Rebranding agency: case study Hermes
Rebranding an organisation that has some perceived problems can present opportunities and pitfalls. All brands have inherent brand equity, good or bad.
Using Hermes as an example, we will look at the recent rebrand and speculate on why they did what they did.
Brand equity
What is brand equity? It can be many things but essentially it is the accumulated reputation, recognition and perceived value (and values) an organisation has with its customers and clients.
Reputation can be a very good thing or a very bad thing. Hermes the courier company had a very poor reputation in the UK and has recently gone through a rebrand with a name change and new identity. It is now called Evri. I suspect the reason for the rebrand was an attempt to shake off this poor reputation and start afresh. Let’s hope the management and processes went through a radical change as well or the new brand may end up inheriting the old reputation.
Hermes identity (logo etc) was not particularly strong, to begin with. Without looking it up, can you visualise the Hermes logo?
If I asked you the same question with FedEx or UPS their logos and probably their colour palette would pop straight into your head. So it’s fair to say Hernes didn’t have a strong visual recognition in their old brand, it had a low equity.
It is a tricky job defining Hermes old values outside customer perception. Their tagline was ‘Making Deliveries Easy.’. Note the full stop in the tagline, that must have been on purpose as taglines don’t tend to feature a full stop. Was it trying to infer that this is the definitive message?
The Hermes website (still live for logistics) states: ‘Hermes moves the world – fast, reliable and naturally sustainable’. I suspect in most consumers' eyes there is little, if any evidence any of these statements apply to the reality of the company.
Evris’s new strapline is ‘Delivery made for you’, which to my mind makes no sense.
So to sum up, Hermes had a poor reputation for service, low brand recognition and brand values that did not sit with the real-world experience.
The rebrand
Superunion was the agency tasked with this prickly task and I have to confess, I was not at the meetings but for the purposes of conjecture, I’ll have a stab at what I think happened.
Firstly the new name. Evri. There is a trend for the phonetic or removal of all vowels, Abrdn springs to mind, the financial institution insisting the pronunciation is still Aberdeen. Let’s see how long that lasts.
Evri obviously implies everything and perhaps even everywhere. That’s a good premise for a company that can deliver anything anywhere. Ani?
Anyway, I kinda like Evri. The concept appears to be backed up by the identity. A bespoke font has been created and there is no strict logo, but rather 194,481 sets of potential variations to set the name.
Again, I like the idea however, the last time this flexible approach was attempted was with British Airways tail fins (which I also Liked) which ended in brand disaster. So what do I know?
One thing that has been carried over from the old identity is the colour. They have retained the blue. I can’t see the logic behind this, the van livery does not feature the blue and if it did there would be a cost saving. Given the brand equity is so poor, this might be a moment where the board's feathers were smoothed.
I suppose a lot of the strong colour pallets are owned by other courier companies, orange and purple are FedEx, UPS owns brown (imagine pitching that these days) DPD has red, Deliveroo has teal – so where are you going to go? I know what I would have chosen…
And on that point, I notice early versions of the logo featured the strapline ‘Formerly Hermes’ which again looks like a management interference and diminishes the rebrand. But I am guessing.
I can’t foresee what this rebrand might do, how it will survive and if it will be successful (although I have my hidden opinions), what I can say is this rebrand has thrown out any previous brand equity and recognises it is a bold step.
Let’s hope it delivers.