| Department: | Fashion&Management |
| Project title: | Opportunities and threats of rebranding a fashion catalogue |
| Website: | |
| Email: | anouk.guibert@gmail.com |
Brands, logos, slogans – wherever you look. Our everyday life is dominated by brands that advertise their products being the best, the second best, the newest, the most wanted, all aiming at influencing our shopping/buying behaviour, our perception and our opinion on specific brands or branded products.Brand names, however, appear to have become a self-evident part of our society; they set free a plenitude of product information without the need to go into detail about the proper product. Next to the brand name an almost endless number of facets contribute to the success of a product. Nevertheless, the brand name is often considered as the soul of the branded goods. But is this right? Is the brand name a kind of prevision for the success of a product or is the brand name a flexible, replaceable attribute, just as alterable as package size or marketing means? In literature we find the statement that rebranding by changing the brand name will lead to the loss of values of the old brand name and that changing the brand name even ‘potentially nullifies those years of effort and can seriously damage or even destroy the equity of the brand’ (Muzellec and Lambkin, 2006, p. 804). Several practise examples in the past have shown that companies do accept the risk and rebrand.
Rebranding means changing the name, the logo, the slogan and further the image and culture of a company. It can occur on three different levels: Corporate rebranding, business, unit rebranding and product rebranding. Main drivers of rebranding are structural factors such as mergers and acquisitions were, with brand image improvement ranked lower.Rebranding is an increasing phenomenon in the business-world but is not covered enough in academic research. The cases of rebranding will increase in the coming years, therefore companies need guidelines and examples on how to proceed. My thesis represents the existing literature on this specific topic and serves as call for further academic research!
