Rebrands: Look before you leap
In September 2018, Weight Watchers faced a wave of backlash on social media when it announced it would be rebranding and changing its name to WW.
Opinions were in one of two courts: people were confused, or they just weren’t buying it.
The company’s president, Mindy Grossman, said: “WW was becoming the world’s partner in wellness,” but when probed by the BBC in an interview, she could not say what the new name stood for.
One problem with WW’s rebrand may be the confusion surrounding the name.
Megan Bannigan, an IP lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton’s New York office, says, generally speaking, that a trademark should serve as an “immediate indicator of source to the consuming public”.
But it seems the brand’s new trademark does exactly the opposite. One Twitter user described the shortened name as “meaningless” and “utterly baffling”, while another said the change “failed to signal any kind of direction at all”.
