Westinghouse, the Undead brand

You can be sure…if it’s Westinghouse.

Those of us old enough to remember Westinghouse Electric as the great industrial powerhouse it once was will recognize that slogan and the iconic Circle W logo with some affection.

In what is now known as the Mad Men era of the 20^th century the logo adorned the items of everyday life, from the Dog-o-matic hotdog maker to fridges, vacuum cleaners, ceiling fans, cookers, toasters, irons… every conceivable electrical appliance for modern convenience brought to you by the driving innovation of Westinghouse.

Like arch-rival GE, Westinghouse once bestrode the industrial landscape of the world producing amazing technical inventions in defense electronics, power generation, refrigerated transport, nuclear engineering and so on.

The logo is still visible today. It appears on an odd assortment of products, from solar panels, light bulbs, flat panel TVs and air conditioners. But it’s not your father’s Westinghouse. It’s not even Westinghouse.

Unlike GE, the company no longer exists. Westinghouse Electric officially died on December 1st 1997.

On that date a great industrial icon of the 20th Century completed one of the most sweeping corporate transformations in history by morphing itself into CBS Corporation, the broadcasting and media company it acquired in 1995. What was left of the firm’s industrial business was sold in pieces.

And so the 111-year-old industrial icon founded on the genius of George Westinghouse vanished from the face of the earth.

________________________

While large corporations are, in one way, merely legal fictions which produce returns out of interchangeable assets, in another way they have a life of their own.

Whatever the complexity of events leading up to the dismantling of an industrial giant and its transformation it into a media company, the demise of Westinghouse demonstrates the resilience of a brand name.

Getting with it.

In 1998 the company, now CBS Corporation, did two things that would ensure the Westinghouse name would live beyond the grave. It sold its remaining manufacturing asset, the nuclear energy business, to British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), along with rights to the Westinghouse name. BNFL in turn sold it to Toshiba in 2006 and it still operates to this day as Westinghouse Electric Company.

CBS also created a new subsidiary to manage the Westinghouse brand. What “managing” means in this case is licensing.

The famous mark, designed by Paul Rand in 1960, along with the Westinghouse name and the slogan “You can be sure…if it’s Westinghouse” has been licensed to a ragbag of small companies hoping to be raised from obscurity by use of the famous brand .

There’s Angelo Brothers, for example, a Philadelphia lighting company. In 2003 Angelo Brothers changed its name to Westinghouse Lighting Corporation under a licensing deal.

“We’re proud to be part of the Westinghouse family and to market products under one of the most powerful and trustworthy brands of our time”, said Stanley Angelo, who now rejoices in the title of Chairman and CEO of Westinghouse Lighting Corporation. While convenient for the Angelo brothers the arrangement has understandably given rise to comical confusion with people calling a nuclear power company for Christmas tree light bulb replacements.

And then there’s Westinghouse Digital of Orange, California that markets LCD televisions and other flat-panel display products^. of reportedly variable quality that are made in Taiwan.

Westinghouse Lighting: Borrowed brand heritage.

One of the most recent conversions to Westinghouse is Akeena Solar, an installer and manufacturer of modular solar panels. Akeena Solar is now Westinghouse Solar. It too is free to use the Circle W logo, the slogan “You can be sure…if it’s Westinghouse”.

Akeena Solar astutely observed: “ as solar purchasers move from early adapters to mainstream consumers, a lack of brand recognition will discourage buyers”.

Idea! Why bother building a brand when you can rent one? Akeena Solar now drapes itself in the borrowed trust and heritage and reputation of a brand that took another company a century to build.

The odd thing about all this is that Westinghouse as a brand is out of its time. While it is not dead, neither is it alive. It connects to a bygone era for those who remember it; for those who don’t it is a museum piece, a brand in formaldehyde. It is an undead brand.

In fact, it has become the antithesis of a brand: it guarantees nothing. From product to product there are no quality standards actively maintained by a parent company. Whatever it delivers, it is not the Westinghouse brand promise it wants you to think it is.

It’s an empty promise, a mocking contradiction of its own slogan: If it’s Westinghouse…you can’t be sure.

Related articles

• UPDATE 1-Akeena loss narrows; shares surge 14 percent (reuters.com)
• Westinghouse President and CEO Stresses Necessity of Nuclear Energy (prnewswire.com)
• Investing in Nuclear Power Plant Construction: Consider Shaw (seekingalpha.com)

The Royal wedding – a case of life imitating Disney

The ability of Disney to capture the essence of an innocent childhood fairy story and commercialize it to the edge of sentimental excess is itself the stuff of legend.

But who knew the the power of the Imagineers of Burbank to so graphically and accurately envision the future?

It turns out the ‘fairy tale’ Royal wedding of Prince William and Kate really was a fairy tale. It was lifted (almost) straight off the Disney drawing boards right down to the characters and costumes.

Buckingham Palace should be expecting an invoice marked Disney.

William, Kate, Beatrice and Eugenie - straight out of a fairy tale.

Bin Laden: code name Geronimo

“We have a visual on Geronimo.”

It was the first confirmation that Osama bin Laden was definitely in the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan last Sunday.

Geronimo and Osama bin Laden: Elusive

Shortly afterwards, a Navy Seal halfway across the world sent the message “Geronimo EKIA” – meaning enemy killed in action – which was relayed to a jubilant White House Situation Room.

Why Geronimo? The code name was chosen for bin Laden because, like the Apache chief, he had managed to evade capture for years and was apparently able to vanish into thin air.

As London’s Daily Telegraph reports, Geronimo’s ability to stay on the run gave rise to legends that he was able to walk without leaving any tracks, and that he could survive being shot.

“Abottabad sounds like name most New Yorkers would have invented for the fictional place they would have loved to kill Bin Laden.”

John Stewart, The Daily Show.

More than a century before bin Laden escaped from the caves of Tora Bora, Geronimo was said to have pulled off a similar evasion in New Mexico. He and his followers entered a cave which was said to have only one visible entrance, and then disappeared as US troops waited at the front.

More than 5,000 soldiers were used to hunt Geronimo and a small band of followers. Unlike bin Laden he eventually surrendered in 1886.

He went on to embrace Christianity and to become a celebrity, appearing at the World’s Fair in St Louis in 1904, and at the inaugural parade for President Theodore Roosevelt the following year.

• Abbottabad is named after General Sir James Abbott, a British army officer in colonial India who founded the town. The ‘abad’ ending comes from Urdu, originating from Persian to mean ‘abode, town or settlement’.

Related articles

• “Codename: ‘Geronimo’ for Osama Bin Laden Mission Angers Some Native Americans” and related posts (blogs.abcnews.com)

Lucent, Consignia and the psychology of naming

What is a good name?

Most people would agree that the 1996 Lucent spin-off from AT&T was a brilliant success. The name ‘Lucent’ is cited as a triumph, as shiningly transformative as the literal meaning of the word on which it is based (lucent:from Latin lūcēns, present participle of lūcēre to shine).

Remember this TV ad? $100 million says you do.

And yet, according to one authoritative account, the whole naming process was a debilitating, angst-ridden affair.  Lucent was unloved and unwanted. Right to the end AT&T executives were ready to ditch it. Consider this passage from Optical Illusions: Lucent And The Crash Of Telecom:

“No one loved the name Lucent…The choice of both name and symbol were controversial until the last, and Landor continued to developed the AGB name [Alexander Graham Bell’s initials] and an alternative, Telascent or Telescent.

As the process dragged on, Rich McGinn and Henry Schacht [President and CEO elect respectively] chatted in front of an elevator one evening. They had reconciled themselves to the fact that the Bell name [American Bell] would not be available, that no new name would emerge to sweep them off their feet, and as their elevator car descended to the ground the two agreed that Lucent was the best option available.

Yet neither was overly enthusiastic about the name, and as they ascended the stage to announce it to their employees, McGinn turned to Schacht and said, “Come on, Henry. One last chance, we can still change it if we want to”.”

Their worst fears were realized on launch day when newspapers ran their usual ‘What’s in a name’ story with quotes such as this:

“It’s a horrible name,” said Danny Briere, president of TeleChoice, a telecommunications consulting firm. “The good news is that it doesn’t sound like anything else; the bad is there’s a reason for it.”

For engineers steeped in a century of the Bell culture and telecom jargon Lucent was outside of their frame of reference. It was a gift thrust upon a recalcitrant management by force of circumstance: a spin-off needs a unique, ownable name in order to be spun-off, and all other options that were within their comfort zone were not available.

Kathy Fitzgerald, Lucent’s VP of Corporate Communications, was revealingly philosophical on this point:

“It turns out you don’t need to love the name or the logo to be able to turn it into one of the best known names in communications in less than two years. Because, trust me, I was at best lukewarm about the name – with its key virtue being that it wasn’t a made-up name and was actually a word in the meaning ‘marked with clarity and glowing with light’.”

The definition was repeated like a mantra to ward off evil spirits. How many people knew Lucent was a real word? Why does it matter? And how is ‘marked with clarity and glowing with light’ relevant?

Underlying this comment is an atavistic fear of what many executives think of as ‘made-up’ corporate names and a bias towards the tried-and-true of the familiar.

In spite of its eventual business decline and merger with Alcatel of France, Lucent’s initial success gave rise to a tranche of sound-alike imitators, circa 2000 – Agilent, Navigant, Thrivent, Mirant – all of them made-up names for companies hoping to borrow some of Lucent’s magic. Such is the corporate world psychology of naming.

So what transformed Lucent from the unpopular choice it was into a celebrated case of rebranding brilliance?

In a word: success.

The Lucent Technologies IPO was a huge success, thanks in no small measure to a $100 million ad campaign designed to underwrite the stock issue. Ipso facto, the name is a success.

At the other end of this spectrum there is the example of Consignia, which one newspaper was moved to call  “one of the most disastrous corporate rebrandings ever undertaken”.

Consignia was launched in 2001 as the new name for the UK’s Post Office Group, a cumbersome collection of inefficient delivery services which included that most royal and ancient of institutions, the Royal Mail.

The rigorous restructuring plan was years in development. It was designed to bring the government-owned enterprise into the 21^st century as a modern, competitively viable and internationally focused business. However, they didn’t reckon with public sentiment and the media’s penchant for indulging it.

If you can include the three words ‘royal’, ‘institution’ and ‘branding’ in the same sentence you have a potent complexity of popular interest that is red meat to the rabid British press.

After a remorseless torrent of negative news stories, union strike threats over job cuts and mounting financial losses the restructuring strategy was abandoned. In a final act of high symbolism, the whole sorry mess was renamed yet again, this time as the Royal Mail Group. Political expediency won the day. Consignia was sacrificed as proof of the plan’s demise.

Ringo, it was the Beatles who made you famous.

Was Consignia a bad name? No. There are other names out there of similar ilk doing serviceable duty – Altria, Aviva, Centrica, etc. Consignia was pilloried in part because it did not do a very good job of explaining itself. In the end the strategy failed and, therefore, the name is associated to this day with a failure.

It was a lesson learned well by Aviva a few years later.  When the British insurer Norwich Union decided to unify its global operations under a single name, Aviva, they took no chances. Ringo Starr, Bruce Willis and Alice Cooper were featured in a series of high-profile TV ads to make the point that changing your name is really OK; we did it – and just look at how successful we are.

It was rebranding 101 to the letter. The name and the campaign may have been pretty banal stuff but it worked. Aviva got its version of the story out first and stuck to it.

Is Aviva a better name than Consignia? Is Consignia worse than Lucent? It doesn’t matter.

In business, as in war, the victors get to write history. Ultimately, all rebranding is about PR and the battle for control of the story.

Related articles

• A seasonal recipe for Consignia – a naming stew (namedropping.wordpress.com)
• Alcatel-Lucent Chops Away at Years of Failure (businessweek.com)