I’ve just finished reading this story in which a marketing agency rails against the British media for forcing a re-think over the Post Office’s brand. In order to compete outside the UK, the Post Office was renamed Consignia in a widely-derided move. It’s recently announced a return to the old name (at vast expense, no doubt).
Obviously the agency is bitter about the whole thing, claiming it’s now impossible to be creative with brands, and saying that brands most people regard as strong today have equally odd names.
Are they right? Is it impossible now to be creative with company names and images? Have the massed ranks of PR and marketing experts disillusioned us to such a degree that anything they do is greeted with skepticism?
Like most people, I found PriceWaterhouseCooper’s plan to rename its consulting arm ‘Monday’ funny. Why? There are plenty of established chains with odd names. Is the marketing industry shooting itself in the foot, or are the media and the public automatically cynical today?
They spend so much time and money, and come up with such crap.
Eg “Buzzle” for the online Apple collaboration in Australia - what a dumb piece of shit. They paid hundreds of thousands for that (or would have done, had the whole thing not gone bankrupt before bills were paid) and something obvious like “AusMac.com.au” would have been so much more relevant.
“Accenture” was another howler - cost millions, worth nothing. Meaningless, vague, confusing. What the fuck does it mean? It has that nebulous pseudo-glossy-faux-business crap about it like nebulous website blurb full of “solutions” and “convergence”.
And I mean why the hell rename the Post Office? What’s the point? And why “Consignia”? Lots of old people use the post office. They use it because it is an office where they go to post things. I mean at least give it useful, relevant title like “UK Mail” or something.
I mean “Monday” - wtf?!!!
Yes - “Monday” - does have a meaning, it means the first day of the week, not your crappy fuckwit spin-off company. I’ll bet Wolff Olins absolutely creamed it off you for that one. Why not just call it something simple, like “Pro-Consulting” or something?
This was the point of the article. Lots of these names are silly, but so are many of the names we take for granted. Boots? Obvious name for a chain of dispensing chemists. Carphone Warehouse? Do they still sell ‘carphones’?
I tend to agree that it’s money for old rope, but think there might be something to this chap’s comments. Consignia wasn’t intended to be the trading name for the Post Office in the UK, IIRC, but for international use where ‘Post Office’ would be meaningless or misinterpreted. What’s so awful about ‘Monday’, beyond the meaningless babble accompanying the relaunch?
It’s the waste of money aspect. It’s the fact that consultants are paid an awful lot of money to have ideas. Whatever the idea turns out to be, having shelled out for branding consultancy the company feels they ought to accept it.
It’s also that we the consuming public feel somehow dissatisfied, and “silly” names are a good thing to focus our dissatisfaction upon. It’s easier for Janine Journalist to write a front pages story saying “ha ha look at the silly corporate scum, they’ve spent millions on a name and it’s crap” than it is to write a story that says “oh dear, look at the management practices of the corporate scum, they’re not as tasty as they’d have us believe”. The second story gets on the business pages, and most people don’t read it. It’s easier to mock obvious, superficial things, like names, than it is to get serious about exactly what it is that displeases us about large corporations.
I think that a branding and marketing consultant should be bloody well aware enough, early enough, of the swell in opinion against newstyled brand names to have not pushed them, instead of whinging about it far too late. Yes, management know about their business, but image is in the eye of the beholder. I’m disappointed that the gentleman from Dragon should have written an article basically bleating about his incomptence as a brands guy.
By the way, Boots is called Boots because it was founded by a Mr Jesse Boot. Mind you, if you want to find the buggers online, you have to remember that they’re wellbeing.com.
Mmm. I certainly agree about that particular article; it did reek of desperation (‘please, clients, don’t leave us!’), and you’d hope that marketing experts would understand the importance of public perception. Then again, I bet they did ‘test’ the name … but then again, maybe what people say in focus groups doesn’t compare to what ‘the media’ or ‘the public’ say.
Because, even well-established corporate names don’t mean anything other than the corporation. Consider: GE (the company’s official name, BTW), GM, RCA, McDonald’s (which hasn’t had anything to do with the McDonalds for nearly 50 years, and doesn’t mention what it sells), Exxon, Enron, Dynegy, Aguila, Conoco, Mirant, Intel, Aetna, Walgreen, Alcoa, Nabisco, Cigna, Solectron, Sara Lee, Raytheon, TRW, Excelon, Southern, Fluor, Masco, Avayla, etc.
And one reason why companies want to use names like this is that some overliteral wiseass complains that the company make something not mentioned in its name and that’s wrong. In other words, if General Electric handles financial services, someone will point out that that has nothing to do with electricity. So they become GE. It’s the same with many others: people these days seem to be confused when a name does not describe something precisely, so you can’t be specific it you want to handle a multitude of services.
Ultimately, the fault, dear Istara, is not in the companies, it’s in ourselves.
I think I once read an article claiming that these made-up names are preferred as they can be tailored to avoid any potential negative connotations in other languages, can allos easy acquisition of (say) web domain names and generally avoid treading on anyone else’s toes.
I’d like to provide a link, but I can’t remember where I saw it.
So how do they actually check these names against different languages? How many languages would that be anyway, and which ones? It may be good to make sure that a proposed name doesn’t mean ‘idiot’ in Serbian or ‘bovine excrement’ in Toki Pona or ‘wastrel’ in Cree or ‘hermaphrodite’ in Cantonese (to name four languages that I have a greater-than-even chance of encountering in any given month) but there’s got to be a point at which they stop checking…
Presumably you check all of the countries you currently do business in and all those you plan to do business in, and potentially any other country with a large population.
If people deride this kind of corporate exercise, it’s usually because they see a huge expense which achieves - or seems to achieve- nothing, and which is often reversed a few years later at even more expense. And they suspect that the consultants / designers who propose these ideas are wearing Emperor’s New Clothes, or persuading their clients to do so. Another factor may be the feeling that while millions is being spent on pointless cosmetic change, the actual product or service is getting worse and being starved of investment.
I think the British Airways ‘tailfin’ fiasco was a classic example, but the Post Office / Consignia farce will also find a place in the textbooks.
It is true that many established names mean very little. However, most are not the result of some ‘design genius’ finding a way to shove a gazillion dollars down the toilet, and hence don’t inspire the same kind of popular ridicule.
Sunspace - when a company wants to adopt a new trademark or brand name, they do employ people to check in all relevant global territories whether (a) that name is available and hasn’t already been snapped up and (b) doesn’t mean anything embarassing. This can be a very time-consuming task, fraught with difficulties, but it has to be done.