1st RETURN TO SENDER
OF ALL the renaming fiascos, none has attracted quite so much ridicule as Post Office Group’s fateful decision to make up a new word to umbrella its supposedly diverse range of business interests.
Of course, hacks traditionally are a hard-bitten and cynical lot and so it was not surprising that they thought the replacement name, Consignia, was total rubbish when it was unveiled in January 2001.
But the derision was much broader than that. So broad, in fact, that it extended to Allan Leighton, who joined Consignia as a non-executive director shortly after the renaming and assumed the position of chairman the following year.
Soon Mr Leighton said that he hated the name and would drop it in a move that he likened to pulling down the Berlin Wall. “It is the thing that is mentioned every time I talk to anyone,” he said at the time. “There is a lot of history here that needn’t have been changed.”
Later that year, 17 months after the name change, the group changed its name again to . . . wait for it . . . Royal Mail Group. The cost of the whole renaming exercise was £3 million at a time when the group could ill-afford to waste money.
The name Consignia had been intended to establish a new international identity for the organisation that includes the Post Office Counters network, Royal Mail and Parcelforce. Instead, the name, which means nothing in any language, met with universal condemnation and required continuous laborious explanation. Even the company’s letterheads described it as:
“Consignia — The new name for the Post Office Group.”
2nd UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
- Although Glanbia sounds like somewhere you might go for a package holiday, in fact it is an Irish dairy product and food ingredients company. Although its previous name, Avonmore Waterford Group, shed no more light on the group’s activities, both Avonmore and Waterford were well-recognised brands. Yet, in a bizarre bid to create a strong international brand, the company decided to create a new word in Gaelic, a language that even most Irish don ’t bother with. The name is an amalgam of the Gaelic words glan, meaning pure or clear, and bia, meaning food. It might have been simpler if Avonmore Waterford had gone with the AWG tag that most people were using after the company’s creation through the merger of Avonmore and Waterford. After all, changing his Kentucky Fried Chicken chain to KFC never did Colonel Sanders, the world’s most successful chicken chief, any harm. The Colonel changed his name because everybody was using it anyway, and that seems like a sensible idea. That way, you know it works and you don’t have to pay an expensive image consultant.
3rd THAT’S US; NO, THAT’S US
- Although the name is now well-accepted, Kingfisher had a rocky start when it changed from Woolworth Holdings in 1999. The retailer had assumed that it could get away with the name, since there were already more than 100 companies with that bird in their titles. The directors at Kingfisher Group, a publisher, had a different view and caused such a fracas at Woolworths’ extraordinary meeting that the police were called.
4th BRAINS LACKING OXYGEN?
- There is nothing that Cellnet, sorry mmO2 — actually, it’s just O2 these days — enjoys more than a bit of pointless rebranding. Cellnet changed its name to mmO2 after its demerger from BT in November 2001. The O2 bit represents the chemical formula for oxygen, with the first half added at the last minute when management discovered an American communications group with the same name. But it has since changed its name to O2. Don’t ask.
5th ENERGETIC APPROACH
- The biggest criticism of the flurry of stupid names that have emerged in recent years is that they offer no clue to the group’s activities. But, occasionally, this is precisely the idea. While nobody would describe the name British Energy as being ridiculous in the same way as the others on this list, it certainly doesn’t tell it like it is. Between you and me, it looks like the Government was finding it a bit difficult to convince the public to buy into the 1996 flotation of eight of its nuclear reactors and so decided not to mention the word “nuclear” in its name.
6th GIVE AND LIVE FOR EVER
- Say what you like about Diageo, the company formed by the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan in 1997, it has defied all the critics who thought that the name would have bitten the dust by now. Among the many acronyms that the wags have applied to the name, one of Diageo’s least favourite must be “Don’t Imagine Any Great Employment Opportunities”. The Hindi meaning of Diageo — “give and live for ever” — gave wags further amusement.
7th SPARING THE BLUSHES
- When a name has been prompted by a merger, the political sensitivities can take on a life of their own. BAE Systems came into being in 2000 after the merger of British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems. Although the deal was a takeover by BAe, not a merger, to save blushes the new name had to take an element from each company. Fair enough. Yet on top of that, the company insisted that both components of the name must enjoy capital letters. The Times, among others, chose to persist with BAE Systems and the company has since followed suit.
8th REPUTATION SURVIVES
- Invensys provides a sobering reminder that you cannot make a company successful simply by changing its name. Despite numerous changes in recent years, the company’s reputation is no better today than in 1998, when it was formed by the merger of the struggling engineering companies BTR and Siebe. The subject of perennial takeover rumours, the remarkable thing about Invensys, other than its name, is that it is still around.
9th BITTER AFTERTASTE
- The change from Bass to Six Continents in June 2001 was so unpopular that one analyst dubbed the new name a “weapon of bass destruction”. It was so unpopular that Six Continents earned the nickname “Inn Continents” within hours of its unveiling. This was a far cry from its the intention, which was to evoke the group’s global aspirations. A restructuring of the business not long after the reincarnation allowed the company to ditch Six Continents with no embarrassment. The company appeared to have learnt its lesson, since the two demerged entities, InterContinental Hotels Group and Mitchells & Butlers, are much preferred by investors.
10th NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE
- When Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture in 2001, it looked like a colossal waste of money. Although the company was forced to change its name as part of an acrimonious split from Arthur Andersen, the auditor, it surely didn’t need to spend £160 million to produce and market the widely derided name? Yet within two years the change was a triumph because it severed the association with Arthur Andersen as it became implicated in the Enron fraud.
