Increase Brand Respect to Increase Brand Equity - Principles of Renaming Service Organizations for Growth

When a brand audit reveals the need to adjust the factors affecting the consumers’ brand image of an organization in order to grow, the organization can elect to rebrand, rename, or retire the brand. Little is currently known about the renaming option. Even more significantly, the renaming of a “company brand”, as opposed to a product brand, impacts the brand equity value of the whole organization. This paper investigates the impact that changing a service organizations’ name has on its ability to profitably grow. It analyzes the role of the service brand management process, develops benefit analysis insight in a renaming scenario, and seeks to determine the effect that renaming & repositioning has on brand equity, and offers a model to tie the organizations’ brand identity to the consumers’ brand image to develop consumer co-creation of value. The increasingly marketized field of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) provides a lens to analyze this corporate renaming model.