Atkins Tries to get away from...Atkins

Brian Morrissey wrote about a re-launch of the Atkins site. The trouble of course, is that they are saddled with a brand that doesn't have a whole lot of appeal right now. They are clearly looking for a way to continue to have the brand Atkins stand for healthy living/eating. The marketing chief notes that their target audience doesn't even necessarily follow the Atkins diet.

So: the question is how do you evolve your brand away from your core product and toward a more sustainable, conceptual position? Certainly Atkins is not the first diet to rise quickly and then fall from favor. The phrase "fad diet" is deeply in the culture's lexicon.

Atkins is potentially going down the right path, by adding the concept of "Advantage" to the brand, and shifting focus from dieters to the broader segment of heathy living/on the go people.

I grabbed that graph from BlogPulse, and I think it shows an interesting phenomenon as well: notice how Atkins and South Beach both rise in tandem around holidays/resolution time? This graph doesn't show this, of course, but one can easily imagine that a lot of that discussion is among people saying they are moving from Atkins, to South Beach.