The game of the name

If a company as big as retailer Gap Inc can’t get rebranding right, executives elsewhere may be forgiven for thinking it’s not worth trying to switch.

It only took days of a widely lambasted new black-and-white online logo in 2010 for Gap to retreat to its well-known blue box with white capitals.

“We are clear that we did not go about this in the right way,” the then president of the Gap brand in North America, Marka Hansen, said at the time.

Gap’s speedy reaction shows the importance companies place on brand and why executives need to take rebranding seriously.

Brand is an important asset that generates value for a business, says brand consultancy Interbrand managing director Richard Curtis. “By investing in their brand, they are better able to differentiate their products and services,” he says. “This makes their brands harder to substitute and therefore generates greater demand and higher returns – for example, by attracting more customers, selling more to each customer, commanding higher prices and higher margins, or even diminishing costs.

“Brands also generate value by reducing risk and creating continuity in demand.”

But few brands last forever.

“If the trend that you started the brand on is no longer relevant to customers or consumers, that might be the right timing,” says boutique market research and planning consultancy Ruby Cha Cha managing partner Ellen Baron.

Kentucky Fried Chicken was a strong, loved brand, according to Baron, but after eating trends moved against fat, the company changed its brand to KFC to remove negative associations with high-risk fast food. (KFC wasn’t immediately available for comment).

The proprietor of Sydney restaurant Vera Chu, Annette Zubani, recently changed both the restaurant’s name, from Vera Cruz, and menu to Asian and Mexican Asian fusion dishes to add to the original Mexican offering.

Zubani decided to freshen her offering in response to a changing mix of local restaurants on Sydney’s north shore.“Everyone has their honeymoon period, where they’re the new restaurant and everyone has to try it,” she says.

She says the move has been good for business. Her strategy of making a major change to her product offering chimes with expert advice on rebranding.

The professionals say it’s important that any attempt to change a brand isn’t simply cosmetic. “It’s much more than just a new logo, that’s very much the tip of the iceberg,” Interbrand’s Curtis says. From his perspective, a brand “lives where your customer interacts with your business”.

Before embarking on a rebranding, managers need to look at how a comany’s brand is seen. “You really should be looking at your brand and understanding what it stands for now,” Ruby Cha Cha’s Baron says.

To analyse your brand, start with your customers, she says. Research questions could include: What do they see as your key attributes? What is your point of difference? What is your philosophy? What in their mind would you stand to lose by the rebranding?

When franchise Fastway Couriers embarked on a rebranding 18 months ago, it interviewed courier franchisees, surveyed customers and took feedback from potential franchisees.

“We used this feedback to help determine the way in which we would position the business,” says chief executive Richard Thame.

Companies should also canvass staff and stake-holders. Any change to a brand is going to need their buy-in to be a success, Baron says.

“If your company and your culture isn’t behind that kind of change, that could be a very, very bad relaunch … Staff don’t like change for change’s sake, they don’t understand it and they think that comes down to poor management.”

In some cases, the perception of staff may be a reason to change a brand. A new brand can contribute to cohesion after a merger, for instance.

Lion, the rebranded Lion Nathan National Foods business, chose to change its name last year to cement its new identity after a 2009 merger. A spokeswoman says the new brand reflects the company’s “shared purpose and identity as a business”, saying it helped unify staff as well as project a consistent brand.

The process of researching the brand probably will help divine which elements of heritage and history the company might want to retain.

“We identified from our initial research that people saw their local courier franchises as being reliable, helpful, honest, down to earth and most of all friendly,” Thame says. “We wanted to make sure all of those things were clear in the way that we positioned the brand.”

Another factor is timing. One decision is whether a company is going to migrate existing customers to the new brand over time, or try to switch in one move. “You need to think about who your customers are and how change-averse they might be,” Baron says.

Consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser has spent years migrating local brand Napisan to one of its global brands, Vanish. Given that Napisan had been on the market here for at least 40 years, the company didn’t want to lose customers when it adopted the new brand.

To do this, Reckitt Benckiser changed the Napisan brand in a staged process, introducing the name Vanish on the pack in 2004. It then progressively increased the size of the Vanish logo, while trimming back the Napisan logo.

“If you’ve got a local brand that you need to produce local advertising copy for it’s a very expensive way of supporting a brand,” a Reckitt Benckiser spokeswoman says.

And when the decision has been made to make a change, the management needs to get ready to sell it to the staff. “Just throwing a big relaunch party is not enough,” Baron says.

A company needs to be able to explain what the change means for the way its systems work, how the business is managed and how staff, such as the sales team, need to work with the new brand.

For Thame at Fastway, communicating the changes to employees and franchisees was a particularly important part of the rebranding process. The senior Fastway team conducted national roadshows explaining the changes in person to the company’s 700 courier franchisees. Fastway produced a brochure explaining the transition and handed out electronic keys giving access to an intranet site. That site contained video tips on areas like preparing vans, gave a timeline for the changes and also had messages from senior staff. “I saw this intranet site as a great tool to open communication between individual franchisees and the senior team directly,” Thame says.

Rebranding can be expensive and time-consuming and is not without risk. But for companies that manage the process well, the benefits can be seen in the business. For instance, Fastway is on track to post 12 per cent growth in revenue this financial year.

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