Online Rebranding – Too Important to Be Left to the Professionals

Recent announcements timed for the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries included the usual update from the major publishers on recently rebranded businesses and products.

This time, Thomson Carswell became “Carswell, a Thomson Reuters Business” and “Westlaw-ecarswell” became “WestlawCanada”. Both name changes are undoubted improvements over what was there before and make sense in the long term, but they are really just the latest in a long series of changes that have taken place since The Carswell Company was acquired by the The Thomson Corporation. On the plus side, the print products continue to be associated with the well regarded “Carswell” name, while the cumbersome “westlawecarswell” has been banished to the scrap heap of legal publishing history along with many other brands found to be wanting for one reason or another.

LexisNexis Canada followed suit with announcements of greater substance but with the potential to create confusion for customers. Just as the Irwin Law popular Essentials Series of legal texts was being removed from the LexisNexis Quicklaw service, the company announced the launch of “LexisNexis Quicklaw Criminal Law Essentials” and “LexisNexis Quicklaw Employment Law Essentials”. These products appear to have the same content as the previously announced “Criminal Practice on Quicklaw” and “Employment Law on Quicklaw”, with the only difference being that a customer can subscribe to them without having to simultaneously subscribe to the full Quicklaw online service. If this is true, was a new brand really necessary?

More significantly, LexisNexis issued a low key (almost invisible) announcement of the launch of the “Canada Digest”. Missing from the announcement, however, was any explanation of the Canada Digest and what it offers the legal researcher. Effectively, the Canada Digest reorganizes cases on Quicklaw according to a classification scheme equivalent to that used by the Canadian Abridgment. Both the Canadian Abridgment and the Canada Digest derive their classification schemes from The English and Empire Digest, now rebranded as just “The Digest”. Heretofore, Quicklaw used the old “Dominion Report Service” key words but was too embarrassed to say so. The key words were never a true “classification scheme” and the change to the Canada Digest actually means something. With the launch of the Canada Digest, LexisNexis Quicklaw gets a major boost in its ongoing battle to retain its market leadership position as the primary provider of case law online. If only Lexis would tell its customers.

Canada Law Book, not to be left out of the name changing games, announced a plan to rename the “Labour Law Library” as the “Labour Law Spectrum”. If true, this change represents another attempt to make something clear into something obscure through rebranding.

What is the point of “rebranding” business and products?

According to marketing literature, “rebranding” is a legitimate marketing tool that can prove to be useful, both to the business and to the customer. Simply defined, “rebranding” is the process whereby a business or a product that was developed with one brand, is subsequently marketed, sold or distributed under a different brand.

From a somewhat cynical perspective, it could be said that some business and product name changes simply reflect corporate politics and current branding fads. Rarely is a new marketing executive hired in a major legal publishing company but that he or she doesn’t shortly thereafter conclude that any and all challenges the business is facing are the result of the poor or confusing branding initiatives of the previous incumbent. Consultants are quickly hired who verify the opinion of the new marketing executive who then receive commissions to rebrand the business or the product, usually at considerable expense.

More understandable is the rebranding that follows a corporate acquisition or merger. This used to be an infrequent occurrence. More recently, rebranding has happened with regularity as legal publishing houses have been bought, sold, and merged frequently. Yet another reason given for rebranding is to distance a business from some perceived negative connotation or image. From a sales or marketing perspective, it doesn’t seem to be enough to say that a problem or issue has been resolved. The preferred course of action is to rebrand the new and improved version of what had gone before and announce it as if a new business or product had been created.

Does rebranding benefit the customer?

Despite the claims of marketing literature, it is not clear that rebranding benefits the customer in any way. In the print environment, every brand, both old and new, lives on indefinitely. The whole purpose of a law library is to retain publications, not discard them because a publisher has launched a new brand. Every new brand on a legal publication becomes just another brand in what is already a large collection of brands, frequently from the same publisher. For that reason alone, nothing distinctive results.

Rebranding in the online environment is easier in that a change in the brand can be immediately reflected in all versions of the product but for what purpose? Online branding also suffers from another problem – brands that have no meaning to a legal researcher. Just what is a product called a “Spectrum” or an “Essentials”? Even worse are products called a “taxnetpro” or the “Works”, the former being incomprehensible and the latter sounding like something on a menu. One can tell that a brand has missed the boat when the publisher has to continually explain what is the content of a product to a customer.

Brands that matter to the customer

In legal publishing, what are the brands that matter to the customer? I would suggest that the ones that really matter are the names of the authors and editors associated with specific content. It is the authors and editors who establish the credibility of a publisher, not the reverse. Other brands that really matter are a handful of product names that have a long history and a critical mass of content that has stood the test of time, like Halsburys or the Canadian Abridgment.

Brands that matter less to the customer are the names of legal publishing businesses, and especially the names of the conglomerates that own them. To the legal profession, the reputation of a legal publisher is based on the quality of its publishing program and not on promotional pieces with glowing adjectives about the publisher that appear everywhere in advertisements. It is well known that new graduates from law schools typically have no idea as to which company publishes which product by the time they graduate and have no interest in finding out. However, they do know which print and online products they found useful in conducting legal research.

Knowing customer needs and wants

From a customer’s perspective, the reality is that “rebranding” costs money, usually lots of money, and that the customers ultimately pay for it as the cost of each rebranding exercise is added to the price of every product. Every new logo, every new sign on a building, every new display at a conference, is paid for by the customers and no one else. In the circumstances, it should be reasonable for rebranding to benefit the customer. It would help everyone involved in legal research if the marketing executives that make the decisions on rebranding actually knew and understood what the customer feels is important and act accordingly. Rebranding decisions are too important to be left to professional marketers.