Alas WH Smith and TG Jones
The blowback isn’t just embarrassing for Modello for its feeble crafting of the new brand name (they own HobbyCraft BTW), but it’s also potentially damaging for the sellers, given the ubiquity of the 233-year old WH Smith brand and the strength of feeling expressed about this change to the high street.
You can imagine what happened. Private equity buyer agrees to buy stores for a song - £73 million is just a tad more than WH Smith paid for Menzies’ high street stores back in 1998 – but WH Smith don’t want to sell or licence the IP because they want to continue to use the brand name for their retained travel and hospitals business. Alas, the buyers decide to make up a name modelled on its famous forebear and plump for another utterly common English surname; Jones. Add a couple of initials and there you have it. Who needs a brand naming agency? Naming is simples! What could possibly go wrong?
Fake news
The trouble is the name is fake. Obviously fake. Fake heritage can’t replace real heritage, so don’t try when your customers see straight through it. Mirroring the past also sends a strong message that there will be no innovation, just run-down stores selling the same stuff, when the opportunity is surely to revitalise and renew the high street newsagent’s value proposition. A meaningful new name might have helped communicate a positive intention.
Then there’s the logo design. For an insight into the unclear thinking, three figurative trade marks were applied for on March 5th, which suggests Modella hasn’t yet made a decision on which way to go for the visual identity. One is a near emulation of the classic WH Smith mark, originally designed by Eric Gill in 1904, another a close variation and the third a ‘Poundland-like’ sans-serif. Based on this, will the new value proposition be the same, more premium or price-fighter? Not a great indicator of a clear strategy.
Moral of the brand story
Customers care about familiar brands and are attached to some brand names. Especially ones they have grown up with.
The prospect of picking up a newspaper, magazine or snack in TG Jones doesn’t add anything to the experience, unless it’s a much better experience than currently. If WH Smith couldn’t make the high street retail estate profitable, how will a fake WH Smith do better? Certainly not from a brand perspective, so this is a missed opportunity.
Last year’s ‘test’ rebranding of some of WH Smith’s stores in Preston and York to ‘WHS’ provides some insight about how customers feel about the WH Smith brand. Just this change caused uproar with consumers and industry insiders, even though the stores were refurbished and looked pretty good. Marketing Week guru, Mark Ritson, had to intervene telling marketeers to “Calm down, this is just a TEST’. TG Jones had better be more than a fascia change…
Then a thought occurred to me. Could Modella be playing the ‘Jaguar Genius’ rebrand card, where you get more coverage by doing something outrageous before rowing back with a more serious reveal, once you have won millions of free eyeballs? This approach is pure Trump zeitgeist, but it can backfire if the core idea is bad. Abrdn’s brandtastrophy proved that.
What’s in a name? Well this is a subject we’ve written about before, but brand naming is something to get right first time, as changing names is an expensive business. New names can be blank canvasses or loaded with meaning, but what the WH Smith rebrand tells us is; don’t load a new name with fake meaning.
Peter Matthews
Nucleus founder & CEO
If you have a brand naming challenge, we’re always happy to help you get it right. Contact us for a chat at any time.