Brand Failures_ The Truth About the 100 Biggest Branding Mistakes of All Time - Matt Haig [79]
Dragon Brand’s Keith Wells was equally happy with Consignia. ‘It’s got consign in it. It’s got a link with insignia, so there is this kind of royalty-ish thing in the back of one’s mind,’ he explained to the BBC. ‘And there’s this lovely dictionary definition of consign which is “to entrust to the care of”. That goes right back to sustaining trust, which was very, very important.’ In addition, the name change had been approved by the controversial government minister Stephen Byers, who was at that time the trade secretary.
The reaction from the media and the general public was considerably less sympathetic. Some thought it sounded like a new brand of aftershave or deodorant. Others thought it was the name of an electricity company. The BBC’s website referred to ‘the most notorious ever Post Office robbery – that of the name itself’. The website also asked the British public to e-mail their opinions of the name. Their responses were almost unanimously critical of the rebrand.
‘Consignia doesn’t sound like the national institution that the Royal Mail does. Instead, it reminds me of that brand of antiperspirant, called Insignia,’ wrote one.
‘It’s a poor excuse to say that Royal Mail could be confusing when it takes a paragraph to explain what Consignia means,’ wrote another.
One respondent e-mailed in with his tongue firmly in cheek saying that ‘given the current crisis within the Post Office, Consignia Plc seems like an excellent name. It is an anagram of Panic Closing.’
Soon it became clear that the name change was not having a positive effect. Although the Post Office had shifted to become a plc, the public still felt it belonged to them. If they didn’t like the new name, they therefore felt it was their right to be angry.
As the Post Office’s corporate performance started to falter, the name was blamed even more. ‘The name got muddied with the comments that business is doing appallingly – this idea that nothing had been the same since the name change. It’s a soft target,’ said Wells.
Soft target or not, May 2002 saw a U-turn as the new Consignia chairman Allan Leighton confirmed the name was to go – ‘probably in less than two years.’ He also admitted that he hated the name. ‘There’s not really a commercial reason to do it, but there’s a credibility reason to do it,’ he told BBC TV’s Breakfast with Frost programme. He said the name change was ‘unfortunate’ as it had coincided with a period of underperformance by the company (it lost over £1 million a day during one month in 2001).
However, the news was lost on some people, as the Consignia brand had failed to become a household name. ‘I didn’t know that the Post Office wasn’t called the Post Office,’ one member of the public told a radio news interviewer at the time of the announcement. ‘Everyone I know calls it the Post Office.’
Lessons from Consignia
Don’t change for the sake of change. The public perception was that the whole rebranding exercise was pointless. This impression was confirmed by a lack of advertising. ‘We thought what would be the point of advertising if all you would be saying is this name change is happening which is not going to affect you?’ justifies Dragon Brands’ Keith Wells.
Realize that business realities have an impact. The new brand suffered due to the fact it coincided with a poor period of corporate performance.
74 Tommy Hilfiger
The power of the logo
Tommy Hilfiger is one of the world’s best-loved designer clothing brands. During the 1990s Tommy Hilfiger moved from being a small, niche brand targeting upper-class US consumers to becoming a global powerhouse with broad youth appeal.
But then, in 2000, the brand was suddenly in trouble. From a high of US $40 per share in May 1999, Tommy Hilfiger’s share price fell to US $22.62 on New Year’s Day 2000, and was cut in half again by the end of that year. Sales were slowing