Brand Failures

206 Brand failures
There is a wise logic behind such thinking. After all, many companies have
come unstuck as time moves on and their name is no longer relevant. For
instance, Carphone Warehouse may have once imagined a world full of
consumers waiting to upgrade their carphones, but the reality is that now
most people wouldn’t recognize a carphone if it hit them over the head. And
other brands have managed to create very successful identities with brand
names that have no direct relevance to their products, or anyone else’s
products for that matter. This is especially true on the Internet. While selfdescriptive
brands such as Letsbuyit.com and Pets.com flopped, vague and
mysterious brand names such as Amazon, Google and Yahoo! have worked
exceptionally well. Indeed, many of the largest brands in the world follow
this model. To take the most obvious example, no-one who spends their
money via Richard Branson’s company expects to take home a real virgin, any
more than people buying books at Amazon expect to be transported to a
tropical rainforest. These names are about evocation. They are about the
identity of the brand, not the product.
Before the Post Office, many other British institutions had also tried to
bring themselves into the new millennium. British Steel had become ‘Corus’
following its merger with Koninklijke Hoogovens. ‘Centrica’ was a former
arm of British Gas. ‘Thus’ was the new name given to the telecoms division
of Scottish Power. The list goes on and on.
So what was the name given to the Post Office On 9 January 2002, the
group’s chief executive, John Roberts, stood outside his organization’s
headquarters and declared that the name was Consignia. This name, he
added, was ‘modern, meaningful and entirely appropriate’ to the rapidly
evolving organization.
Dragon Brand’s Keith Wells was equally happy with Consignia. ‘It’s got
consign in it. It’s got a link with insignia, so there is this kind of royalty-ish
thing in the back of one’s mind,’ he explained to the BBC. ‘And there’s this
lovely dictionary definition of consign which is “to entrust to the care of.”
That goes right back to sustaining trust, which was very, very important.’ In
addition, the name change had been approved by the controversial government
minister Stephen Byers, who was at that time the trade secretary.
The reaction from the media and the general public was considerably less
sympathetic. Some thought it sounded like a new brand of aftershave or
deodorant. Others thought it was the name of an electricity company. The
BBC’s Web site referred to ‘the most notorious ever Post Office robbery – that