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Topaz filling stations undergoing an odd re-branding

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Topaz filling stations undergoing an odd re-branding

All 420 Topaz filling stations in Ireland will be re-branded to “Circle K” at a cost of a mad EUR 20mio. There is absolutely no need to move away from the well established “Topaz” brand in Ireland and in my opinion the new “Circle K” brand looks much cheaper than the Topaz brand, which makes the move even more odd.

Here is a picture of a Topaz station and here is one of a Circle K filling station in the USA.

But a LOT has happened with Topaz recently. Topaz was owned by Denis O’Brien and in 2015 he sold it to the Canadian company Couche-Tard, which has something like 6500 filling stations in North America and 1500 other stores and also is operating convenience stores and/or filling stations in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Indonesia and Mexico.

The global Circle K stores and filling stations is the reason why it was decided to bring the Irish brand in line with the global branding. But remember that Topaz only recently re-branded all Esso filling stations to Topaz and now another rebrand is happening. 20mio to make your brand look cheaper than before. Mad! You might also remember that Topaz was some while back Statoil and Shell, so a lot of rebrands and changes. :-O

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TV3 Rebranding – Now on hold

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
TV3 Rebranding – Now on hold

I am definitely not a branding expert and while I am currently trying to learn a little more about the intricacies of branding, I will still guess and interpret my way through this This is Odd piece. ;-) It is about TV3s rebranding.

TV3 was bought in July 2015 by Virgin Media for EUR 80mio. Before that TV3 started in 2008 and was a struggling commercial competitor to RTE’s tax-payer-funded semi-state TV empire. In 2014, TV3 had losses of 7mio and in 2015 of 17mio, so things could have been better for them, but Virgin Media’s buyout of the TV station changed the picture.

Virgin Media has an even more illustrious past: There were originally NTL and Telewest in the UK. They merged and then bought Virgin Mobile UK. The three companies then signed a deal with Richard Branson that gave them the right to use Branson’s brand “Virgin”. So Branson doesn’t own any part of the company, but gets money for his name (a license deal) but when the Cable TV company UPC in Ireland became Virgin Media, Richard Branson was paraded around like he was the boss. Virgin Media, however is owned by Liberty Global, a huge American TV and telecommunications company. UPC also was owned by Liberty Global, hence the deal to merge the Irish UPC into the Virgin Media brand. So Virgin Media provides Telecommunications services, Cable TV and then bought TV3 to add TV services to their Irish portfolio. In 2015 TV3 bought the UTV TV channel, which was created only a very small number of years before and had failed miserably. (I could make it more complicated by explaining how TV3 had licensed ITV content, but lost that to UTV, when UTV’s channel launched in Ireland. ironic that it all came back to TV3 when TV3 bought UTV. But I don’t want to make it tooo difficult to follow. :-) )

That bought UTV channel was renamed into “Be3” in January 2017 to create the three stations TV3, 3e and Be3. A somewhat odd and inconsistent branding mess, one could say and Virgin Media wanted to sort it out by rebranding all of them to VM1, VM2 and VM3. In autumn of 2018 all the new names were meant to be adopted. But this week (08 March) TV3 declared that a rebranding was not the highest priority right now.

The new mother company and the available money and TV3s new confidence meant that TV3 successfully won broadcasting rights to all Six Nations Rugby Games from 2018-2021 in addition they still have broadcasting rights for UEFA Champions League and a number of other football tournaments. And then there are the drama series that TV3 has access to.

All these successes are linked to TV3 and it took a good bit of an effort to create the brand link of series and sports events with TV3. And if everything got renamed (probably for a high cost) now the branding would have to be created from scratch.

So does it make sense or does it not make sense to postpone the rebranding? I think it probably makes sense, but remember that I said that I am no expert! ;-)

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