This post concludes the series on brands that have wasted their potential.  In the past few weeks, we covered:

• GNC — “It’s such a shame because the company has the history, focus, and distribution to be a great brand.“
• Facebook — “There are no obvious or meaningful brand attributes that differentiate it.“
  
• Dairy Queen — “Recent rebranding efforts have squeezed out much of the endearing old-school essence of the brand.”
  
• Vonage — “It’s the classic “boy meets brand, brand over-promises, brand under-delivers, boy tells everyone he knows to avoid brand” cautionary tale.“, and
• Saturn — “In 1994 people bought Saturn for what it stood for. Today it is just another make to be judged on quality and price alone.”

Thanks to my guest contributors who provided provocative insights about how brands that could have been really good ended up failing to live up to their potential.  Their analyses contain great lessons for all brands who may be squandering strong equity or missing opportunities.

And hope for these brands, and others, is not lost — in fact, the following concluding remarks describe how all brands can maximize their potential.  These comments are from Scott Goodson — founder and CEO of StrawberryFrog (the agency behind iconic campaigns such as Coke, Old Navy, Heineken, and the current effort for True North).  The success of his agency speaks to what a talented guy Scott is (and I’m not just saying that because he has been so great to me for so long.)

Scott says, “I would say that any brands that are simply broadcasting to the consumer are not taking advantage of their full potential.  The new battleground is the profusion of media and how to tame and control it, and use it to your advantage to ensure your amazing content actually gets seen by the consumer.  Cultural Movement + Tools = Full Potential.

“I know this is new thinking in the new marketing world that has totally transformed everything, difficult to believe even, but the way things have worked in the past is not way how they can or will work in the future.  The 60 years of advertising that have gone before are not the systems of the future, marketing is today transformed.

“Brands that are taking advantage of their full potential are brands that spark cultural movements, not brands caught in the past.  Today brands can identify an idea on the rise in culture, they can crystallize, lead, curate and sponsor a movement.  Once you have a movement you can do anything in a fragmenting media world.“

Thanks for the inspiration, Scott.  I hope this has been an interesting series for everyone and you have learned as much as I have.

What do Lindsay Lohan,

the universal remote,

and the Bush administration

have in common?

They are all examples of things that could have been great but have ended up not living up to their potential.

Many brands have also turned out to be phenomenal disappointments.  The list of brands that fall into the category of wasted potential is longer than the list of Lohan’s missteps — and the reasons behind brand disappointments are as confounding as why someone never developed a universal remote that people could actually use.

But, for this, the inaugural post in a series of brands that have failed to live up to their potential, I’ll offer up a single example — GNC.  Yep, the brand of those 1500-square foot strip mall stores that sell vitamins, supplements, and sport nutrition products.

It’s no secret that demand for products that support a healthy lifestyle has skyrocketed in recent years — global nutrition is now a $228 billion industry.  And GNC Corporation, the company behind the GNC brand, says it’s “dedicated to helping consumers Live Well.”

But, what does GNC stand for?  I mean, I know the letters stand for General Nutrition Center, but what does the brand stand for?  The company has over 4800 retail locations in the U.S. alone, and yet the brand doesn’t seem to offer anything differentiating or compelling.  The shopping experience is unmemorable, the little advertising and promotion they do is generic, and other than a private label product line that offers common products at a discount, their product assortment lacks uniqueness.

It seems drugstores and warehouse clubs have taken over the mainstream vitamin market and Whole Foods has become the outlet of choice for specialty health and wellness products.  Even grocery stores now carry more power bars and protein drink mixes than my local GNC.

This has left GNC without a reason for being.  And it’s such a shame because the company has the history, focus, and distribution to be a great brand.

I’ve invited brand experts to contribute their thoughts on other brands that have failed to live up to their potential.  In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from luminaries like:

Jonathan Salem-Baskin (author of Branding Only Works on Cattle, the “dim bulb” blog, and Ad Age column),

John Moore (former Whole Foods and Starbucks marketer and now of Brand Autopsy fame),

Tom Fishburne (Brand Camp cartoonist and UK Managing Director for method products),

and others.

I’m so looking forward to learning from — and commiserating with — these folks about brands that could be really great.  I’m sure there will be lessons for all of us to learn.  Please check back next Monday for the next in this series on brand disappointments (I’ll still post other stuff during the week.)