When a company like Kellogg's changes a product name from Coco Pops to Choco Krispies you can be sure that there is a mountain of market research available to justify the move.
There are many reasons why the image of products, companies and even countries are transformed. Brand repackaging means more than just a change of logo and involves a lot more work than most consumers imagine.
Most major companies employ design consultants to carry out this work for them. Whether it is Opal Fruits changing to Starburst or Marathon to Snickers millions of pounds are spent each year on transforming, maintaining and promoting brands.
Companies like Dublin-based Designworks who have repackaged products such as Tayto Crisps and created a logo to represent Irish tourism as a brand specialise in reinventing or revitalising the image of a product.
According to Mr Tom Meenaghan, managing director of Designworks this need to evolve and change has been around as long as there has been packaging. "From the time a baker started wrapping his bread a different way in reaction to local competitors there has been a need to repackage brand identity," he says.
Branding is a tool used by manufacturers and corporate organisations to stamp their goods for marketing purposes. Different symbols, shapes, colours and designs give customers clues as to what the product or company represents. Designers talk of "brand personality" and the "underlying values" of a product. What we may see as another catchy slogan or an aesthetically pleasing logo goes a lot deeper according to the experts.
HB ice cream, a product range owned by Unilever, was given a new global image recently so that their brands would have a more consistent identity all over the world. Their new heart logo was chosen after extensive consultation with consumers about what they thought their ice cream products represent.
They decided on a red and yellow heart logo which was viewed as a friendly and warm symbol indicative of the kind of relationship HB wanted to have with its customers. A global identity meant cost savings too as it allowed for uniform marketing across all of their markets.
There are a number of triggers for such change according to Mr Jim Dunne, managing director of The Identity Business (TIB) in Dublin. The company specialises in the "creation, communication and management of corporate and brand identity".
"A merger might have occurred introducing a new partner to the business, a product range may have expanded resulting in a need to make customers aware of the change. Increasing competition may mean that a company has to evolve and keep pace," he says.
Sometimes a brand just looks out of date in the face of the multitude of new products it is competing with. The Identity Business (TIB) were responsible for giving the range of Club soft drinks a facelift at a time when new products such as Tango were being stocked by its side in the supermarket fridge.
Mr Peter Kruseman of TIB led the project which started as an assessment of all the "positives and negatives" of the brand. "It was like redecorating an old house that has great character but has become a bit cluttered over the years, we wanted to keep all that was best in the old but make it comfortable for the way we live today," he wrote in the company's newsletter Visible Difference.
Mr Tom Meenaghan of Designworks explains that sometimes consumers become blind to a brand and so it needs to be given a makeover. "Tayto crisps were competing with 40 other products under the shelves. The packaging needed to shout a little louder if it was to be noticed by the consumer," he says.
Overall corporate identity is also subject to modification and some companies go as far as changing their name in an effort to stay ahead of competitors. This strategy was employed recently by two large Irish financial institutions here. First National became First Active and Friends Provident changed to Friends First. The motivation for such drastic action can have its roots in mergers, take-overs and privatisations.
Sometimes it is because a new hierarchy in an organisation wants to stamp its own identity on a brand and highlight its own particular agenda. The Government for example spent tens of thousands of pounds on renaming 10 Government departments. The money was spent on everything from new stationery to Ministerial seals.
Following on from a major revamp of how Irish Tourism is marketed abroad a new campaign has just been launched to promote Britain overseas. A newspaper reported last week that old images of Morris Dancers are being abandoned in favour of posters with a more contemporary feel. Mr Bean, Ms Kate Winslet and clothes by Mr John Galliano are just some of the images being used to promote Cool Brittania abroad.
While the brand identity business has emerged as something of an applied science, ordinary consumers not familiar with its intricacies may feel that in some cases an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" philosophy might have been better employed. When you have grown up with Coco Pops, for example, "I'ld rather have a bowl of Choco Krispies" just doesn't have quite the same ring.
