I still think they make the best donuts. When they finally opened stores here 10 or 12 years ago, I was there an hour early for the Grand Opening. I was the 3rd car in the lot, too.
But now, holy cow: first they stopped making crullers, now they’re taking donuts off the name.
I admit I don’t eat many donuts any more, no more than 1 or 2 in a year. And I don’t drink coffee, so I don’t go there for that. But now a brand that’s been around longer than me is going away, renamed to reflect changing tastes.
But the real question, to me, is how long do they keep that stupid apostrophe, now that the brand name really isn’t at all about “dunking” and more about drinking? I think Dunkin is a perfectly serviceable non-common familial-type brand name, one that is sufficiently simple and of plausable obliqueness of origin to translate well anywhere in the world.
Ah well, come January I’ll have to go get a box of donuts to take to work and wait until someone notices the new logo on the box.
I think the Dunkin’ thing is just a brand (capture) concept. Domino’s did it a few years back by dropping the Pizza in the name. Facebook dropped the The. BP did it by dropping British Petroleum. Pizza Hut even flirted with The Hut for a while. It makes it easier to tweet, soc meds, etc. in addition to opening up new revenue opportunities. Honestly, Dunkin’ hasn’t really been pushing doughnuts since the 80s and the early morning donut maker ads.
Even social media is being shortened to soc meds to make it a more hip thing to say for goodness sake!
Used to be, they would make the donuts in each store (“Time to make the donuts.”). They phased that out (and thus run out late in the day, when you might want them for dessert) and started cutting back on varieties and replacing them with other things.
If they lost the apostrophe, they could just as well change it to Duncan. (But then they would be victims of a [very] hostile takeover by Macbeth. Maybe not the best idea. Then again, the commercial with three witches making coffee and no donuts could be big.)
John Goodman has been calling the place Dunkin’ on the commercials for, what, a couple years now? If only I had put it together I would have known this was coming!!
Getting away from what made you successful has always worked so well for businesses.
Maybe they could take a cue from an annoying insurance company blanketing the airwaves with ads, and do “Dunkin’” spots with the chorus “Dunkin’ Dunkin’ Dunkin’…Dunkin!”.
I would have sworn that they had made this name change within the past year or two, or at least announced that they were going to make the change. I guess the article does say that they “toyed with the idea” for quite some time now, but I really had thought they made an announcement about this earlier (not just inferred from the commercials.)
That’s been going on a long time- I’ve lived in my neighborhood for 30 years and for as long as I can remember, the donuts have been made in one location and delivered to other the locations owned by the same person.
It makes sense to me. They put no effort into their doughnuts, which are barely better than grocery store doughnuts. Krispy Kreme is far better, and even better than that are the other places that make fresh doughnuts all day—like Duck Donuts, Sugar Shack, Astro Doughnuts, etc.
Seems like a move to be considered one of the big coffee chains, competing with the likes of Starbucks. Having ‘Doughnuts’ in their name renders them forever just an unhealthy doughnut shop, but now they’re in the same lucrative class as Starbucks, Peete’ s, etc., without having to do anything except remove a word. They are already marketing their coffee at the grocery store, just like the others.
Shipley Do-Nuts are much better. They are a regional chain.
Dunkin’ implies the use of a doughnut. Although I never liked ruining my coffee that way.
I guess many people just say Dunkin already. It’s too much trouble to say both words.
My love for doughnuts faded many years ago. I buy them a couple times a year. Maybe eat two.
I do like Shipleys croissant breakfast sandwich and buy them every couple weeks.
Tim Hortons’, while similar, is much better.
(For those of you who do not live on the northern tier, Timmys’ is a Canadian chain similar to (although in my humble opinion much better than) Dunkin’ Donuts. However, it occupies a place in Canadian culture more like Micky D’s here in the States.)
They should just change the name to what we all call them anyway: Double D’s.
From a branding perspective, this is perfectly fine with me. No one really called them Dunkin’ Doughnuts anyway and it’s been said already how it’s easier to put on the internet. This will go over just fine and in 5 years we will barely remember their full name.
They used to be a great doughnut shop that also sold coffee. For decades now, they’ve been a good coffee shop that also sells subpar doughnuts at inflated prices. I’m not sure when it changed but I think sometime in the 1990s. As of the late 1980s they still had a huge selection of big, tasty, incredibly fresh doughnuts to choose from. By about 2000, they had a paltry selection of small, insipid, often stale doughnuts. I still buy their coffee sometimes but I haven’t bought doughnuts there for years. You can get bigger, tastier, fresher doughnuts for less money at almost any supermarket that has an in-store bakery.
