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Deliver on your promises. ‘ITV Digital’s promises ran ahead of its ability to deliver, it was a totally new system,’ says Marc Sands, the platform’s first director of brand marketing.

Don’t tarnish related brands. ‘The greatest mistake was to rebrand it ITV Digital, dragging ITV, one of the strongest consumer brands, into disrepute,’ says Sands.

Be realistic. ‘I know what it costs to set up digital transmitters,’ says Gerald H David, chairman of Aerial Facilities, experts in digital radio engineering. ‘ITV Digital’s demise is all part of a pretty unrealistic plan. The ITC put the cart before the horse when it licensed it.’

Understand the competition. ‘Carlton and Granada didn’t anticipate such a competitive environment,’ says John Egan, director of operations and strategy for the platform until 1999.

76 Windscale to Sellafield

Same identity, different name

At the risk of understating the case, nuclear energy has always had something of an image problem. When incidents happen at nuclear plants this ‘problem’ becomes a nightmare.

For instance, when massive amounts of radioactive material were released from the UK’s Windscale atomic works in 1957, following a serious fire, the consequences were disastrous. The local community in Cumbria were understandably terrified about the health implications of uncontained radiation.

Rather than close the plant down, the government believed the best way to put distance between the disaster and the nuclear plant as a whole was to change the name, from Windscale to Sellafield. However, everybody knew that the nuclear facility was essentially the same, and so all the negative associations were simply transferred to the new name. The name-change certainly didn’t stop the rise in health problems in the area as this 1999 article from a local Cumbria newspaper testifies:

While animals are still being irradiated in laboratories all over the country to ‘study’ the effects, Dr Martin Gardner and colleagues of the Medical Research Council in Southampton have learned that the children of fathers who worked at the Sellafield nuclear-reprocessing plant were six times more likely to be afflicted by leukaemia than neighbours whose fathers had not worked at the plant. Sellafield, formerly called Windscale, has experienced so many episodes of radioactive leakage that the government changed the name to disassociate the plant from its history. There is an unusually high incidence of childhood leukaemia in the area. Dr Gardner’s study seems to indicate that it is caused by damaged sperm, which leaves the father intact but visits the government’s sins upon unborn children.

The new epithet therefore failed to generate any increase in goodwill towards the plant. Julian Gorham, creative head of the Brand Naming Company, claims that name changes are pointless without meaningful organizational changes. ‘Windscale, Sellafield, it’s the same thing isn’t it? Nothing has changed.’

Lessons from Windscale/Sellafield

Change needs to be fundamental. A name change won’t fool anybody if the procedures remain unchanged.

You can’t hide your history. Everybody in Cumbria knew about the 1957 incident, regardless of the new name, as its consequences were still felt for many years.

Over the following pages are even more of the most notable rebranding misses.

77 Payless Drug Store to Rite Aid Corporation

In 1998, Payless Drug Store, a regional chain of chemists operating across western USA, changed its name to Rite Aid Corporation. The name change required several million dollars spent on advertising just to gain a level of local awareness equivalent to the previous brand name. The reason for the change was the acquisition of the Payless Drug Store by the Rite Aid Corporation, which owned its own brand of chemists throughout the United States. They therefore thought the rebrand was a logical step. But what happened? Soon after the Rite Aid acquisition and brand conversion