Yes, yes, yes, I love the Big Boy as much as anyone. Of course I had to have a photo op when I was in L.A. But I do have to be honest: it’s been many a moon (which Dr. Evil rode past in his Big Boy Rocket, of course) since I went inside a Big Boy and paid them money for something.
Why do we let the brands we love die?
If people really did love Hostess brands, we could have skipped the No-More-Twinkies jokes that, at their peak, occurred 48 times per minute around America’s office coffee makers (statistics approximated).
So what happened to all these brands in this list on Business Insider?
Generalizations are easy: they were old and irrelevant; they were upstaged by rivals; some were poorly managed, most were weak already, and the recession came along for the coup de grâce.
I’ll bet it’s more nuanced than that. They failed to recruit the young, to really keep pace with what their future customers would want as a new generation. They got a little too expensive for what they were providing, perhaps. They failed to look alive. They got stuck in dying malls. They had no social media interest and therefore no strategy. They failed to attend the details that do make a difference even though they’re boring—cleaning the sneeze guard on the salad bar and making sure the urinal mints don’t give off such a strong odor it puts people off when they’re standing at the hostess stand, that kind of stuff. [NOTE: THAT LINK THERE IS NSFW. IT’S PRETTY WONDERFUL, BUT IT’S NSFW.]
If you’re in the mood to make a comment, I’d love to see in the comment section what you think some of these places did wrong. (If there are no comments yet, hey, it’s only a matter of time—soon the flood will come. And yours will be first! Everyone will read it! …okay, enough desperate salesmanship. If I were Blimpie, this would be a perfect example of how not to act.)
