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RadioShack To Rebrand As "The Shack"?
Harry writes "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to re-brand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space in between 'Radio' and 'Shack'). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business." Where will we go to buy soldering irons and those RCA to headphone jack adapters now?
The competitors of the traditional Radio Shack were not the likes of Ace Hardware, and only marginally were they stores like BestBuy or CompUSA. Radio Shack didn't sell hardware for mechanical engineering, like an Ace Hardware store; it sold hardware for electr(ical|onic) engineering. Its competitors were other electronics hobbyist and surplus stores, like Dow Electronics, Marvac Electronics, HSE Electronics, and so on.
Truth be told, though, Radio Shack's biggest competition came from the atrophy of that market. Over the last three decades, steadily more people have become consumers of electronics and stopped being creators or engineers of it. That is why Radio Shack transitioned from selling components to selling "pre-fab" products; they couldn't compete with those other stores in a dwindling market, and some of those other hobbyist stores have disappeared altogether. Could they have created an advertising campaign that would single-handedly have reinvigorated the hobbyist component market? I doubt it.
That said, this alleged re-branding is even more idiotic than Pacific Bell spending $750,000 to re-brand itself as Pacific Telesis Group (that was just the bill from the ad agency that came up with the name, not the total cost of the name change). "The Shack" isn't edgy or funny, it's just weird and dumb, especially because it will say NOTHING descriptive about the current business model or product offerings.
With Verizon it probably helped. Anyone happy with the Bell Atlantic/NYNEX/GTE was already a customer, and wasn't going to switch just because of a name change. Changing their name gave them a chance to trick some of their unhappy former customers into trying them out again.
The Verizon rebrand happened when they still had a monopoly on northeast area local call service, and that was their only real business. There wasn't any choice of switching or not. You can rebrand as many times as you want when customers have no other company to go to. (A lot of utilities rebrand pretty frequently for that reason - my gas company just rebranded themselves as "National Grid" a little while ago, even though they only serve the Northeast. But I have no other choice of where to get my gas, so who cares?) I suspect my gas company rebranded themselves the way they did for the same reason as Verizon - they did not want to continue to be pigeonholed by their name into one region of the country. (Ditto for Cingular, now AT&T, which is an apt case of "back to the future".) In those cases, the rebranding allowed a local company to go national.
I would love to see Verizon try to rebrand themselves again now, in the middle of a major battle with Cablevision for TV and phone service, and an ongoing battle with the three other major cell phone carriers for cell phone service. It would be a disaster.
Any company that has major competition and is not region-bound by their name had better think long and hard about rebranding itself. You have to make the determination that your current brand is actually hurting you more than the confusion caused by rebranding would. I can't see how that's the case with Radio Shack. In fact, most companies interested in re-branding would be better served by going back to their roots and seeing what made them successful in the first place, not throwing it all away and trying to start from zero. (See aforementioned AT&T - how many telegraphs will you use today?)