Brand management is the proven method of delivering value to end users and also to owners and suppliers. Even when retailers develop their own brands they are involved in brand management. They may communicate in a different way, and may develop a much wider range of products but Tesco own brand and Sainsbury own brand still stand for something and still have to be managed carefully.

One aspect of brand management that some companies seem to find difficult is that of naming the product. A brand is of course much more than just a name and includes other aspects of communication such as pack design and advertising but at heart the choice of the name is very important.

Changing names is a difficult task and should largely be avoided.  Mars Incorporated is the largest private corporation in the world. In the UK they had successful chocolate brands which all adopted the same technique. This had first been established with the famous Mars bar with a tasty centre encased with milk chocolate. One example of this was the Marathon bar, based on the US product Snickers. When Chris Brasher established the London Marathon the Marathon bar seemed like the perfect sponsor and so it proved.[i] However the corporation decided to consolidate its brands on a global basis.  UK management was forced to rebrand Marathon as Snickers and of course the sponsorship was no longer appropriate. Sales suffered badly as UK consumers found the naming odd. It sounded too much like sniggers, which is defined in my dictionary as a sly and disrespectful laugh.

There are countless examples of rebranding that goes wrong. A famous example is Royal Mail. In an effort to compete with mail companies with brandlike names such as FedEx and UPS,  in 2001 Britain’s Post Office made the risky marketing decision to change its name from the hallowed Royal Mail - in use since it was first made available to the public by Charles 1 in 1635 - to the made-up Consignia. The Post Office’s Chief Executive, John Roberts, called the new moniker “modern, meaningful and entirely appropriate” explaining that “the new name describes the full scope of what the post office does in a way that the words post and office cannot. A bewildered public quite comfortable with the definitions of the words post and office disagreed. A year later the company changed back at considerable cost.

Perhaps sensitive about the bad publicity Facebook continually gets, and also perhaps thinking that his company was now more than just one form of social media, in the autumn of 2021 Mark Zuckerberg decided that Facebook should be known as Meta. The shares promptly fell from $370 to only $100. Although they have recovered somewhat, they’ve not yet got back to the previous highs. When Standard Life Aberdeen, which had merged two of the best known brands in Scottish finance, most bizarrely renamed it as Abrdn PLC, a name both without history as well as vowels the shares were north of 250p then and today are around 150p. Elon Musk is a highly successful businessman but he does seem somewhat eccentric in some of his decision making. His rebranding of Twitter which although irritating was extremely well known, to something now known as X which means nothing at all has led to a loss of a substantial part of its valuation.

One particularly strange name development if not strictly a name change was carried out by Kellogg's. It recently demerged with the expectation that this would unlock benefit value for shareholders. In general carving out successful units into stand-alone companies increases overall returns. The newly-separate business is more focused, has its own dedicated management team and maybe more attractive to a bigger player  because it is smaller and cheaper. However, when this particular demerger took place the market reacted badly. The new company owns well-known brands such as Pringles,  Cheez-it and Pop Tarts but immediately fell by 7% from the issue price and continued to decline. There might be other reasons but the main one from my point of view was they came up with a weird name for the company. They took the “Kell” from the parent company Kellogg's and added Nova from the Latin word for new and came up with Kellanova which sounds like something from science fiction.

These issues are not only limited to rebranding but also the way that advertising slogans can be developed. Some slogans have stood the test of time so well that they enter colloquial language. One famous one for people of my generation was “Guinness is Good for You” which some people might today think is politically incorrect. However, my mother suffered from a shortage of iron in her blood and our GP recommended she drink Guinness on a regular basis as a way of increasing her iron intake.

Another popular beer is Heineken. “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” was written by Terry Lovelock in 1973 at the Collett Dickinson Pearce ad agency. What has possessed them to come up with “Open Your World”? Stella Artois, a similarly popular global brand of beer, just says “Be Legacy”.

This madness is not just confined to beers. Champagne is arguably the best generic brand in history but some of its leaders have caught the disease. Dom Perignon says “Creative Freedom is Power” while, not to be outdone, Lanson claims “It's All About Love!” which just reminds me of The Beatles.

Car manufacturers are in on the act. “Live Brilliant!” yells Hyundai. “Your Toyota is My Toyota” asserts Toyota which could be a threat of repossession. Lexus has come up with “Experience Amazing” and, though not a car firm, but still in the travel business Deliveroo says “Eat More Amazing” which doesn't stand any kind of analysis because Deliveroo’s point of difference if it has one is not in the product it delivers. Hewlett Packard says “Let's Do Amazing.” The brand manager in me wonders if today's brand managers still carry out research on the new claims their agencies are selling them.

Some of the slogans out there are simply illiterate. “Find Your Happy “instructs Right Move while Tui the travel firm wants you to “Live Happy”. Another car firm Subaru shouts “Way of Life!” Hitachi “Inspire the Next” or the government of Abu Dhabi’s “Find Wonder” are not inspiring and are just found wanting.

There also is a trend to appeal to the narcissist in us all. A lotion from Protan proclaims “It’s all about me!” TU asks you to “Be You With TU” while Holiday Inn goes further with “Stay You”. I use my Amex card for various reasons but none of them is to “Keep Being You,” its latest slogan. In the same lane comes Diet Coke with “You Do You”.  Jack Daniels goes somewhat higher with “Be the Best Version of You”. and again, while I don't drink bourbon I do occasionally drink whisky but it isn't for that reason. A brand I've always admired is Adidas but their latest statement “Impossible is Nothing” makes no sense.  Neville Johnson furniture manufacturers ask you to ”Find your Fabulous”. Advertising slogans must be literate, sensible and most of all have intelligent meaning.

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