Not just within the last 22 years by the way, as the 90s also saw plenty of “We have to update this character from the 1920s to fit into the 1990s!”
Basically any example of a company with an old mascot or brand identity that’s given a “fresh coat of paint” purely in an attempt to appeal to “younger generations” or “to better reflect current society.” This is almost always done just to get more brand recognition since on slow news days TV or Internet news will report it as a main story. The most recent example of this was when M&Ms revamped their characters to appeal to “Gen Z” which was mostly just having the female characters drop their high heels for regular flat shoes.
For me personally, it’s when 4 years ago the Red Baron Pizza Company introduced the Red Baroness to appeal to “Working class moms who are the majority purchasers of the pizza” but mainly I feel the company was just really poorly trying to pivot away from the fact the entire company is based on an incredibly fictional representation of a real life German war criminal to sell pizzas. By making a typical mom the Red Baron you’re just further confusing everything. Does anybody actually care that the new mascot for Red Baron Pizza is a woman anyway?
Maybe it’s just me but I really hate Kia’s new logo. Every time I see it I think it looks more like KM or KN than KIA. The old logo in the oval was perfectly fine - and readable! But I guess the new logo is more edgy or something.
Perhaps he got him mixed up with this cousin, whose Wikipedia article has this quote:
Richthofen was a de facto war criminal, as virtually all other senior commanders on the Eastern Front were guilty of violating the Geneva Conventions in the handling of civilians and prisoners of war, whose abuse Richthofen condoned. Richthofen’s death weeks after the war prevented his probable arrest and subsequent prosecution at the High Command trial.
It’s sourced from Wolfram von Richthofen: Master of the German Air War by James Corum (page 26).
(Full disclosure: the cousin is who showed up first when I googled the name in your post. For a bit I thought he was the Red Baron, until I googled that phrase and saw he was his fourth cousin.)
Don’t know if this counts as a campaign but GM’s new lower case logo is quite unimpressive. I’m sure someone got paid thousands to come up with it and I think they wasted their money.
Allied pilots in WWI did not have parachutes. They were actively discouraged (the cockpits were too small and the higher ups were afraid pilots would bail out too often, letting a perfectly good plane crash). Germans wore them toward the end of the war, but it may have been after von Richthoven’s death and, of course, he wasn’t going to shoot German pilots.
Not an updated mascot, but a failed attempt to make a brand appear more youthful: From what I understand, the “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” campaign did more harm than good. It did nothing to make younger people think Oldsmobiles were cool, and it alienated older buyers who wanted a “traditional” Oldsmobile.
Pearl Milling Company pancake mix & syrup. I totally understand why they changed the name, but the name they chose is uninspired, at best. It sounds like an Aldi/Walmart/other store brand.
Seriously. It’s like they acknowledge the brand is known as a stuffy old-man car, so the commercials these days are focused on imagery of young people, who refer to their car as “your Buick” (who really does that?) with all the tech gizmos. I recall the only reason the brand stayed off the chopping block when GM restructured after being bailed-out was that it was popular in overseas markets, particularly China. Buick stayed while Pontiac ended. I may be wrong on that.
