Organizational Communication in the News
Case Studies of Organizations and Organizational Communication in the Media
The Epic Fall of Guess Jeans And The Marciano Brothers
Technically, Guess went public in 1996. As far as control goes, though, it remains as much a family-run company–family-dominated, really–as when it was founded in 1981. Mercurial, obsessive and opinionated, Paul and his siblings, Maurice, Georges and Armand, erected a denim empire by imposing their will on everything: the jeans (tighter, lighter and more stylish), the marketing (the iconic and voluptuous Guess Girls, most notably Anna Nicole Smith, who turned a workman’s staple into a garment as seductive as lingerie) and, yes, even the glowing lettering in the headquarters…
That may ultimately be its undoing, according to numerous ex-employees and Wall Street analysts. “You need new management. Some new blood,” says Bridget Weishaar. “You need a new brand image. You need to be relevant to today’s youth.”
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Organizational Communication in the News by Rahul Mitra is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
