Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [78]
Okay, so people won’t fall apart if their favourite breakfast cereal changes its name, but they won’t like it, unless they asked for it to be changed. So a company is left with two options. Either it can make changes so subtle that the consumer will hardly notice (for example, the Shell logo has had over 20 subtle design updates, none of which have radically changed the company’s identity), or it must make sure that the changes it makes are in accordance with the customers’ wishes.
If a company ignores both options and makes changes for the simple reason that this makes sense for the company, then it may end up following in the same ill-fated footsteps of the brands featured in this chapter.
73 Consignia
A post office by any other name
When the UK state-owned Post Office Group decided to change its brand identity, a new name was the first on the shopping list. The reason for the brand makeover was partly to do with the fact that the 300-year-old Post Office Group was no longer simply a mail-only organization. It had logistics and customer call centre operations, and was planning a number of acquisitions abroad. There was also growing public confusion about what the purpose of the organization’s three arms – post offices, Parcel Force, Royal Mail – actually was.
‘We were researching hard into what this organization called the Post Office was facing,’ explained Keith Wells to BBC Online. Wells was from Dragon Brands, the brand consultancy that helped to repackage the organization. ‘What we needed was something that could help pull all the bits together.’
The consultancy considered the name of each division but none was appropriate. The name ‘Post Office’ was dismissed as ‘too generic’. ‘Parcel Force’ was, again, inappropriate. So what about ‘Royal Mail?’ ‘That has problems when operating in countries which have their own royal family, or have chopped the heads off their royals,’ said Wells. So Dragon Brands set about creating a new umbrella term for the whole organization. It wanted to come up with something non-specific, something which would work equally well throughout Europe, not just in the UK, and most of all something which didn’t tie the Post Office Group down to mail.
There is a wise logic behind such thinking. After all, many companies have come unstuck as time moves on and their name is no longer relevant. For instance, Carphone Warehouse may have once imagined a world full of consumers waiting to upgrade their carphones, but the reality is that now most people wouldn’t recognize a carphone if it hit them over the head. And other brands have managed to create very successful identities with brand names that have no direct relevance to their products, or anyone else’s products for that matter. This is especially true on the internet. While self-descriptive brands such as Letsbuyit.com and Pets.com flopped, vague and mysterious brand names such as Amazon, Google and Yahoo! have worked exceptionally well. Indeed, many of the largest brands in the world follow this model. To take the most obvious example, no one who spends their money via Richard Branson’s company expects to take home a real virgin, any more than people buying books at Amazon expect to be transported to a tropical rainforest. These names are about evocation. They are about the identity of the brand, not the product.
Before the Post Office, many other British institutions had also tried to bring themselves into the new millennium. British Steel had become ‘Corus’ following its merger with Koninklijke Hoogovens. ‘Centrica’ was a former arm of British Gas. ‘Thus’ was the new name given to the telecoms division of Scottish Power. The list goes on and on.
So what was the name given to the Post Office? On 9 January 2002, the group’s chief executive, John Roberts, stood