The Tropicana Crisis of 2009 underlined the importance of a company’s branding.
In January of that year, the orange juicemaker, owned by PepsiCo, changed the look of its cartons. The shiny orange punctured by a straw was replaced by an almost abstract blob of orange juice.
Consumers responded accordingly, and sales dropped by as much as 20%. Less than two months after rolling out its new look, Tropicana announced it would switch back to the original packaging.
Since then, the slate of companies with messy rebrands has only grown. Facebook became Meta. Twitter became X. The UK fund manager Standard Life Aberdeen became “abrdn”, before switching to “aberdeen”. All attracted ridicule.
This week MSNBC entered the chat: the cable news channel announced it would change its name to MS Now (My Source News Opinion World) after splitting from NBC later this year.
Users online are once again taking part in the schadenfreude of a haphazard rebrand. “It sounds like the newest addition to the Microsoft Office suite,” read one comment on Reddit. “Sounds like you’re demanding to be given multiple sclerosis immediately,” offered another.
In a statement, MSNBC assured viewers its new name “underscores our mission: to serve as your destination for breaking news and thoughtful analysis” as it splits with NBC News. The channel will now be a part of Versant, a spin-off from Comcast, and will join the business news channel CNBC, Golf Channel, GolfNow and SportsEngine. CNBC, which initially stood for Consumer News and Business Channel, will keep its current name.
Marketing experts said this was just the latest example of a company navigating the difficult terrain of a rebrand. In 2019, when Mastercard announced it was simply removing its name from its logo, the company’s chief marketing executive told the Wall Street Journal it spent almost two years surveying customers around the world to ensure people would still recognize the brand.
“Consumers would be shocked at the amount of effort that is often behind many of these changes,” Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, said. “You would not believe how willing people are to sit for hours and agonize over the curve of the font, should this be teal or not really blue.”
Of MSNBC’s new logo, Reed said: “I promise you that a lot of time and energy went into coming up with that picture… They spent months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this kind of thing.”
Significant work also goes into finding a new name that is legal, appropriate and matches the vision of a company. “The search for a legally available and trademarkable name is not to be underestimated,” said Sadie Dyer, strategy director at branding agency Siegel+Gale. “You generate hundreds and hundreds, for this, probably thousands of names, and go through a lot of internal reviews.”
MSNBC faced a particularly challenging task since the “NBC” brand and its peacock logo is among the most iconic in US media.
“You can’t compete with the peacock logo. That’s some of the best branding that there is,” said Dyer. “It’s distinctive, something that is historic and nostalgic. People have lots of connection with it.”
Companies sometimes redefine themselves in ways that don’t sit well with consumers. Many people still refer to Elon Musk’s social media platform X as Twitter, though the company rebranded in 2023, and still refer to posts as “tweets”.
The streaming wars has also seen the creation of new services, such as Peacock, Paramount Plus and HBO Max, which changed its name to “Max” before again changing its name, to HBO Max, this year.
Casey Bloys, chair of HBO content, told the New York Times cable television has been having a hard time, branding-wise, with the transition to digital “and a bunch of other companies are trying to navigate that”.
No matter what a company’s new name is, a change will likely draw its critics. People are drawn toward the familiar, and many will compare anything new to what had existed before.
“It’s the nature of change. Even if it’s something that people look back on and fully follow you to the new name, it’s always going to result in people immediately resisting,” Dyer said. “You’re asking people to change their behavior and the name that they call you. That’s really tough, and it’s going to take a lot of work.”
