Brand Equity, Repositioning, and Joanie Loves Chachi
Several times during the past few months I’ve noticed the advertising campaign announcing that Brink’s Home Security has changed its name to Broadview Security. Each time I saw one of the ads, I asked myself why they would do that. And each time I saw one of the ads, I was reminded that I had not remembered their new name in the time since the previous viewing of the ad.
The name Brink’s has equity. Broadview, not so much.
As it turns out, there is a reason behind the name change, nicely summed up in a 2009 article at Forbes.com. “The publicly traded security company spun off its alarm system unit, Brink’s Home Security, from its armored truck division last October in an effort to fight competitors and boost earnings for shareholders. Part of the spin-off agreement was a branding makeover aimed at driving more business to the home security outfit.”
I still don’t get it. Obviously there are more variables involved than the above sound byte gets into, but this sounds like the same reasoning that network executives must have used to pitch Joanie Loves Chachi.
In their defense, if you are going to rebrand, an economic downturn is probably a good time to do it. Smart brands invest heavily in marketing during tough times to reposition themselves in an effort to gain market share over competitors. Pepsi did it, so did Holiday Inn and countless others — many with considerable success — but most focused on changing their image, not a wholesale reinvention that leaves behind little to nothing in the way of brand equity.
Rebranding isn’t cheap. Everything from letterhead and business cards to the signs they stick in people’s yards to the vinyl stickers on the sides of vehicles to the stenciling on the control boxes and a bazillion other things have to be changed. So with a budget not to exceed $120 million (which is how I like to portray my personal budget to anyone who will listen), Broadview Security has been trying to get the word out with a television campaign that mostly just says, “Hey, we used to be Brink’s, now we are Broadview,” while the world collectively shrugged and said, “Who?”
And just about the time I have seen enough of these commercials to remember that I was going to write a blog about it, Tyco, the parent company of ADT Security, their biggest competitor, comes in and buys Brink’s, I mean Broadview Security for a cool $2 billion, and they get to rebrand yet again. Somebody probably came out of all this making a nice chunk of change, but I think Joanie Loves Chachi may have had a longer run than Broadview Security.