When Kellogg’s famously changed the name of its leading breakfast cereal Coco Pops to Choco Krispies there was a public outcry. Sales of the product plummeted and the company agreed to a high profile telephone poll to ask their customers what they thought of the new brand. When an overwhelming majority said they disliked the new name, Coco Pops made a rapid and triumphant return.

This is a cautionary tale. One false branding move and a charity can find itself in deep financial trouble. With no actual product to offer today’s High Street savvy consumer, a charity’s brand is all it has to convince potential supporters to part with their hard earned cash. Rebranding can be an expensive and risky exercise, and charities cannot afford to get in wrong.

But Lawrence Simanowitz, partner at Bates, Wells & Braithwaite says charities repeatedly fail to prepare for an identity overhaul, leaving them at risk of falling into a whole host of legal pitfalls. Charities may find that they have wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds if they do not carry out essential legal checks. Moreover, using a professional branding or marketing agency to guide your organisation through the quagmire is not enough to prevent a legal hiccup, especially when selecting a new name.

“We have been surprised how many very professional agencies will offer charities names that they think will be good for a rebrand and when they’ve finally selected the name they come to us to register as a trademark and find it’s unregisterable,” Simanowitz says. A name can be unregisterable for a number of reasons. Either another organisation has exactly the same name, or one that is too similar. Names which are too generic, such as Charity Care, would also fall foul of trademark regulations.

Charities and branding agencies can carry out an online search for existing names before appointing legal representation, but this does not always flag up some of the similar, but not exact, matches. The same problem is often encountered when choosing a slogan or strapline, and further heed must be paid to selecting an adage not already in common use.

“What you can’t do when you register a name is monopolise the English language. You have got to pay quite a lot of attention to that,” Simanowitz adds. “You also have to be careful not to offend. You have to think about your support base and whether you’re using something that is in common currency among them.”

He says he has seen charities waste vast sums of money not only on creating the new brand itself but also on marketing tools and website domain names, only to find the brand cannot be registered. A charity could risk using a name that is not a trademark, but that move opens up another category of problems, as Simanowitz warns: “The point about not being able to register as a trademark means others can take the same name and use it. For a charity, that can be a disaster because you can get impersonators and fraudsters.”

Even if the name a charity chooses can be registered, it could face opposition from supporters who fear organisations have latched on to language a whole host of organisations working in a similar field already use. This was the problem faced by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society when it changed its name to Dignity in Dying early last year.

On hearing of the planned rebrand, the Association for Palliative Medicine and the Medical Ethics Alliance wrote a letter to Alan Johnson, the then secretary of state for trade and industry, urging him to reject the organisation’s application for a new trademark. The letter said that ‘dignity in dying’ was a phrase commonly used by patients worried about the care they will receive during their final days. It said the society was seeking to create a monopoly on the expression and invest in it a different meaning.

At the time, Dignity in Dying rejected the claims as a PR stunt from anti-euthanasia lobbyists. The management stuck to their guns and the new name remained. “Our new name drew some criticism,” admits spokesperson Davina Hehir. “Most of this came from individuals and groups who were always opposed to the aims of our organisation, particularly the campaign to change the law on assisted dying, often for religious reasons. This wouldn’t change whatever we called our organisation.”

Hehir says changing the organisation’s name to Dignity in Dying was an important move to reflect the fact that its primary focus was to promote patient choice in end of life medical care. The group did carry out research before initiating the change, which found overwhelming levels of support for the new name.

“Because people have very confused and different understandings of the word ‘euthanasia’, which actually means ‘a good death’, our old name was a barrier to people understanding what we actually do,” she says. “Having dignity in dying is not exclusively about medical assistance to die. It is about all end of life issues; having patient choice, Living Wills and withholding and withdrawal of treatment. As a name, Dignity in Dying gives a much truer reflection of our range of interests.”

Robert Jones, consultant at branding consultancy Wolff Olins, says changing an organisation’s name is always going to attract criticism and upset existing supporters, so it is only worth changing name as part of a wider shift in the charity’s remit. He says Macmillan’s decision to reposition itself as Macmillan Cancer Support was very successful, and the Spastics Society’s change to Scope was also an important move to reflect the shifting sands of the use of the English language.

“You always do a certain amount of research, but if your organisation believes in something you should go for it,” Jones says. “I don’t think you can ever make a radical change to any organisation, particularly a charity, without upsetting some people. If you’ve done it without upsetting some people you probably haven’t done it radically enough.”

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The motivation behind the rebrand should be a good indication of whether the often costly exercise will be a success. “If you’re changing the things you do in a big way to meet new needs then it probably will be. If you’re just a new chief executive and you want to change the name then it probably won’t be,” he adds.

Jones says that just because there may be initial opposition to a leftfield new name, it does not mean it will fail. “A lot of very unlikely names do work; would you ever have thought of buying frozen food called Birds Eye, if you think about the meaning of the words?”

But finding the right name that is welcomed by your supporters is not the final hurdle. Coming up with a fantastic new name but then finding that some web domains with that name are not available can be more than an irritant; it can potentially be very embarrassing. “If you’ve got ‘.org.uk’ but someone’s got ‘.org’ it’s going to divert quite a lot of potential traffic,” says Bates, Wells & Braithwaite’s Simanowitz.

In fact, the owner of the alternative website could have entirely opposing views on a similar issue, and detract from your message. Simanowitz says one high profile third sector client struggled when a website with a similar domain name actually contained content which was extremely critical of the charity’s approach to its work.

Another problem lies with the ownership of intellectual property rights. “What charities will often do is commission someone to design them a logo, but what they won’t do is make sure they have the rights over that logo,” says Simanowitz. “The designer then continues to own the rights. The charity will get a licence to use it but the designer continues to own it.” If the charity then decides to re-use the logo, for mail marketing or its website for example, the organisation can end up paying twice or facing a legal challenge from the designer.

Volunteering England found itself in a similarly tricky situation when it installed a new branding agreement with its local volunteer bureaus in 2004. The local organisations feared that if each independent office was joined under the one name they would have to cede intellectual property rights, for example over research they had carried out, to the umbrella body. The issue was resolved, but it seeks to highlight another potential stumbling block for large organisations.

Rebecca Price, head of brand at marketing and communications specialists Radley Yelder, whose clients include Comic Relief and the NSPCC, said every project is “a little bit painful”. Inevitably some supporters will be lost, and time will have to spent convincing fundraisers, volunteers and frontline workers that it is the right move.

“What you’re really trying to do is shift or consolidate perceptions about your brand. That’s a very subtle thing and is very difficult to measure. There is a bit of risk,” she says.

But with a lot of planning, research, and knowledge of the potential legal traps, even the most radical rebranding exercise can pay dividends for your organisation – unlike Kellogg’s.

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