Thursday, October 2, 2008

From unique to non-descript

I was surprised to see/hear in a recent television commercial (yes, I still watch commercials) that Electrasol was changing its name. And the most surprising part is the blandness of the new name - finish. It's generic and the addition of the diamond image and tagline - the diamond standard of dishwashing - does nothing to take away the ineffectual rebranding.

It's usually a mistake to change the name of a product that caries a great deal of brand recognition, like Electrasol. Name changes can create confusion, diminish brand recall and soften sales. But if a company is going to change the name of a product, it should choose a name that's meaningful to the product, not a name that's muttered by parents around the dinner table (finish your vegatables, meat, rice, you get the picture) long before the dishes hit the dishwasher .

I don't know the background on this name change and a google search resulted only in a bunch of coupon offers to celebrate the new name. I only hope the marketers behind the rebranding effort were strong-armed into the finish name and didn't craft this meager candidate themselves.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It seems that Reckitt Benckiser makes both "finish" and "electrasol". It also appears that these are two names for the same product; finish being the european name and electrasol the north american name. So they've just decided to consolodate the product under a single brand name. However one still has to ask why they're doing this, since electrasol is such a strong north american brand.

CHiP said...

It seems to me that they tried changing Electrasol's name to Finish once before, years ago. It didn't catch on, so they changed back. I could be mistaken, but I also can't find anything except coupon offers, etc on the web.