Another High Street Rebrand

[Blewatter]

Nationwide's new 'bragging about not closing branches' advert features its new logo. Gone is the serif typeface, now it's fine for the vogue of minimalist design. I really don't like it. Having it all lowercase doesn't strike me as formal, and the house icon is barely discernable. The negative space on it doesn't work. Maybe the colours are too dark

[tillyoshea]

Nationwide's new 'bragging about not closing branches' advert features its new logo. Gone is the serif typeface, now it's fine for the vogue of minimalist design. I really don't like it. Having it all lowercase doesn't strike me as formal, and the house icon is barely discernable. The negative space on it doesn't work. Maybe the colours are too dark

Weirdly, I've had conversations with three different people where they've moaned about this campaign in light of the seemingly recent closure of the Nationwide branch on Gosforth High Street. I don't often have conversations about TV ads, so this is unusual.

It might be a specific local thing, perhaps underlined by lots of recent Gosforth High Street bank branch closures plus Newcastle Building Society doing a lot of marketing around retaining their branch. But I wonder whether it's a local picture repeated in many places nationally, and whether therefore the approach might be received less well than they anticipate.

[DAS]

WH Smith?

Que?

[WillPS]

I like how many of the replies are genuinely thinking it's one of these fake shops who moves in after the real-deal pack up.

Just awful really, what are they thinking? They want a logo which is vaguely evocative of both the NHS and the original Doctor Who logo, but doesn't owe anything to their own heritage?

[iSon]

Imagine going for a rebrand after all these years and not embracing the WHS cube logo. I’ve always thought it would do well for them in the same way it has worked for the Co Op. Let’s face it, they should play on their heritage because it certainly doesn’t compete on price.

[Philip]

It looks like when you make a document in Word with a custom font that you downloaded but then you've opened it on another computer without that font and it defaults to Arial.

[WillPS]

Imagine going for a rebrand after all these years and not embracing the WHS cube logo. I’ve always thought it would do well for them in the same way it has worked for the Co Op. Let’s face it, they should play on their heritage because it certainly doesn’t compete on price.

Agree completely. Open goal entirely missed.

[Andrew]

If they’ve got money available to spend on their stores, I think it would have been preferable to spend it in literally any other way than changing the sign outside

[all new Phil]

I did a duplicate sorry duh

[all new Phil]

WH Smith?

Que?

What’s fun about this is it’s on a retail park and therefore not one you’d necessarily refer to as “WHS Preston” (which would surely be the city centre one).

Seen another pop up on Twitter so it’s definitely a thing.

I love an in-house rebrand done by people who aren’t creatives.

[NiKepp]

With more of their big stores closing and Smiths only being interested in the small airport and train station outlets now, maybe the rebrand makes sense. They'll need the shorter name just to fit it on all those much smaller unit signs.