There may be no more difficult task in business than bringing a brand back from a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. But those who counted out the Irish-themed Bennigan's restaurant chain once it failed a few years ago didn't reckon with CEO Paul Mangiamele or a cadre of new franchisees willing to take a flyer on the venerable marque.

"There are no boundaries that can be set on a team that is so passionate and committed to a brand that nothing becomes an obstacle," Mangiamele told brandchannel. The restaurant-industry veteran was recruited by investors in 2011 to lead a turnaround of the brand that was bought out of bankruptcy in 2008 by a private-equity firm.

These days, Mangiamele is out touting the story of the iconic restaurant brand that was left for dead but has since reinvented and reopened with 85 restaurants, aiming for a total of 200 outlets of the new Bennigan's within five years. Mangiamele details the experience so far in a book, "Bennigan's Return to Relevance ... Bleeding Green 25/8."Continue reading...

You may have read (or red — see above) Ford's attempts so far to reposition Lincoln as a saddle without a horse. But at least one key indicator of brand equity shows that Lincoln already has been able to boost perceptions with a branding and advertising campaign even before much is available in the way of new vehicles that are planned under its revival.

Reintroducing the brand with its full-page "Hello Again" newspaper ads, a series of five TV spots, the renaming of the brand as "Lincoln Motor Company," and persuading talk show host Jimmy Fallon to rally his 7.3 million Twitter followers to crowdsource Super Bowl ad ideas has helped Lincoln quintuple its impression levels since early November, YouGov BrandIndex research indicates.Continue reading...

How low can you go? If you're Carlos Ghosn, you want to build a car cheap enough that Nissan finally can compete in the very lowest-priced segment of auto sales throughout the developing world. So as promised earlier this year, Nissan — up 30 percent on Interbrand's just-released 2012 Best Global Brands report — is moving forward with a plan to delve into the ultra-low-cost car market by offering a model for about $3,000 to $5,000.

And the Nissan-Renault alliance has promised to do so through a revival of the Datsun brand. Nissan plans to offer six Datsun vehicles, beginning in 2014, at a price range lower than all but a handful of smaller car makers in China and India, Ghosn told the Wall Street Journal. A $3,000 Datsun would be about one-third of the price of the currently least expensive Nissan, the $8,000 Tsuru compact.

By not doing so previously, the CEO of Nissan and Renault said that the company has left itself out of about 40 percent of the potential market in countries including India, Indonesia and Russia. "We just see an opportunity," Ghosn explained earlier this year. "Today, in all the markets we are present, there is a level of price below which we cannot compete, we have no offering. The risk is to do nothing."Continue reading...

Discerning bicycle enthusiasts with a taste for the finer things in life are in luck. Both Audi and DeLorean are producing cycles worthy of some attention. While the DeLorean sticks to the conventional man-made energy source, Audi’s concepts will provide a motorized option to help any cyclists who get a little bored with the continued cranking.Continue reading...

If hard times killed your brand in the past few years, don’t give up your rights. You may need them down the line when you want to try and revive the brand, as Nissan is now doing with Datsun.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a slew of old brands are being revived since they already have name recognition and some brand loyalty built right in. Classic American brands including Astro Pops, Boast logo shirts, and National Premium beer will start appearing on store shelves, while the Seafood Shanty restaurant chain is getting another go.Continue reading...

Since Activision announced its decided to stop making the Guitar Hero video game back in February and laid off hundreds of workers, did you think the fake-guitar video-game industry is dying?

After all, according to Wired, sales of Guitar Hero declined from 1.5 million just for the first month of Guitar Hero III back in 2007, to 86,000 for Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock for the entire year of 2010. Plus, licensing popular tunes costs a major chunk of change as well.

Those kinds of numbers led to Rock Band creator Harmonix being sold earlier this year by the now defunct MTV Games of Viacom to return to its roots as an independent studio.

But now, rocking on, Rock Band III will be reissued for folks who didn’t get it the first time around and need a Rock Band fix for the holidays, but the bigger news is that a new version will come out in 2012 and it will be “fundamentally reinterpreted,” according to an interview company execs gave to GiantBomb.com.Continue reading...

Motorola Mobility today unveiled its biggest news since being sold to Google in August — the return of the RAZR, which launched in 2004 and became (as CNN notes) "the best-selling cell phone brand of all time — until the iPhone came along" in 2007.

Unveiled at a press event with Verizon Wireless, the $299 (with a two-year contract) Droid RAZR smartphone will be offered exclusively by Verizon starting in early November.Continue reading...

Charlie Brown may have been insecure, but he dominated the comics pages for decades. Now comics pages are disappearing and the Peanuts gang has been busy fading away into the annals of pen-and-ink history.

That’s all about to change. Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty, and all the rest of Charles M. Schulz's iconic characters are entering into the digital and social-media worlds.Continue reading...