Starbucks and our hostility to rebranding

I doubt I can say anything new about the Starbuck’s rebranding exercise (that Michael Owen covered here) but there has been some interesting coverage discussing why consumers seem to get be so enraged when rebranding occurs and new logos are launched.

As this Economist article suggests, Starbucks wants to join the small club of companies that are so recognisable they can rely on nothing but a symbol: Nike and its swoosh; McDonald’s and its golden arches; Playboy and its bunny; Apple and its apple. The danger is that it will join the much larger class of companies that have tried to change their logos only to be forced to backtrack by an electronic lynch mob.

And so it has proven with the new Starbucks logo which has enraged the blogosphere, leading Starbucks.com to be inundated with complaints. The protesters have plenty of success stories to inspire their efforts. Gap, a clothing retailer, abandoned a new logo in October after a week of concentrated online abuse. Tropicana (which tried to replace its straw-in-an-orange logo with a picture of a glass of orange juice) and Britain’s Royal Mail (which renamed itself Consignia) held out a bit longer but eventually had to retreat. My favourite is the bizarre decision by Yum brands to rebrand Pizza Hut as Pasta Hut. Do you remember that one? Thought not.

Part of the hostility is generated by daft ideas like that, or by the corporate babble that’s used to justify the idea (Gap’s president for North America defended the firm’s new logo with drivel about “our journey to make Gap more relevant to our customers” and the $1m redesign of Pepsi’s logo was justified by arguing that “going back-to-the-roots moves the brand forward as it changes the trajectory of the future”. That would make anyone cross.

But there’s more to it than that. Brands provide us with information – and familiarity. The article argues that people have a passionate attachment to some brands. They do not merely buy clothes at Gap or coffee at Starbucks, but consider themselves to belong to “communities” defined by what they consume. And the more choices people have, the more they seem to value the familiar. There are so many choices available to consumers that they are in danger of being overwhelmed.

The debate about logos reveals something interesting about power as well as passion. Much of the rage in the blogosphere is driven by a sense that “they” (the corporate stiffs) have changed something without consulting “us” (the people who really matter). This partly reflects a hunch that consumers have more power in an increasingly crowded market for goods. But it also reflects the sense that brands belong to everyone, not just to the corporations that control them.

So an interesting observation, both about the importance of brands and as part of the long running “which is the most important business stakeholder?” debate.