Brand & Purpose

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, ’s audience was drifting away. My hunch was that had a problem common to many businesses—it was focused on the wrong thing. had given up on its reason for being: The simple remodels 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.