> rebrand themselves as "Spectrum" in markets where they already had a presence (such as New York City)
Is that a nice way of saying they're rebranding themselves to anyone already familiar with the brand. The assumption being anyone familiar with the brand has a negative image of it :)
I agree that "rebranding" is a seriously uncharitable interpretation of the circumstances.
Charter also bought Bright House at the same time as Time Warner Cable. They are all being brought under the Spectrum name, which was and is Charter's pre-existing name for their cable services.
This is not the scenario at all that "rebranding" invokes. Especially not in the context that chimeracoder uses it. See ssharp's post [0] for an example of what the typical interpretation would be.
It's really not that bad of a rebrand. Brands are important. People care about them. They need to be updated with the times. Perhaps the author would care to show some alternative modernizations to illustrate a better way to do it.
I don't think they've called it a rebrand. "Renewing their branding" seems like a longer way of saying it but certainly sounds less extreme.
They're specifying things like proportions of text to the rings, how the tagline should or should not appear, icons that should be used across all digital products, etc.
> Seriously, have you ever seen a rebrand negatively affect a product?
I think there is an example in Europe. myTaxi has been rebranded to FREE NOW. The change has been dictated to free the brand from just the taxi business connection. But I believe it was unfortunate, at least for their taxi business. I don't have hard numbers, but the new name and logo seems to be random, completely unrelated to taxis, so when you see a car with it, you have no idea that the driver is a taxi driver. It's 2 years now with new name, but they iOS app is still named: FREE NOW (mytaxi). Me and my friends always have to ask someone "how mytaxi is called now?" because the app is no longer under M in the phone.
Worse for the company is that, since myTaxi was extremely catchy, there came a competitor called iTaxi, and many believe it might had take over some of the clients just because people trying to find myTaxi installed iTaxi instead, as FREE NOW looked cryptic and unrelated to taxis for them.
Is that a nice way of saying they're rebranding themselves to anyone already familiar with the brand. The assumption being anyone familiar with the brand has a negative image of it :)
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