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Branding Practices For Marketers For Marketing

Decent Essays

I. Introduction
Rebranding is omnipresent in branding practice for marketers to accomplish such goals. It has drawn deep attention and interest among the business practitioners together with academic researchers (Gregory, 1999 & Wu, 2010). There are a handful of examples of big corporations rebranding themselves, from luxury brands such as Harley-Davidson which turn from almost went bankrupt to the most reliable motorcycle brand; to Google who hold 68.75 percent of the global search engine pie, which has renamed itself after BackRub in 1996 (Aquino, 2011).
Rebranding also been applied by Uber, taxi hailing app with one tap and a car comes directly to consumers. It began from Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, who came up with brilliant idea; tap …show more content…

Uber is aiming to have unique designs for cities as well as countries for their long term goal (Kalanick, 2016).
It did not take long time for experts and online users to criticize new Uber in-house logo which has done by Travis Kalanick and Shalin Amin; one of the designers who is working at Uber. Travis refused to trust the rebranding to anybody else since he argued company logo is a personal matter. Several headings in online presences are filled with confusions and negative statements. News from Daily Mail (Prigg & Liberatore, 2016) mentioned, Twitter users expressed confusion why Uber had made a change ‘for changes sake’. In addition, Financial Times publishes an article which states Uber’s rebranding suggest arrogance and inconsistency (Hill, 2016). More surprisingly, Uber’s head of design decided to leave following this radical rebranding. By modifying visual brand elements as colour and logo, marketers intend to create new brand associations. The results, nevertheless, are vary. In fact, the failure rate is higher contrasted to the successes (Causon, 2004; Stuart & Muzellec, 2004).
While many experts claim that consumer confusion are result of brand similarity (Loken et al., 1986; Foxman, 1990; 1992; Kapferer, 1995), information overload and misleading information (Russo, 1974; Summers, 1974; Wilkie, 1974; Scammon, 1977; Jacoby, 1984; Malhotra, 1984a & b), the concept of rebranding has largely been ignored.

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