Are Rebrands A Good Idea?

0:00Alright, so we are going to talk about if rebrands are a good idea. So let's talk about a recent rebrand. Here's an example for everyone. Facebook changing into meta. So that is a rebrand. You change your logo, you change your name, and sometimes there are good results. Sometimes there are bad results. So we're here to talk about this a little more and share some examples. So I'm not a fan of rebrands, especially if you have a really popular brand. If you're new, no problem, not a big deal. But if you already have a lot of revenue and a lot depends on the person, A lot could be a million bucks.

0:34A lot could be a hundred grand. A lot could be a billion. I would not consider rebranding. I just don't like it. I think it's okay to adjust the logo and the design of certain aspects. Like if you look at the Apple logo has changed over time, but why not just keep the same corporate name? Or you could create a parent company like Google did. So Google is still Google, but now they have Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google. That I don't think is a big deal. But if I was like Facebook, I wouldn't be like, we're now known as Meta. Yeah. They tried rebranding Facebook, like just in general, if you're doing a, you know, like facebook.com is still Facebook.

1:13I don't think you would ever see them changing from Facebook to meta.com, but they're trying to go after this whole metaverse and they're trying to make a whole different narrative. But generally speaking, I think it's a bad idea to just change the name of anything that's popular or that makes money. because in most cases that I've seen, it typically goes down and I haven't really seen too many cases where it goes up. Oh, well, we got one over here. So you remember this one for sure, because we're both in California. I remember when Time Warner became Spectrum. So Time Warner Cable became Spectrum because Time Warner had such bad reviews that they had to rebrand.

1:48So it was like a completely correct. I don't think it was Time Warner. I think it was Comcast became Spectrum. Let's look at it. I'm pretty sure it was Comcast. So in that case, I think a rebrand works really well because if you have a terrible name and everyone knows you for crappy product, crappy service, even if you have revenue, it usually can't hurt. And what's funny is when they announced Spectrum, everyone's like, oh, this is a cool new thing. No, it's not. They just did a rebrand, but to the consumer, they try to spin it as something new and fresh. Still is terrible. Oh, we're both wrong.

2:17It was Spectrum to Charter. Oh, sorry. Charter to spectrum. Remember charter? But either way, it was still a terrible company when it came to service. If anytime you call their service or their phone line, you're lucky if you got to answer. Speaking of Comcast, do you remember the old dig post that went viral? Someone ended up, they took a picture of a Comcast technician falling asleep on their couch because the technician was on hold so long with their own internal company trying to solve a problem. They fell asleep and that thing went viral. That's funny. That's so funny. Yeah. charter was the worst everybody in california would be like it's the worst cable service it was like negative branding right it was getting reinforced too much so they're like okay yeah we're gonna change it to spectrum i'm gonna show you some good rebrands though i do agree on the facebook they should have just kept facebook honestly because right now like both neil and i have ad agencies sometimes we say meta sometimes we say facebook it starts to get confusing after a while because you kind of and wait just to clarify here the facebook version is very different than google google is just like we just have a parent company because we do more than search and it's called Alphabet and we own a lot of stuff.

3:21Facebook, even though there's still facebook.com and it's not a crazy, terrible rebrand, I think a terrible one would have been if they got rid of Facebook altogether and they just said it's Meta. But they changed the name to Meta because they're like, hey, we're focusing everything on the metaverse. Well, if you look at the general world, none of us are really like, yeah, we need a metaverse. It's just like, we're cool with the Facebook that you have, the Instagram that you have, change your algorithms a bit, focus on this type of content. But they're the ones shoving the metaverse down our throats versus the general population being like, yes, we want a metaverse.

3:52Now, when you look at AI, at all the consumers out there in the whole world, right now, even though some people are afraid of AI, majority of the world is embracing AI. You look at ChatGPT, according to SimilarWeb, it's the 19th most popular website on the web. And globally, like I'm even in Brazil right now, asked a room, how many of you guys use ChatGPT? And these were executives from really large corporations that are global corporations, almost 100 % of them raise their hand. And there's probably like 50, 60 people in the room. But the point I'm getting at is Meta's rebrand was more like, hey, we want to shove the metaverse down.

4:26And it had nothing to do with what people wanted. By the way, on that front, something that's kind of related here is when you look at Apple, when they did their video for the Vision Pro, which is their augmented reality headset, they didn't talk really about AI, didn't talk about metaverse. In fact, I don't think the word AI was used at all, nor was the metaverse used because they want to keep things simple at the end of the day and they know who they're targeting. So it's really important. Like when you think about a rebrand, rebrands actually complicate things versus simplify things, which is what Apple tries to do.

4:57Dude, are you going to buy the Apple VR headset? Dude, we talked about this before. Of course we're going to buy it. Of course. Yeah, I'm going to buy it. I don't know if you changed your mind. No. If you're fortunate enough to be able to afford one, you should get one. here let me show you something so i pulled up this here's some incredible rebrands here neil so patagonian toothfish now it's called chilean sea bass i think that's a successful rebrand because i don't want to eat a toothfish i just think about the teeth right oftentimes i forget that mayonnaise is aioli is just mayonnaise so i don't know that aioli is just mayonnaise i try not to eat mayonnaise or aioli so that one okay okay okay but aioli sounds a little better right yeah Yeah.

5:36Pleather is now vegan leather. Okay. I like that. Statistics, data science, data science, machine learning, machine learning, AI, crypto to web three. Anyway, I think these top three are good examples. So your mileage may vary. It depends on the situation that you're in. And we just wanted to share a couple of examples here. Anything else? But if you look at the examples that you shared, typically, if something has a negative connotation, a rebrand is not a bad idea. But I hate it when companies do a rebrand and there's not any negative issues or their business is still growing well. That's a good point.

6:04That's a good point. Okay, let's talk about yours. So Neil Patel Digital is now NP Digital. That's true because too many people felt it was relying on Neil Patel. And they're like, oh, what happens if Neil's not on my campaign? And we kept the initials. We just shortened it. We don't even go by NP Digital internally. We just go NPD because it's too long. That's a good example. That's another example, right? So it just depends. Your mileage may vary. So what's funny is we try to be NP Digital from day one. Technically, the agency was supposed to be called Patel. I couldn't get Patel.com. and then we were trying to be NP digital and we couldn't get npdigital.com made the guy offer and he came back like a year and a half later after we created the company and then he accepted the offer nice or else we would have been NP digital from day one in the future we will talk about how Neil buys Patel later but that is it for today please don't forget to rate review subscribe five stars please and we will see you later