Australia’s biggest rebrand fails as the BOM backtracks on $200,000 new name

The Bureau of Meteorology has been left shamefaced this week after announcing it wanted to be known simply as ‘The Bureau’ following a costly rebrand at the same time as three states struggled with deadly flooding disasters wiping out homes and businesses.

A rebrand is great in theory: it’s a refreshing lick of paint for a business that can help it redefine its brand identity in a changing market, or even on occasion carve out a new brand identity in the wake of a reputational hit.

But there’s always the risk that the public won’t accept the new you, which can have somewhat unpredictable results.

Here are four rebranding fails in Australia’s (and New Zealand’s) history.

The BoM

On Tuesday, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) released a sternly-worded media alert imploring journalists to “please update style guide references for the Bureau of Meteorology” to ensure it is called by the full name in the first instance and the Bureau after that — not the BoM.

It came after an 18-month rebrand by Melbourne agencies C-Word Communications and Era Co, which included an update to the organisation’s visual style and logo, as well as research, pull-up banners and media engagement.

The rebrand cost a total of $220,296 but somehow, incredibly, every person working on the project across both agencies forgot to reserve the BoM’s new Twitter handles, which were listed in the final line of the media alert.

As a result, several Twitter users quickly snatched up handles, including @TheBureau_NSW, and held them “ransom”, with one user demanding “1) a weather balloon (will settle for a regular balloon), 2) a signed photo of Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac, 3) the power to manipulate the weather (like Halle Berry in x-men)”.

Attention Bureau of Meteorology

I’ll give your Twitter handle back if you meet 3 simple demands. I want:

1) a weather balloon (will settle for a regular balloon)
2) a signed photo of Sunrise weatherman Sam Mac
3) the power to manipulate the weather (like Halle Berry in x-men) https://t.co/x5EysTUxLh

— Keelan (@I_am_da_BOM) October 18, 2022

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek was visibly exhausted by the whole debacle, which came as life-threatening flooding was causing chaos and loss of life in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania.

“My focus and the focus of the BoM should be on weather, not branding,” Plibersek said on Wednesday, tellingly not bothering with the new name.

“The Bureau of Meteorology, the BoM — Australians will make up their own minds about what they call it.”

Deep in crisis management, BOM backtracked on its advice in a statement later this week, saying “The community is welcome to refer to the Bureau in any way they wish, including referring to us as the ‘BoM’”.

iSnack 2.0

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it — but Vegemite tried to, anyway. The cupboard staple across Australia suffered a rebrand in 2009, billed as a “deliciously different Vegemite experience” after sales began to dwindle slightly.

iSnack 2.0 is a valuable addition to the Vegemite product range AND THE HIGH COURT WILL SO HOLD pic.twitter.com/Pj9n2uiIZ5

— australian kitsch 🦘 (@OzKitsch) October 28, 2017

It all started when Vegemite, which ws owned by Kraft foods, went from an 80% Australian household penetration to 72% in five years prior to 2009, signalling to Simon Talbot, Kraft’s head of corporate affairs, that the iconic brand was in decline.

Talbot spearheaded a social listening strategy and found there were 32 different ways people ate the salty spread, which saw the creation of the successful “How do you like your Vegemite?” campaign that received over 300,000 submissions from fans.

This led Kraft to create a product designed specifically for quick eats, and put it to the public: what should we call this new spread? Cheesymite was popular, but Kraft wanted it to imply snacking, so instead tweaked another consumer suggestion ‘iSpread 2.0’.

It was an almost-immediate failure.

Within a week, Talbot told the BBC: “We have been overwhelmed by the passion for Vegemite and the new product. The new name has simply not resonated with Australians.”

Nation Brand

The backlash was immediate when the federal government unveiled its new Nation Brand initiative design, which looked exactly like an illustration of the COVID-19 spike protein with a big AU in the middle.

Minister for Multiculturalism and Seniors Mark Coure, who was in opposition at the time, said he would be personally complaining to Australia’s Nation Brand Advisory Council as well as then-trade minister Simon Birmingham about the design.

“I can’t believe they have changed the Australian made logo to look like this, it looks like a virus,” Coure said.

All I am seeing at the moment from the #Branding !!#Australia #rebranding pic.twitter.com/Jk1B7nXSsv

— 🇦🇺 Dunken K Bliths 🇺🇦 (@DunkenKBliths) July 2, 2020

Only — they didn’t. The government’s Nation Brand logo was a separate entity from the Australian Made campaign, a not-for-profit public company, and one was never replacing the other.

The logo, which was designed by marketing agency BBDO Sydney for a reported $10 million of taxpayer dollars, was supposed to be a wattle, an extremely unfortunate design considering it was released just six months into the pandemic.

“Obviously COVID means there’s a need to have a look at that piece of work — particularly the logo element — given some of the associations people were drawing,” Birmingham admitted.

Interestingly, it was former Labor MP Craig Emerson who originally had the idea for the green and gold logo in 1986 when he was working as a staffer for Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

“I wrote the Cabinet memorandum for Bob, he got Cabinet approval and 34 years later it’s still going,” he tweeted.

One NZ

Across the ditch now and Vodafone came under immediate fire when it announced it would be known as One New Zealand, which hordes of social media users said sounded like a “white nationalist” name.

It didn’t help that the new name bore a striking resemblance to One New Zealand Foundation (ONZF), a far-right group that welcomed Vodaphone’s new moniker because it gives “ONZF a far better coverage when Vodafone customers Google ‘One New Zealand’ and get the ‘One New Zealand Foundation’ by mistake”, researcher Ross Baker​ said.

Vodafone chief executive Jason Paris defended the rebrand on Twitter, saying it would save millions of dollars a year in branding fees after Vodafone split from Britain’s Vodafone Group in 2019 and was acquired by NZX-listed investment company Infratil and Canadian private equity firm Brookfield for $3.4 billion.

“One NZ has landed extremely well. 100% love that we are reinvesting the Voda brand licensing $ back in NZ, & that One NZ stands for the best of NZ (diversity, inclusion, trust, innovation etc) Ultimately we won’t be judged on the name but the actions we take. That’s our focus,” he posted to Twitter.

The rebrand came just two years after the Christchurch mosque massacre, where an Australian white supremacist terrorist shot dead 51 people during Friday prayer while live-streaming on Facebook.

So why did Vodafone choose that name? It was chosen to retain the last three letters of the original name, with a cryptic countdown to the new name including letters gradually being removed.

Surprisingly, industry veteran Andrew Stone from TwoViews was behind the new name, with team members from big-name agencies including DDB, which left social media baffled.

“I refuse to believe that neither you, your branding agency nor any of your communications people googled your new name before launching it,” one social media user tweeted.