We’re all familiar with companies that screw up their brands — Bud Lite coff coff — and I often wonder how they stay in business.
Chief among these offenders are companies which change their logo, a change which may not only cause customer confusion at the moment, but which can screw up future brand recognition as well.
One shining example of when it’s a good idea to change one’s logo is that of Federal Express, abbreviating that (unnecessarily-long) name to simply “FedEx” — and it made sense because ta-da! that’s what their customers had been calling them for years anyway. (And adding colors to differentiate the various services: genius.)
And to be honest, FedEx hasn’t made that many mistakes anyway, over their relatively-short corporate history.
That makes sense. But this one doesn’t.
WH Smith has left shoppers baffled after dropping ‘Smith’ from its signs in a trial rebrand. The High Street retailer has shortened the signs to simply state ‘WHS’ in a move that has confused customers.
The sign now consists of the three letters ‘WHS’ in a white font on a blue background, dropping the surname of William Henry Smith, who turned his father’s business into a nationwide concern.
I should point out that the stationery company has been known as WH Smith since 1846. (It was originally founded by WH’s father in 1792.) This is not a heritage to be messed with. The change is massive; it goes from this:
…which everybody knows, even internationally, to this:
…wherein the sign would idiotically incorporate the name of the town, as though customers would be unaware of where they are.
All that said, however, there may be some hope:
A spokesperson for WH Smith said the new signs were designed in mind to raise awareness of the range of products sold by the company.
He added that there were currently no plans to roll the new design out to further stores.
What fucking bullshit. How does shortening the company name increase awareness of the product range? More to the point, who was the moron who came up with this idea?
Here’s the thing. “WH Smith” is inextricably linked with things like books, stationery, newspapers and such. Yes, they sell other stuff such as toys and games — but mostly it’s paper and paper-related products, and it’s what they’ve been known for since the nineteenth century.
What are they going to do to their product range that would make so fundamental a change necessary? Expand into tools and hardware? Clothing and perfumes? Garden furniture?
You see, that’s the problem right there. It’s because WH Smith is so linked with paper and publications that it might be difficult to tell customers that “Oh no, we don’t just sell newspapers, we also sell motor cars and cookware!”
One ironclad marketing rule is that you never mess with your core brand’s identity — New Coke, anyone? — but if you want to expand your product offering, you do it under a new brand. It’s why Procter & Gamble doesn’t sell Pampers tampons, even though Pampers and Always are part of the same corporate entity, and often manufactured under the same roof. Most consumers, by the way, are blissfully unaware that the two products are made by the same corporation, nor should they or anyone else care, because it’s irrelevant.
So if WH Smith wanted to branch out and extend their product offering — and there’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily — they would need to separate the non-stationery items under a new brand, and preferably in a new location altogether. Frying pans ain’t magazines, Bubba, and they require a different approach altogether.
FFS: this is Marketing 101 stuff, and I feel like I’m explaining the need for personal hygiene to kindergartners. I’m sure there are all sorts of Smart Young Things at the Swindon headquarters of WH Smith — pardon me, WHS — who would love to bend my ear about The Need For Change, and Not Letting Your Brand Become A Dinosaur and every other marketing trope (I nearly said “tripe”, which would have been equally appropriate).
I would have thought that said Bright Young Things might have learned from the debacle of New Coke — yeah, I know, but that was such a Long Time Ago and Times Have Changed, Old Man — but it pains me to think that they couldn’t even learn from the very recent debacle of Bud Lite, whose dolorous ripples are still being felt even as I write this.
The problem, you see, is that Marketing always has to stay relevant. That’s what is taught, and it’s regarded as gospel — when in fact it really isn’t. The core principle of marketing — Never Fuck With Your Brand — is about as unyielding, and as timeless, as the principles contained in The Gods Of The Copybook Headings.
Then again, the latter are also regarded as old-fashioned nonsense nowadays, so perhaps this whole “WHS” nonsense is unsurprising.
I just hope that this “WHS rebrand experiment” remains just that, and is tossed into the trashcan quickly.
What will all the young genius’ of marketing say when the Hallowed Brand of Hahvahd completely collapses?
From the rumors I’ve read over the years, New Coke accomplished two objectives.
1) It allowed Coca Cola to go from sucrose to high fructose corn syrup (far cheaper). If you have people expecting a change in taste (We’re going back to “original coke”), then they will identify that taste change as the one they are expecting. Except that it isn’t.
2) There was a boardroom fight, and “give someone enough rope to hang himself” apparently applied. After the failure of New Coke, said board member “retired to spend more time with his family”, and the rest of the board settled back under control. Also, by having this public a failure, it can be brought up any time someone else proposes a change.
I’m not familiar with store or their recent performance numbers but I suspect that the rebranding is also tied to the steep decline in demand for print media — books, magazines and stationary that are their apparent core business. Not a lot of demand for yesterday’s news today when todays news arrives as it happens on your mobile. Demand is also down for books and stationary. I still add to my hardcover collection but why would I need a “paperback” for the long plane ride or a few days at the beach when a kindle or iPad takes less space and does more.
So the “rebranding” is likely more a desperate effort to expand their product line and reach a wider audience and drive up their probable declining sales volume.
A good reason to distrust “marketing” specialists. They don’t seem to know their asterisks from a rathole. Another is this habit of grabbing money mis-spent on name-branding venues. (Called “selling naming rights.”) A venue is a term of art referring to a performance facility — theatre, stadium, amphitheatre, et al. What that does is destroy the venue’s brand in favor of an entity (business) that has no relation to the venue’s line of business. What does a phone company have to do with show business? And how many Verizon Music Amphitheatres are there in the country? See? what was once unique and special to one particular performance space is now diluted and common, making it impossible to know which particular venue you’re referring to. Not even sure the name-rights-buying company benefits from the association. Give us back our Madison Square Garden, our Paul Brown Stadium, and our Veterans Fieldhouse.
Don;t forget Wrigley Field…
“I’m sure there are all sorts of Smart Young Things at the Swindon headquarters of WH Smith — pardon me, WHS — who would love to bend my ear about The Need For Change, and Not Letting Your Brand Become A Dinosaur and every other marketing trope”
It ain’t just the corporate world, either. One of the banes of my not-so-recent career in the Air Force was the constant barrage of new, improved, ill-considered “people programs” cooked up by those friggin’ geniuses in Personnel Plans and Programs. All of which required ever-expanding information and data automation support. And almost all of which collapsed in a year or two, because they were stupid and impractical in the first place. It is indeed a bad idea to have too many Smart Young Things in the same place at the same time.
It’s because someone has to justify their overpaid position, so things must change. Because reasons.
The company I work for recently re-did their logo. It’s both comical and sickening to listen to people from corporate (who make many multiples of my salary) go into exquisite detail about what the new logo means. “The contrasting colors represent our commitment to customer blah blah blah”. “The three squiggle lines indicate our ability to blah blah blah”. “Our customers will respond positively to the blah blah blah”.
For fuck sake, we produce commodity chemicals for sale to other industries. Our customers will respond to pricing, availability, and quality control, in that order. And nothing else. 10 out of 10 of them don’t give one single fuck about the logo.
I’m so ready to retire.
Don,
You’re absolutely right about price, availability and quality. The sign on the building and logo on the letterhead is solely to inform people that they are arriving at the right building or who the invoice and correspondence is from. That is absolutely it.
I worked at a hospital that was bought by another hospital or healthcare network. They changed the signs, then put planters in. When the plants grew, our name was obscured but the new owners was clearly visible. Thanks for erasing us new boss.
JQ
We’re running into this with the company I work for. Got bought 2 years ago by a much larger org. MuchLarger is very executive heavy (including marketing) and what I’ve noticed is there’s a shitload more meetings, initatives, busy-work, whatever in order to make said executives look busy and important.
I think these brand changes are just the Marketing (formerly known as sales) dept sitting around thinking they need to come up with something new to justify their continued existence.
Look at the change in font. Another mistake IMHO. The abbreviated logo with a sans serif font looks….neutered.
As a marketing guy, you might dig this. There’s a kind of cloak-and-dagger capitalism about international marketing and development of potato chip flavors. If you’re trying to choose between Pringles and Lay’s, there’s a good chance you’re choosing between two flavors developed by the same Men In Black.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/dec/02/the-weird-secretive-world-of-crisp-flavours?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us
I suppose the obvious babe change wood be to ‘Smiths’ which is what everyone calls them. However there is a toy shop chain called Smith’s so I suppose that option isn’t available.
WHSmith is one of those weird shops that sounds have gone bust decades ago. Empty dirty shops, with poor signage, selling nothing that can’t be found in the average supermarket. I suppose the outlets in railway stations and airports have kept the rest afloat. If I had to bet on a high street shop ceasing to trade in the next year it would be them.
I worked for an Aussie company for 20 years. The lifespan of the marketing manager there was about three years. Every one of them just had to do a brand “refresh” or some such. Talking to one of them about it and his take was essentially that that change goes onto their CV as a tangible thing they led / drove during their time.
I’ll also forgive the assumption that there’s any other types of Marketing people than Morons. At least from my expirience.
Ah, the mention of commodity chemicals and marketing takes me back to my youth as a young research engineer at a commodity chemical company.
Our R&D lab hosted three day quarterly reviews of our efforts. Attendees were all the R&D folks, all the production plant managers, all the plant tech managers, and all the corporate v.p.’s. The company president sat front and center in the audience with everyone else surrounding him with distance from him inversely proportional to rank.
Every research engineer and chemist presented on his (This was so long ago we were all male.) work and plans. This was a Big Deal.
One of the projects was going to introduce new products to our line, acids that were expensive, available in limited amounts from natural products, and sold to small markets. Our new process would seriously decrease costs and increase availability. A question arose about whether we could sell into the new markets we envisioned. Our president said he’d have marketing look into selling to these new customers. At which time one of the wheels from headquarters, call him “Tom”, derisively said, “Our marketing department couldn’t sell pussy on a troop train.”
About 30 years earlier many of the men sitting in that meeting had had the experience of riding on a troop train and remembered it well.
About a week later “Tom” was made v.p. of marketing, condign punishment for his snarky remark.