Peter Jackson column
Aug 31 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal
Everybody is rebranding these days. David Cameron is at it, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela and apologising for the fact that his party was once so beastly to him.
This, with the new oak tree symbol and countless other gestures, is to change the party's image, to make it appear more sympathetic.
It is a technique borrowed from the business world, where Co-op is the latest organisation to go in for a makeover, launching a £100m revamp of its brand.
Because market research has revealed that people don't really know what "Co-op" stands for, the Co-operative Group (official name) will rebrand its 3,000-strong chain of retail, funeral, bank, insurance and pharmacy outlets as The Co-operative.
Rebranding, or even merely renaming, can be good thing for a business, if handled well. In the North-East, Cowie's transformation to Arriva furnishes a good example.
If done badly, on the other handÂ…
Here one only needs mention the Post Office's decision in March 2001 to rename itself Consiginia - a name which was ditched little more than a year later.
The worst renamings are those which are seen to be utterly pointless.
I had a teacher at school who was politically correct years before the term had been dreamed of. Quite unilaterally, Mrs Bowker - or "Boff" Bowker as she was fondly known - decided it would be kinder to refer to Jews as Hebrews - much to the annoyance of the Jewish pupils who had never asked to be so rebranded.
When I worked on a paper in Chorley, a new forward-thinking chief executive had a go at rebranding the town. He didn't try to rename it, which would have been going too far, but he did change the town's motto.
For generations the sturdy folk of that Lancashire borough had surveyed the world through suspicious eyes and had lived by the single word motto "Beware".
The new chief executive thought this too negative and had it subtly altered to "Be Aware". But this half-hearted Cartesian call-to-arms did not impress the burghers of Chorley and in all the years I was there they never reconciled themselves to it.
I believe that if the chief executive's role had not itself been rebranded and had he remained a town clerk, he would never have got ideas above his station.
