What’s in a name?
For brands, nothing says “image overhaul” better than a shorter, snappier moniker. Name changes tend to reflect a shift in corporate strategy or the move from selling one specific kind of product to a wide range of items. Some brands just want to shed an image problem, so they change their name — and the vaguer the better.
Tobacco giant Philip Morris picked Altria, and Steinhoff Asia is to be rebranded under the name Greenlit.
Last week, two Nasdaq-listed companies revealed new brand identities.
Dunkin’ Donuts is becoming just Dunkin’. Coffee is its main business — drinks actually make up 60% of its sales, according to The New York Times. One can’t help but think how much more attractive the business looks as a beverage purveyor rather than a peddler of sugar-laden treats.
Multinationals like Pepsico, Cocacola and Nestlé, all of which are growing their portfolios, could perhaps take more notice?
Trimming down
Diet company Weight Watchers, which doesn’t want to be known as a diet company, also has a new identity.
It is now called WW to emphasise a focus on overall health and wellbeing rather than just weight loss.
WW’S newish CEO, Mindy Grossman, said: “This is just a next step, a point of validation. Like any brand we have to stay relevant.”
There has been a dramatic shift globally with obsessive calorie counting and fad diets giving way to following healthy habits for enjoyment and wellbeing rather than losing weight.
WW has 4.5-million members across the world and the company’s traditional title has come under scrutiny for being guilty of “fat shaming” and encouraging eating disorders. The 55-year-old group has in the past made use of unforgiving weight loss rhetoric like “The thinner, the winner” and “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels”; these belong in the 1980s with the grapefruit diet.
Under Grossman, Weight Watchers has been updating its technology and reshaping its diet plan to encourage subscribers not to focus on weight but to aim for “healthy habits”.
Grossman is under pressure to make sure the group maintains the growth spurt received after former talk show host Oprah Winfrey joined the Weight Watchers board and took a 10% stake in the company.
The company’s shares rose almost 300% in 2017, according to Bloomberg, as advertisements featuring Oprah helped bring customers back to the weight-loss programme “after a difficult stretch that saw the company’s shares sink below $4 in 2015”. To come full circle, as they say, WW has also partnered with Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness company, to provide content on the Weight Watchers app, which is now configured to look at a person’s overall fitness and wellbeing, rather than just the numbers on the scale.
In the corporate world, there are notable name changes that shouldn’t be forgotten.
When “fried” became a dirty word, Kentucky Fried Chicken rebranded to its initials to appear healthier.
Google, which has just turned 20, was once called Backrub, and Amazon CEO and founder Jeff
Bezos considered a few names for the e-commerce giant: Browse, Cadabra and Awake. Eventually he registered relentless.com.
He still owns the URL, and if you type relentless.com into your browser, it redirects you to Amazon’s website.
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