BEWARE
THE FRUMIOUS BRANDING CONSULTANT
Avoiding The
Side Effects Of Branding
The following is an article in the
Consignia’s
Name Consigned To Past
Consignia, the postal company once known as Royal Mail [the
British Postal Service], will today return to its old name in an
embarrassing climbdown.
British mail bosses were the subject of ridicule in March last year when
they spent £500,00 ($733,000) on branding consultants who
rechristened the venerable institution. Now the group is to spend another £1m
consigning the Consignia name to history, as it alters the signs on 3,000
buildings to meet company law requirements.
The seemingly trivial issue come as the crisis-hit company today
announces losses for the year of £1.1bn ($1.6bn) and 17,000 job cuts.
Chairman Allen Leighton, who has been a driving force behind ridding the
company of its much-mocked name, will give details of the rebranding plans
today.
Mr. Leighton, who has combined his role with 10 other directorships,
yesterday resigned as a non-executive director of Scottish Power. He spends two
days a week at Consignia.
With the end of the Consignia brand will go thousands of sheets of
headed letter paper, business cards, and sales dockets.
As well as this, mugs bearing the Consignia name and promotional items
such as chocolate wrapped in Consignia paper handed out at company-sponsored
events still need to be used up.
It’s difficult to comment knowingly on the logic behind this event
because we don’t have all the facts. But a few things seem obvious. For
example, were they trying to change the name to offset the image of poor
service? Well, first of all, that has nothing much to do with branding. And as
we’ve often noted, you don’t change the perception of a company by
manipulating symbols. If the reality is poor, change the reality.
We don’t know, either, whether the so-called branding consultant was a
marketing specialist, or a graphics company selling its services as branding. If
you look behind the branding fad, you will find, in most cases, that it’s
driven by graphics design firms who, like the weavers of the Emperor’s
clothes, sold high and delivered low.
As for the name Consignia, that too is part of the weird fad of the past few years,
in which strange names are dug up to replace the good old-fashioned names. The
are presumably designed to be memorable, to imply some reality about the
company, and to attract attention. Sometimes, a new name is required to reflect
the fact that the old name no longer represents what the new company does. Accenture – the former consulting arm of Arthur Anderson (phew! They
got out in time) – is a good example of a name that can be made to work. It
may be a leap from, say, accentuate to the focus on what the firm really does, or accent
on the positive. At least it
sounds like it. The branding comes from a brilliant campaign for the consulting
firm that promotes the name. It takes a lot of millions of dollars, but it may
work. But Consignia? Well, you saw
what happened.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, a fancy name itself that at least ties to the two
merged firms, has just announced that it’s calling its consulting arm Monday.
The implication, I suppose, is that we start solving your project first thing
next week. Or that (to refer to a former president’s campaign), it’s dawn in
The point is that when you get caught in a fad, like branding, it’s
easy to lose sight of the realities of relating to a market. When you let the
branding merchants take over the marketing, it’s like letting the cabin boy
take over the helm. CEOs and managing partners would do well to take a dim view
of fancy names that are now computer generated, and have the sterility of a
rock, and of pie-in-the-sky concepts of branding, which can be the most
unfulfillable prophecy that any marketer can make.
One of the most amusing things to watch over the years is the trend in
children’s names. Whole generations will be named Heather followed by other generations named Brianna.
An amazing phenomenon, carried into corporate life. And the greatest
beneficiaries are not the clients, but the so-called branding specialists. All
that stationery down the drain. How many trees died for the branding and image
consultants and logo merchants?