Can you rebrand a bad memory?

Five that rebranded and one that didn't

By Craig Smith

What has Abu Ghraib got in common with the Millennium Dome? They've both been shut down only to reopen under new names. But the rebranding trick is a hard one to pull off, especially when bad memories are fresh.

Sellafield, Altria, Sea River Mediterranean, Xe - the rebranding club recently gained a new member in the guise of Baghdad Central Prison.

That most of these names will be unfamiliar illustrates the difficulty, or futility, of attempting to wipe clean the slate of history with a mere name change.

Even with the benefit of five decades passing, the British nuclear reactor formerly known as Windscale looms large in the public consciousness for the disaster that occurred there in October 1957 when a fire led to a radioactive leak.

Abu Ghraib should be knocked down, turned into a community centre, a park area or even a parking lot. Anything but a prison Joel BiswasFuturebrand

What chance then for Altria, formerly Philip Morris, to shed its associations with tobacco, or the oil tanker Exxon Valdez to put ecological disaster behind it with a pleasure cruiser-type moniker such as Sea River Mediterranean?

Iraq, and the US's presence there, has opened up a new chapter in such "rebranding" exercises. The reputation of Blackwater, the security contractor operating in the country under a US State Department contract, was already badly damaged by the time of a 2007 shooting involving Blackwater guards that left a dozen Iraqi civilians dead.

Earlier this month it renamed its group companies Xe (pronounced "zee") is an attempt to limit its losses to the State Department contract that once represented a third of its annual revenue.

Saddam past

Abu Ghraib prison will find it less easy to eradicate an ugly past. It gained notoriety in 2004 when the world witnessed shocking images of prisoner abuse at the hands of their US military captors - an episode that former US President George Bush described as the low point of his tenancy at the White House.

Before the arrival of the Americans, the prison had held inmates and enemies of Saddam Hussein in their tens of thousands.

This is the most vivid association with Abu Ghraib prison

The Iraqi officials now running the prison are at pains to point out that Baghdad Central Prison is a very different institution to the one the Americans eventually shut down in 2006. It now houses a modern medical centre, mosque, hair salon and recreational area for visiting families. The authorities have capped the number of inmates it will hold at 14,000.

Such efforts to improve the "product" are understandable, commendable even, yet its "repackaging" faces one, seemingly insurmountable, hurdle. Whatever name the prison goes by, it still sits squarely in that district between Baghdad and Fallujah called, well, Abu Ghraib.

And while marketing gurus can do what they like with a company or institution, they have little sway over the renaming of an entire neighbourhood.

This is the new Baghdad Central Prison

"This isn't so much an attempt at commercial rebranding as an attempt at reconstructive surgery, changing one's identity and trying to live under an assumed name," says Joel Biswas, senior strategy consultant at branding agency Futurebrand. "The only problem is that Abu Ghraib can't actually physically relocate."

In fact, the rebranding is an insult to the Iraqi people and a major black eye for the branding industry, says Mr Biswas.

"Abu Ghraib should be knocked down, turned into a community centre, a park area or even a parking lot. Anything but a prison."

Whether or not the branding industry suffers by the efforts of Baghdad Central Prison or vice versa, the fact is that its management faces the same difficult decision as any crisis-hit organization - whether to keep, change or cull the brand.

In 1982, the US's leading over-the-counter medicine, Tylenol, was rocked by the so-called Tylenol Murders, when capsules on shelves were laced with cyanide, killing seven customers. Although the deaths were all in the Chicago area, the effect was felt nationwide and few believed the brand could survive the disaster.

Owner Johnson & Johnson responded swiftly, launching a then unprecedented mass recall, public information campaign and relaunch. Within a year, not only had the household name survived, it had regained its market share and more than restored public trust.

Dome crisis

What Johnson & Johnson realised is that the residual value of a well-known brand is greater than the damage that can be done to it by even the worst of crises, assuming you respond to the problem ethically and effectively. It is a fine line, however, and the trick is in being able to spot the difference between a brand survivor and one that is in its death throes.

Though little else was wounded in its making than a few political egos, by the time the Millennium Dome opened for business on 1 January 2000, it was already a brand suffering a catastrophic crisis of reputation.

Over budget and overhyped, the exhibition that the structure housed attracted just over half the number of visitors forecast. A year later the venue was closed and struggled for purpose for six years until it was reopened as "the O2" in June 2007.

Although it had shed the Millennium Dome name and had benefited from a