When Stepping Backward is the Right Direction

The Brand New blog (well worth adding to your blogreader, BTW) offers a critique on the rebranding of Canadian retailer, Hudson’s Bay Company.

I don’t know this brand’s history, but its previous identity appears to have been an attempt to “modernize” this 339-year-old company by stripping away all vestiges of its heritage and reducing its name to “HBC.”

Thankfully, someone there recognized the travesty of that approach and initiated a rebranding effort that proudly embraces the company’s rich and differentiating history. Designed using the full brand name, the new identity offers a traditional crest intersected by Hudson’s Bay Company’s signature stripes in four colors.

It’s nice to see a corporation bucking the pervasive and brand-suffocating trend toward initialization of names some may consider long and unwieldy. Length is only one of many traits that affect the power of a brand name–rarely does it make sense to rebrand when length is the only issue.

Even for someone who knows nothing about the history of the company, the name “Hudson’s Bay Company” resonates with connotations and has the potential to pique interest. It’s insane to throw all that away for the sake of brevity.