Brand Failures

Rebranding failures 207
of the name itself.’ The Web site also asked the British public to e-mail their
opinions of the name. Their responses were almost unanimously critical of
the re-brand.
‘Consignia doesn’t sound like the national institution that the Royal Mail
does. Instead, it reminds me of that brand of anti-perspirant, called Insignia,’
wrote one.
‘It’s a poor excuse to say that Royal Mail could be confusing when it takes a
paragraph to explain what Consignia means,’ wrote another.
One respondent e-mailed in with his tongue firmly in cheek saying that
‘given the current crisis within the Post Office, Consignia Plc seems like an
excellent name. It is an anagram of Panic Closing.’
Soon it became clear that the name change was not having a positive effect.
Although the Post Office had shifted to become a plc, the public still felt it
belonged to them. If they didn’t like the new name, they therefore felt it was
their right to be angry.
As the Post Office’s corporate performance started to falter, the name was
blamed even more. ‘The name got muddied with the comments that business
is doing appallingly – this idea that nothing had been the same since the name
change. It’s a soft target,’ said Wells.
Soft target or not, May 2002 saw a U-turn as the new Consignia chairman
Allan Leighton confirmed the name was to go – ‘probably in less than two
years.’ He also admitted that he hated the name. ‘There’s not really a
commercial reason to do it, but there’s a credibility reason to do it,’ he told
BBC TV’s Breakfast with Frost programme. He said the name change was
‘unfortunate’ as it had coincided with a period of underperformance by the
company (it lost over one million pounds a day during one month in 2001).
However, the news was lost on some people, as the Consignia brand had
failed to become a household name. ‘I didn’t know that the Post Office wasn’t
called the Post Office,’ one member of the public told a radio news interviewer
at the time of the announcement. ‘Everyone I know calls it the Post
Office.’