Companies are trying to revamp their products to lure buyers. A promotional event in New York for a stain remover.

Face-lifts for people, products and even corporations.


The doldrums of the Great Recession has given way to the do-over era. Sitting still and waiting it out may mean getting left behind. Instead, businesses are thinking of ways to repackage, rename and revise their products and strategies to make the customer feel good about spending again.

“There’s a saying: ‘When times are good, advertise. When times are tough, advertise more,’ ” Dan Beem, president at Cold Stone Creamery, an ice-cream chain based in Arizona, told The Times’s Stuart Elliott.

The recession has become the mother of reinvention. And what better time than now to revamp with some plastic surgery- Maybe those sagging jowls are as much of a weight as a lackluster retirement account. But a face-lift is no longer just a facelift. It’s now branded as the Lifestyle Lift or the QuickLift, wrote The Times’s Catherine Saint Louis. Patients pick an advertised operation, and are then referred by a national organization to a doctor who will perform the procedure, wrote Ms.Saint Louis.

“What’s new is this is plastic surgery being marketed to the public as a widget,” or product, Dr.Brian Regan, a plastic surgeon in San Diego, told Ms.Saint Louis. “People are buying, so buyer beware.”

The retail industry is also getting a face-lift. High-end stores like Neiman Marcus and Saks will offer more midpriced merchandise, wrote The Times’s Stephanie Rosenbloom.J.C.Penney is installing self-service computers to help customers browse. And Macy’s stores will be stocking merchandise that customers request and getting rid of items they complain about.

“I think in this economy we’re seeing a lot more of an open dialogue with the retailers than we had in the past,” Adele Arkin, who runs an exercise-and-socialize group in New York that gathers in shopping malls, told Ms.Rosenbloom.

Companies now want to show that they are on the same level as the customer and are approachable, which means names and logos are changing. Ally Bank (“A Better Kind of Bank”) is the lender formerly known as GMAC Bank, once part of General Motors, which emerged from bankruptcy.

Some stiff-looking corporate logos are receiving makeovers. “Logos have become less official-looking and more conversational,” Patti Williams a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told The Times’s Bill Marsh. “They’re not yelling. They’re inviting. They’re more neighborly.”

Bold, block capital letters are replaced by lower case to soften the voice of corporate authority. Sprigs, bursts and friendly flourishes of logos like Kraft Foods and Amazon.com create logos that smile, Mr.Marsh wrote. And happier colors abound: electric blue, yellow, red, purple, orange and green.

All these efforts are trying to get the consumer to feel better about buying more stuff. And there is plenty of new stuff: food, cars, drugs and soap from companies like General Mills, Mars and Unilever, wrote Mr.Elliott.

But many marketers are bringing out new products under the banner of brands that consumers are already familiar with, wrote Mr.Elliott. After all, companies don’t want to rebrand themselves out of existence. Haagen- Dazs Five, an ice cream made of five natural ingredients (basically the same as the ingredients in its regular ice cream), sells under its brand of superpremium desserts. The product might be new, or rather, new-ish, yet it’s already familiar.

Aliza Freud, chief executive at She- Speaks, which helped the Haagen- Dazs Five campaign, told Mr.Elliott: “This is a very good time for brands to get out there in new and different ways.”

Even if it’s about selling the same old product.