Great article from Forbes that sheds some useful insights on why and when to rebrand…
“Rebranding can be a good way to better reflect your company’s current focus and growth, but the process must be handled with the utmost care. Otherwise, you risk alienating your existing customers while failing to attract any new ones.“
Category: rebrand
Subway Reveals Major New Brand Look
Looking to connect with younger guests and cement its role as a fresh-food leader, Subway changed its logo, store design, and so much more.
Subway’s revamped design was built with the customer, and the future, in mind. Consider it Subway’s new duds to the biggest party in foodservice.
On Monday, the chain with 45,000-plus units globally unveiled what it’s labeling the most extensive launch in company history: a massive brand evolution that affects everything from pictures and colors to function and form. The hefty investment, which began in earnest around two years ago and will take “multiple years to rollout,” will help Subway remain at the forefront of a category it has historically fronted—freshness and quality—and broaden its appeal with younger customers, says Chris Carroll, Subway’s chief advertising officer.
“We can now go in with confidence and get more aggressive in our engagement,” Carroll says. “It’s like going into a party when you have a new outfit on. You feel more confident than if you were in an old pair of jeans.” Read more here.
How Uber Can Fix Its Reputation
“An arrogant behemoth”
From Yahoo Financial:
Dean Crutchfield, a New York-based branding specialist, struck an even more dire tone than Kerris.
“The first thing they have to recognize is that brands, like people, get sick,” Crutchfield explained. “Uber needs to admit it’s slightly broken. This was a cool, game-changing brand, and now it’s an arrogant behemoth. It sort of lost itself in its success. One has to respect customer and driver’s emotions, and I think they’ve forgotten about that. It’s a problem not just of their business, it’s a problem of the leadership. That leadership reflects poorly on the brand.”
Crutchfield pointed to United Airlines’ (UAL) recent controversy, in which a passenger was forcibly removed from a flight. United CEO Oscar Munoz exacerbated the public backlash by initially blaming the passenger for the brouhaha. United subsequently issued several apologies and promised a sweeping review of policies, particularly around crew behavior and passenger incentives.
“[T]here was a real arrogance where the CEO did not recognize their weaknesses and faults,” Crutchfield said.
Uber, for its part, knows it has a serious problem on its hands. Kalanick told employees in March he planned on hiring a COO “who can partner with me to write the next chapter in our journey.” Uber board member Arianna Huffington, meanwhile, is helping lead an “urgent” investigation into one engineer’s sexual harassment claims against the company.
But while that’s certainly a start, it’s clear company-wide changes to Uber must go far deeper. Full article.
How A Logo’s Color Shapes Your Mind
Turn Me On
Gr
eat brands are about storytelling and brand voice success comes when you mitigate the turned-off reaction.
Wired’s Best New Logos of 2016
From Instagram to Budweiser, here are the year’s most notable new logos from Wired http://snip.ly/74erj
As Wired put it, “It was a messy year for logos. The presidential candidate with penetrative, Web-1.0-style graphics won. America’s largest art museum drew ire from critics for deviating from its iconic emblem. The Tokyo Organizing Committee scrambled to find a new symbol for the 2020 Olympics, after its original selection faced allegations of plagiarism.
But it wasn’t all chaos. Trends emerged, like fold-over icons and pleasing gradient hues. Designs from the ’60s and ’70s found new life in clever brand revivals. And designers continued to strive towards visual identities that are equal parts user-friendly, attractive, and inventive. We exit 2016 with more logos than we entered with. Below, a selection of the year’s most notable work.”
Procter & Gamble Co. is striking back in the razor wars
Category busters abound, P&G fires a salvo with a digital campaign taking aim at online rival Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club. Here’s what I shared with Sharon Terlep at The Wall Street Journal:“Being less serious — and less ostentatious — is a smart move for Gillette, which turned consumers off with decades of marketing aimed at making men feel obligated to buy its razors. The category has been dominated by inadequacy marketing, with things like ‘The best a man can get,” Gillette’s tagline. The Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s come at it with something fun and innovative. The “Welcome Back” concept creates some curiosity, and that’s what it’s about. The question is: Is it too late?”
MetLife Grounds Snoopy. Curse You, Red Baron!
Here’s what I shared with Sapna Maheshwari at The New York Times:
MetLife is firing Snoopy.
The “Peanuts” character, one of the most recognizable figures in American pop culture, is being retired after more than 30 years of appearing in print ads, TV commercials, marketing materials and on the sides of MetLife’s blimps at sports events.
No more big-nosed beagle in the flight cap and goggles chasing the Red Baron on Metlife’s airship. No more television commercials featuring a smiling Snoopy navigating life’s treacherous waters to sell insurance. Cuddly Snoopy hitting a home run? Out.
MetLife, one of the largest insurance companies with 100 million customers worldwide, said the move is part of an effort to update its corporate emblem for international competition.
The global chief marketing officer for MetLife, Esther Lee, announced the change on Thursday, saying that Snoopy was adopted as a symbol in 1985 to make the company seem “more friendly and approachable during a time when insurance companies were seen as cold and distant.”
“We have great respect for these iconic characters,” Ms. Lee said in the announcement. “However, as we focus on our future, it’s important that we associate our brand directly with the work we do and the partnership we have with our customers.”
The company said it wanted a “clean, modern” design that included the colors blue and green to “represent life, renewal and energy.” They form what it has called “the partnership M.” The broader MetLife palette was expanded to include a range of vibrant secondary colors, reflecting “the diverse lives of its customers,” a company statement said.
There is also a new tagline, “MetLife: Navigating life together,” replacing the old “Get Met. It Pays.”
Dean Crutchfield, an independent brand consultant in New York, said that Snoopy was relevant at the time that it was introduced, but that the change was a smart move that recognized the company’s changing business. “Snoopy was brought in to connect emotionally with consumers,” he said, but was no longer helping as a brand. “It is no longer relevant to its target audience.”
Already, the company’s website shows no sign of the floppy-eared dog whose adventurous daydreams won the hearts of multiple generations of Americans, in the Charles M. Schulz comic strip and its spinoffs.
In the comics, on TV and movies, a hit pop song and even the stage, Snoopy was the loyal pup who loved his “round-headed” human, Charlie Brown, but could never remember the boy’s name. His rich fantasy life included characters like “Joe Cool,” a hipster in dark sunglasses, and the World War I flying ace whose doghouse was transformed into a British biplane.
But now Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel are grounded, at least when it comes to selling life insurance.
The company called the decision the “most significant change” to the brand in decades. Ms. Lee, who joined MetLife last year, conducted research among more than 55,000 customers worldwide and found them “overwhelmed” by the pace of global change. MetLife had to evolve, Ms. Lee said.
“What we did want to figure out, as we started to become this more purpose-built, modern company, is do those characters go beyond being friendly and approachable?” she said.
The answer turned out to be no, MetLife discovered in its research.
Consumers thought the “Peanuts” characters were friendly and approachable, Ms. Lee said, but did not associate them with traits like leadership and responsibility. Nor did the characters affect interest in buying insurance.
The research also asked customers point blank if they would mind if MetLife stopped using Snoopy and the gang. “People are indifferent from us moving away from the characters,” Ms. Lee said, adding that more than 1,000 other brands around the world use Peanuts characters in their marketing. “They basically don’t care.”
The life insurance giant has over the years tried to find a way to make its business, overshadowed by the terms “death benefits” and “beneficiaries,” more approachable, and for years Snoopy and other Peanuts characters provided the warm and fuzzy.
There had already been changes afoot at MetLife in the era of social media. In 2014, the company introduced an online campaign to change perceptions of the life insurance industry, encouraging customers to share the ways they live for their loved ones by using #WhoILiveFor. The campaign’s centerpiece featured a collection of video clips not of the Peanuts characters, but of real people with diverse races, partnerships and backgrounds.
Corporations are viewed as more approachable these days, Ms. Lee said, and consumers are no longer intimidated by them, she added. “So many companies are actually reaching them one-on-one, tweeting back and forth with them.”
