Splendid Isolation

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.