she has an active account. How many others, however, are a MySpace Trace? Once again I digress into philosophy.
MySpace suffers from an amalgamation of casual knowledge by consumers and associations that are clearly damaging. In other words, it had “Negative Brand Equity.” NBE cannot be empirically evaluated thoroughly, although some hypotheticals can be applied. NBE is hard to overcome.
Take a look:
Eastern Airlines (Flew right into the ground...a couple times.)
Howard Johnson’s (a slow, slow death)
Jack-in-the-Box (expanded rapidly...food problems...now regional only)
Kinney Shoes (dead)
Polaroid (Relaunched....but hardly exciting)
Kodachrome
Realistic (the old Radio Shack Brand)
Atari (The original!)
E.F. Hutton ("When E.F. Hutton Talks...")
Ted Airlines (The dead Ted page)
Gateway Computer (Acer ate you for lunch)
In one way or another each of these brands died. Many attempted relaunches. NBE, however, doomed them to failure. Once a brand loses is equity, word of mouth can kill it off and leave it for dead among the other brand carcasses. There are a few exceptions to this rule.
I'll name one: Apple. No need to rehash this amazing comeback.
So MySpace? Nah. I don't see it happening. It is in the ER an the Doctors are performing emergency surgery. Gallant effort or not, MySpace is going to flatline....eventually.
The End.
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