Branding 101 – The Law of Change
Posted on May 23rd, 2008
The law of change in regards to branding says that you can change your brand but to do it slowly and not very often. Remember that a brand is not just a logo, it is everything that makes up the culture of your business. The reason you should do it slowly is because your customers have come to know your brand as it is today, change is usually a scary thing.
An example of what not to do would be when Radio Shack was bought by Circuit City. Overnight every Radio Shack was transformed into a Circuit City with a new logo, branding and with customers scratching their heads. For 20 years or more people had come to know what Radio Shack was about now they had to learn about what Circuit City was about.
What Circuit City could have done was introduce the logo side by side to be Radio Shack/Circuit City for awhile. Then gradually ease out the Radio Shack portion of the logo.
How would you have done the branding change at Circuit City/Radio Shack?
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3 Comments
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Thing is, they didn’t have a choice: they lost the rights to use the Radio Shack name in Canada, so they had to move away as fast as possible. Considering the amount of advertising they did for The Source, and how they tried to promote it as the place for everything hi-tech, I think they did a good job.
I think what happened with the Cingular-to-AT&T transition was well done. They had a transition period where all the commercials said something like “Cingular is now the new AT&T”. They combined the orange branding of Cingular with the blue branding of AT&T, slowly moving more and more to the latter. Today, there’s no orange, no Cingular, and AT&T is easily recognizable again.
A simple change that could affect a lot of companies!
A similar law was passed in the UK which allowed businesses like Mcdonals to change highway signs to feature their adverts instead of the services etc