Aer Lingus spent €2 million “tilting” the shamrock on the tail fin of its aircraft. Eircom spent €16 million to lose three letters from its name (becoming Eir). Rebrands are expensive and the jury’s out on whether they lead to improved financial performances.
A recent US analysis of more than 200 rebranding announcements associated them with a modest increase in stock prices, but in more than 40 per cent of cases, they were followed by “negative abnormal returns”.
And when they flop, they can flop big.
Jaguar’s recent decision to dump its famed pouncing cat emblem in favour of a monogrammed circle, housing the letters J and r, which was launched alongside viral ads featuring androgynous models in a lift, was at best baffling.
The ads didn’t feature a car.
The reboot was intended to align the luxury car brand with its new all-electric future but critics labelled it woke for abandoning automotive themes.
“Jaguar cannot survive on a group of people who love the brand but don’t buy the cars. F***ing lunacy,” marketing guru Rory Sutherland said.
Either way the campaign has failed to halt a decline in sales and last month saw the departure of long-time boss Adrian Mardell.
Elon Musk’s wholesale evisceration of Twitter’s cuddly blue bird logo in favour of an ominous X was seemingly aimed at killing off whatever “woke” credentials the company might have had.
The X could signify a kiss or the skull-and-crossbones on cartoon bottles of poison.
The company’s market value has plummeted since the rebrand but, like Tesla’s sales, this probably has more to do with Musk’s politics.
References to X in the media are still frequently qualified with “formerly Twitter”, suggesting the new name lacks the cachet of the old one.
Eircom’s rebrand as Eir in 2015 was said to be the costliest rebrand in Irish corporate history.
The roll-out included new uniforms for 1,500 technicians, 1,500 rebranded vehicles, 106 revamped stores, 6,000 TV adverts, 4,500 radio adverts and 2,100 outdoor posters.
The new logo – written in cursive, lower case script – fell foul of the house style of most media groups, including this one, which typically capitalise proper nouns.
This seemed to catch the company and its well-paid image consultants by surprise. There were heated conversations on the day of the launch.
The name Eircom, introduced in 1999 in conjunction with the company’s privatisation, was a clever grafting of Telecom Éireann (its former iteration) on to the dot.com train.
Eir, a rebranding devised by international agency Moving Brands, which at the time included Google, Netflix and Sony among its clients, remains meaningless and bland. Fresh air, hot air, air on G-string, whatever.
Eir’s former name had, however, become sullied by a share price debacle and by a privatisation process that saw the company switch hands several times, loaded with debt and forced into examinership, a period that endeared it to no one other than its foreign owners.
The new name was apparently the first one proposed to management and the whole rebranding exercise was conducted in 16 weeks, making it perhaps the fastest rebrand in Irish corporate history.
Why are some independent Irish breweries turning off their taps and closing?
In contrast, Aer Lingus’s makeover consultants (New York creative consultancy Lippincott) are said to have worked on 50 shamrock redesigns before one was accepted.
“The logo retains but restyles the brand’s shamrock, adding a slight tilt to symbolise ‘dynamism and speed’, with heart-shaped leaves reflecting the ‘warmth and hospitality’ of the brand,” the company said.
The airline’s previous rebrand – back in 1996 – was equally safe, introducing a stem to the shamrock. Radical departures don’t seem to be in the company’s DNA.
Coca-Cola rarely rebrands while rival Pepsi alters its look nearly every decade. Once Coca-Cola’s main rival, Pepsi has now slipped out of the top three bestselling sodas in the US, suggesting another major rebrand may soon be on the way.
The strange thing about the mother of all Irish branding flops, Guinness Light, is that it now looks like a product ahead of its time.
The lighter stout was launched in 1979 when sales of Guinness among 18- to 24-year-olds were falling.
The company ploughed millions into a massive marketing blitz that included TV ads of astronaut Neil Armstrong with a voiceover proclaiming, “They said it couldn’t be done”.
But it fell flat and was discontinued two years later and has become a template for branding misfires.
The succeeding decades years have ironically seen the launch of multiple light beer products and more recently a spate of zero-alcohol alternatives.
Diaego has pumped €60 million into developing and expanding Guinness Zero since its launch in 2021.
From a commercial perspective, standing out from the crowd is difficult and it’s understandable why many companies frequently get it wrong and why others tinker only sparingly.
