Brand Failures

Rebranding failures 205
73 Consignia
A post office by any other name
When the UK state-owned Post Office Group decided to change its brand
identity, a new name was the first on the shopping list. The reason for the
brand makeover was partly to do with the fact that the 300-year-old Post
Office Group was no longer simply a mail-only organization. It had logistics
and customer call centre operations, and was planning a number of acquisitions
abroad. There was also growing public confusion about what the
purpose of the organization’s three arms – post offices, Parcel Force, Royal
Mail – actually was.
‘We were researching hard into what this organization called the Post
Office was facing,’ explained Keith Wells to BBC Online. Wells was from
Dragon Brands, the brand consultancy that helped to repackage the organization.
‘What we needed was something that could help pull all the bits
together.’
The consultancy considered the name of each division but none was
appropriate. The name ‘Post Office’ was dismissed as ‘too generic’. ‘Parcel
Force’ was, again, inappropriate. So what about ‘Royal Mail’ ‘That has
problems when operating in countries which have their own royal family, or
have chopped the heads off their royals,’ said Wells. So Dragon Brands set
about creating a new umbrella term for the whole organization. It wanted to
come up with something non-specific, something which would work equally
well throughout Europe, not just in the UK, and most of all something which
didn’t tie the Post Office Group down to mail.