Deadpan, local, completely unbothered.
In 2024, a hoax went viral claiming the store was finally closing, and people were so upset they drove there from across the United States.
The store’s response: don’t believe everything you read, we’ll be here until the bitter end. Merch orders spiked. A rumour of death was the best marketing the brand had in a decade.
Then there’s Concorde. Retired in 2003 after the economics finally caught up with the romance. Twenty-three years later, there are volunteer groups restoring droop noses on museum airframes, a quarterly fan magazine, and Club Concorde, which has been trying to get one back in the air since 2011.
Nobody does this for a discontinued SKU. So what exactly are these people loyal to? Because it isn’t video rental and it isn’t supersonic flight.
A brand’s afterlife is the audit
Death strips a brand down to whatever it actually was. While a company is alive, you can never quite separate the brand from the distribution, the media spend, or the habit. Customers show up, and you flatter yourself that it’s love when a lot of it is convenience.
The afterlife removes every confound. No stores, no ads, no product. Whatever’s still standing is the real brand.
Run the audit on Blockbuster, and the answer is obvious. Nobody misses rewind fees. People are mourning Friday night, the walk down the aisle, the gamble on the box art.
Blockbuster was selling a ritual and thought it was selling rentals. Netflix killed the company in a decade, but it couldn’t kill the meaning. There is no scenario in which people form a fan club for an algorithm that autoplays the next episode. Netflix won the business and forfeited the afterlife.
The mourning test
Now run it on tech, where most brands are utilities wearing brand costume. Skype shut down in 2025 after two decades as a verb, and the funeral was a shrug. Quibi raised $1.75 billion and died without a whisper.
Meanwhile people are still grieving Google Reader thirteen years on, and Vine is so culturally load-bearing that TikTok is essentially built inside its ghost. The correlation between money spent and afterlife earned is approximately zero.
So what do you build?
A little friction, for a start. The Blockbuster aisle was the product. So was the Concorde boarding experience. Utilities that rush users to the outcome don’t get fan clubs. And the ritual has to stand for something contestable. Vine argued for creative constraint. Concorde argued the future should be faster and more glamorous. Nobody mourns a brand that agreed with everyone.
The resurrections are the proof. Polaroid came back because fans bought the last factory. Nokia relicensed the 3310 because the affection outlived the handset by a decade.
If you’re running a startup, maybe spend less time studying why brands died and more time studying what refused to die with them.
That residue is a pre-validated brief.
We’ve spent years optimising for habit and calling it loyalty. But habit is what happens when nobody’s deciding anymore. Ritual is friction people choose. People drove across America to Bend because of a rumour.
Habit dies the second a better product ships. Ritual gets a fan club.
Pony Studio is the Emerging-Tech Brand Studio — a London-based branding and creative design agency specialising in strategic brand development for tech companies worldwide. If you’re building something bold and want a brand that moves at the same speed as your ambition, let’s talk.