Cultural Innovation/Rebranding Exercise: Underperformance of brands, How Tesco lost its way, Tesco's Weaknesses, Potential future trends

Cultural Innovation/Rebranding Exercise
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Underperformance of brands
Companies may face problems connecting with customers and their brand loses value over time. This could occur gradually or may because by a series of events that the organization fail to deal with. For instance, British Petroleum (BP) has recently received bad press for its actions after the Gulf oil spill, with the company placing the blame to contractors rather than providing answers on how to avert such incidences in future. As such, organizations may appear disengaged from the public and fail to address customer concerns are likely to face discontent and backlash.  According to Holt & Cameron (2010, p75), for branding to succeed then branding should be a social innovation venture that takes into account strategies that integrate culture. The Cultural Innovation Theory will be used to analyze the case of Tesco. 
How Tesco lost its way
One of the challenges facing Tesco is connecting with customers, as the company lost identity, simply becoming a generic big grocer without unique features that attract customers to the stores (Anonymous, 2012, pp. 14-15). With the changes shopping habits Tesco did not attract more customers who did not wish to visit the out of town stores.  Tesco placed too much focus on customer loyalty programmes, while ignoring to invest on in-store experience unlike Morrison’s that innovated and improved the store experience. The workplace culture and strategies should be structured to facilitate innovation breakthrough and simply not incremental innovation that is temporary (Davila & Epstein, 2014, p. 98).
Tesco’s Weaknesses
Failure to innovate and complacency meant that the brand was no longer attractive as the management was more preoccupied with making profits, and not addressing customer issues. Having a clear vision and identity are crucial aspects to the growth on a brand, where lack of innovation and confusion what Tesco stand for drove away customers (Anonymous, 2012, pp. 14-15). For instance, Aldi & Lidl is an aggressive discounter and customers associate the chain store with low prices, while Waitrose deals with quality brands. On the other hand, there is low differentiation compared to Asda, Morrison’s and Sainsbury.
Potential future trends
In future, Tesco is likely to face a fragmented market and will need to connect better with custom...