Blind you with rebranding science
Monday, March 9th, 2009 by Jon Clements
What’s in a name? Well, sufficient for companies to keep the media buying industry afloat right now.
The perils of renaming and rebranding a business are spelled out clearly in this insightful article from the editor of Marketing, Lucy Barrett.
I too had wondered why kitchen paper towel brand, Bounty, had bothered to spend the ad money on its slightly unsettling she-male characters to herald the new name, Plenty. If the brand logo and packaging colour scheme had been ditched altogether, they might have been rightly concerned. But as it is, I wonder how many absorbent kitchen wipe customers will even notice the difference.
As Barrett points out, yet more intriguing is Coca Cola’s use of Welsh soul singer on a bike, Duffy, in it latest campaign. There’s no denying she’s attractive with a bag full of music awards to boot. But what is it all about?
On the topic of fizzy pop, Pepsi has strayed into the powerfully critical gravitational force of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science column, which tends to bring charlatans and peddlers of inscrutable nonsense down to earth with a bump. If you’ve seen what he does to lazy PR surveys, then you’ll be relieved it wasn’t your rebranding exercise he found.
He greets Pepsi’s “Gravitational Field” document with the jocular “welcome to the science of PR”, before moving on to the more unambiguous: “It is gibberish”. Lampooning the document aside, Goldacre seems more miffed that this pseudo-science is staking a claim against real scientific endeavour.
And Bad Science isn’t the only place that’s stuck the boot in, as here, here and here testify.
Does this harm people’s proclivity to drink Pepsi? Probably not. But does it help the cause of the marketing communications industry to be taken seriously? I fear it just hastens our frogmarching to the firing squad wall once the revolution arrives.
Thanks to blowatlife.blogspot.com for the pic
