 In this dynamic market environment, there are a number of reasons why a company might find the need to reinvent its brand, rebrand, reposition itself. These reasons could include technological changes and social-cultural changes, demographic changes, market changes of any sort. In recent times in the New Zealand market, we've seen three fairly big companies reinvent or rebrand themselves. These include Zed from Shell, Telecom going on to Spark, and Air New Zealand who reinvented itself in a very different way. So it's interesting to look at these three examples because they've all gone about it in fairly different ways with equally significant amounts of investment. Zed is an interesting case because obviously they changed their brand name because the license ran out for Shell and instead of paying royalties to the Shell organization, they decided to change the name to Zed, being a New Zealand-owned company now. And so when they went about it, they changed the name first and the logo. And this meant a lot of cynicism and skepticism. People were accusing them of just slapping a fresh coat of paint onto the company and not really making any changes. It's not until recently we've seen some of these changes happening sort of after they've changed the logo and the name and they're more positive now. So that's one way of doing it is to change your name and your brand first and then to make the business changes later. With Telecom, they claim to sort of be approaching it in a different way. So they're claiming that they've changed a business model over the last few years, half a decade. They're moving more into clouds, iPad, sort of apps, all these sorts of more dynamic environments being a data company as opposed to a telecommunications company. And so they've made the changes. Then there was that transitional period in the middle where they changed the logo from the old logo to the new, what we know now as the Spark logo. And now it's come to the very end of that transition and they're going to change their name from Telecom to Spark. And so the argument there is that the business has already changed and it's simply just a name change at the end. And if we contrast those two examples with the third example of Air New Zealand, that's probably the most interesting case in my mind because here's an example of a company that went through equally significant changes to the business model, if not more significant than the changes experienced by Zed and Telecom. So they reinvented their brand completely using design-led thinking, changing the customer experience, the look of their planes, interior, exterior, all of the above. But they've reinvented themselves without changing the brand name at all. And so that's a very interesting example of hanging on to the brand equity and the heritage that's tied in with the Air New Zealand brand, but changing everything else essentially about the business. And in a way it's more of a genuine adaptation of the company in my mind. So rebranding is obviously a very expensive investment and the downside of just changing the name is that nothing else really changes. So essentially it's like painting a bus a new color and calling it a new public transport system. So if you change your brand, your logo and all this signature letterheads, et cetera, the color, the font, that's a very superficial level of changing. And unless the business model changes dramatically and the culture changes to adapt to these new circumstances, it really is just a waste of time. You're literally painting a building with a new color and it ends there. And that's a huge investment, both in terms of time and cost. And so the argument is, well, why not invest that money into actually changing the company for the better as opposed to just changing the brand name? So that's the downside. In terms of positives, I guess changing your name does send a signal out there both externally to the marketplace, but also internally to the employees that the company is still relevant. It's still dynamic. It changes the foot and it changes for the better, hopefully, to make the company more, you know, adaptable to the new market environment. Whatever the path the company chooses to reinvent itself or rebrand or reposition itself, there are some essential points to remember. The first one is, you know, make sure you're doing it for the right reason. So in some cases, a name change or rebranding of an organization can come across almost as a CEO wanting to make their stamp on something. They don't want to work with someone else's legacy. They want to have their own legacy. They want their own baby to nurture and to grow. And so this is a bit of an ego trip in my mind if a CEO approaches rebranding in that sense. So you have to be careful that the change is actually genuine and it is for the better of the company and the customers. The other essential point to remember is that if you change, then the only change that really counts is the cultural change within the organization. Because it's from the employees behaving in a new way, systems being implemented to make the company operate in a new sense, that true changes come about. And those are the changes that hopefully will actually matter to the marketplace. Because at the end of the day, the customer doesn't really care if you're a new name or a new color. What they want is that you're providing a new, better service to them.