Tiger Woods is back, and that's good news for other troubled brands

From Boeing to Oscar Mayer, the lesson is clear: It's almost always better to rebuild a brand than start anew

Longtime airplane executive Alan Mulally took the wheel at Ford Motor Co. in 2006 asking the type of questions you’d expect from an outsider. Among the most pressing: Whatever happened to that aerodynamic family sedan named the Taurus?

The Taurus reinvigorated Ford in the 1980s but was killed after a botched redesign relegated it to rental-car status. In its place came the Five Hundred, a bulbous automobile as unloved as it was unknown. Mr. Mulally wanted Five Hundreds renamed Taurus and charged engineers with a necessary overhaul.

If Mr. Mullaly’s hunch that it’s bad business to discard a brand that cost decades