8 Nov 2007 by Chris     1 Comment     Posted under: News/Media/Sport

Discount Booze at The Local. For selected tramps.

Bad product branding always cheers up a dull day for me. There are all sorts of reasons why a product or business might launch or re-brand itself amusingly awfully, but the most obvious ones seem to be:
[1] A terrible idea sometimes gets right through the marketing department and out the other side, perhaps through a case of Emperor’s New Clothes or something;
[2] A graphic designer from the planet Zog is employed with an open brief, once again thanks to a clueless marketing department;
[3] A parent company, probably from another country or continent, decides that what works ten thousand miles away (or in Germany) is quite suitable for a totally different culture, and imposes some sort of “global standard” branding.

Here’s a wonderful example of at least two of those in action.

In our village, the off-licence used to be a Victoria Wine. Now, you may be unaware of this, but most of the UK’s off-licence chains, past and present, are all owned by the same group. These include Victoria Wine, Threshers, Wine Rack, Unwins, etc etc. The group has been sold, merged, and resold several times already this decade. In 2004, they launched a new store brand, called “The Local”. Here’s a car crash waiting to happen. Who calls an off-licence “The Local” except a few tramps? Worse, they let some trendy designer replace the conventional store front with a giant slab of yellow and a tiny speech bubble saying “The Local”. So presumably the target market is now tramps with very good eyesight. I think the idea of “The Local” was that they were trying to say the stores are more than just an off-licence. And it’s true: ours also sells crisps.

Anyway, I see that our store at least has given up all pretence of trendy design. In the huge yellow gaps either side of the speech bubble, it now says “DISCOUNT” and “BOOZE”. This isn’t just lowest-common-denominator rebranding, it’s lowest-common-denominator rebranding with giant (cheap) knobs on. It’s so awful it’s brilliant. However, it’s also so awfully done that I wonder if this is a rebranding at all. Could it be that the management of our village “The Local” (see, it just doesn’t work) have taken matters into their own hands as a protest against the terrible graphic design they’ve had to put up with for the past couple of years? The lettering is bad enough that it could be a desperate, one-off job. But then again, from the people who thought the tiny speech bubble was a good idea, who knows? Perhaps they see a gap in the market for an alcoholic version of the cheap “closing down sale” stores which seem to thrive everywhere.

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