University of Auckland associated marketing professor Bodo Lang tells the Front Page podcast that marketing folklore is replete with examples of rebrands that have gone awry.
Vodafone will certainly be hoping not to follow in the footsteps of the Coca-Cola Company, which inspired decades of derision for its infamous attempt to pour 'New Coke' down the throats of customers in the 1980s.
Lang says this has undoubtedly gone down as one of the worst examples of a rebrand in history – and offers lessons to any company wanting to rebrand its business.
The motivation for change seemed to make sense on the surface. The Coca-Cola Company embarked on this rebrand project because it felt threatened by the fact that Pepsi regularly rated better among consumers in taste tests.
Coca-Cola responded by changing its recipe and doing a series of flavour tests, before settling on what they thought was a sure-fire winner.
"It was a complete flop," says Lang, chuckling at the schadenfreude.
"What Coke had not understood is that it's not just about taste, but it's about the brand. Coke was part of the American fabric, especially back then. So what people were saying is: 'Don't mess with America.'"
Even if it did taste better, none of that mattered because the company was changing something that was already familiar to the public.
"A brand has meaning well beyond its functional attributes," says Lang.
Coca-Cola was trying to fix something that wasn't actually broken.
The challenge for Vodafone in establishing a new brand in the local market lies in first defining what their new name One New Zealand actually means and then ensuring that it doesn't carry over the problems that have historically plagued the telco.
Lang says that for Vodafone's rebrand to be acceptable it has to show the public that this is more than just "a fancy new name, website and a cool-looking logo".
He says that customers need to be shown what has actually changed.
Vodafone has been laying the groundwork for this change over the last few years. One of the biggest complaints that have plagued the company historically has been criticism of its customer service, and the company has taken steps to try to rectify that.
"Successful rebrands work when there are actually changes to the business. And that's what Vodafone has been doing over the last few years. [Most of] their call centres are now New Zealand-based and their retail stores are now owner-operated. These moves are designed to make sure the New Zealand public is served and helped by locals in New Zealand. I think that will go a long way towards breaking down those old service quality issues that they have had."
Lang says this emphasis on localism will help to drive home the idea that this is a New Zealand brand and not just another multinational that happens to operate in the local market.
Vodafone CEO Jason Paris has experience rebranding major telcos. Photo / Dean Purcell
Looking at the rebrand of Telecom to Spark, Lang says the thing that made that change so successful was the willingness of the executive team to address the problems within the operation.
"Spark did a pretty good job of ensuring it wasn't just lipstick on a pig. [The team] actually looked at the business and asked: What are we selling? What are the services we're selling? Where are our pinch points for our different stakeholders? And what can we do to improve on those?
"That's how you do a rebrand that's not just a superficial exercise of slipping a new logo and name on it. That's really key."
The ace Vodafone has up its sleeve is its chief executive Jason Paris, who led the Spark rebrand in 2012 while he was a senior executive at the company.
"It's definitely an advantage because there's undoubtedly a learning curve with rebranding," says Lang.
"Doing a rebrand twice in the same category in a relatively short period of time, with two large operators, which are both direct competitors, is absolutely an advantage. There's so much to learn and so much intel to digest from the Spark rebrand, and that would have been really useful for this rebrand."
If done right, Lang believes that the One New Zealand branding has enormous potential to be built into a strong brand that communicates the idea of bringing people together.
