By the time I got to This Old House, it wasn't exactly Victorian, but it was definitely vintage. And I had to renovate it.
TOH was the original home-improvement brand--the PBS television shows, a couple of websites, a magazine, and other businesses. When I got the house keys, the show had been around long enough to have been satirized on Saturday Night Live and in The New Yorker. TOH was the impetus for HGTV, and, in reruns, it was even much of that network's early programming.
But by 2005, even with home-improvement programming exploding, TOH's audience was drifting away. My hunch was that TOH had a problem common to many businesses--it was focused on the wrong thing. TOH had given up on its reason for being: The simple remodels it started with in 1979 included sweat equity from homeowners, who also learned a little carpentry and plumbing in the process. But TOH had since gone upmarket, concentrating on high-six-figure, expert renovations. The program's contractor hosts were perfectionists. Really annoying perfectionists. They never made a DIYer's mistake. Never bent a nail or trudged back in defeat to Home Depot. They were Martha Stewart in work boots.
But no one wants to be shown how inferior they are to others. Imagine a car company advertising that, hey, this is a great car, an amazing car, the absolutely best car; too bad you're not good enough to sit behind the wheel. Something had to change.
We've talked a lot about teams and workplace in this issue, and they are two crucial pieces to any successful business. There is a third crucial piece as well, and we lacked it at This Old House when I got there--right before the financial crisis. TOH had lost its brand purpose.
