From Dunkin' to Pizza Hut: 11 company rebrands that sparked customer outrage

Tropicana is best known by the label on its orange juice cartons. On the front, an orange is punctured with a straw, suggesting that the juice is so fresh, customers are nearly drinking straight from the fruit. But in 2009, Tropicana switched its iconic packaging with a more minimal design with a close-up of the juice in a glass. The orange cap was rounded to look like an orange.

Customers complained that the new look was "ugly" and "generic," the New York Times reported. Unit sales dropped 20%, AdAge reported, and less than two months after releasing the new design, Tropicana switched back to the original design.

The US's best-known boxed mac n' cheese maker adopted a new logo in 2009, ditching the red-and-blue, all-caps version that it had used in some form for decades. The new logo featured only lowercase letters as well as a "flavor burst," according to Kraft. But the new look wasn't a hit with consumers or analysts, some of whom said it reminded them of the logo for Yoplait yogurt – a product that Kraft didn't own, CNN Money reported at the time.

In 2015, Kraft merged with Heinz, known for its ketchup, to create Kraft Heinz – and a whole new logo.

In late 2008, Pizza Hut customers started to notice a shift in the company's branding: Some of its delivery boxes and signs referred to the chain as "The Hut," according to trade publication Nation's Restaurant News.

The following year, the company gave conflicting answers about whether it was trying to rebrand itself. Then-CEO Brian Niccol told NBC that there was no name change on the horizon. At the same time, he said, Pizza Hut would continue testing "The Hut" to appeal to the "texting generation."

Around the same time as "The Hut," Radio Shack tried a similar move by referring to itself as "The Shack." While the company was still formally known as Radio Shack, it wanted a nickname with consumers — what happens "when a brand becomes a friend," the company said according to an August 2009 article in Time Magazine.

In the long run, the nickname didn't improve the retailer's reputation with customers. Faced with competition from online rivals like Amazon, Radio Shack closed stores and filed multiple times for bankruptcy. In 2020, Retail Ecommerce Ventures acquired Radio Shack's name and other intellectual property. The holding company counts other all-but-defunct brands, such as Pier 1 Imports, among its holdings.

For two decades, Gap had a simple, yet recognizable logo: white serif, capital letters in the middle of a navy blue square. In 2010, the clothing brand refreshed its logo from what the company called "classic, American design to modern, sexy, cool," Bloomberg reported. The font became a bold, Helvetica font and the blue square was a smaller, faded version of the brand's original. Amid a flood of criticism, the company switched back to the old logo within a week.

Yves Saint Laurent was the eponymous brand of the French designer known for his influence on 60s and 70s fashion. In 1999, luxury conglomerate Kering purchased the brand, and in 2012, the company appointed Hedi Slimane as its creative director.

As part of his takeover, Slimane changed the brand's name to "Saint Laurent Paris," and redesigned its primary logo to resemble the label's original branding from 1966. Some fans of the fashion house were not pleased, saying, "YSL without the Y is not YSL." Other's noted that the logo looked too much like Zara's, The Cut reported. Meanwhile, the vertical YSL logo on handbags and lipsticks remained the same.

Hershey's has seen its fair share of rebrands in its 129-year history. In 2014, the candy maker debuted a new logo and took the apostrophe "S" off its name. The new design changed the iconic silver-wrapped kiss candy to a rather unappetizing brown mound. People on social media likened it to a pile of poop and some said the gray curl — meant to represent the paper tag that sticks out of the chocolate candy — looked like steam. Not quite the "fresh and modern interpretation" Hershey's was going for, Entrepreneur reported.

In 2019, the chain known for coffee and doughnuts shortened its name from Dunkin' Donuts to just Dunkin' to focus on its beverage offerings. The company made some slight tweaks to its bold and curvy font but kept its brand colors the same pink and orange it first adopted in 1973.

The move spurred a difference of opinions among fans about what they called the brand in the first place. Some called it a "terrible" decision and that it sounded like "a name that promotes basketball," per Teen Vogue. While others like a Vox writer chimed in, "what kind of nerd calls it 'Dunkin' Donuts' anyway?"

In September 2018, Weight Watchers rebranded itself "WW" in order to "focus on overall health and wellbeing," not just weight loss, the company said in a statement at the time.

But the rebrand didn't sit well with marketing experts. One wrote in Forbes that "WW" was too simple and harder to say in speech than the name that the company had spent decades using. The company still uses "WW" in the logo on its website – with "WeightWatchers" written out right next to it.

Chain restaurant TGI Fridays cut "TGI" (short for "Thank God It's") from its name at UK locations in 2020. The name was meant to be "single-minded and confident," the design studio behind the rebrand said at the time.

Customers didn't agree. In May, the company brought back "TGI" to its signage and other branding in Great Britain, MediaPost reported.

In April, the off-price department store chain went retro with its logo. The new version is an updated of their logo from the 70s and 80s. The move, which coincided with Nordstrom Rack's 50th anniversary, was an effort to differentiate the brand from its luxury sister chain Nordstrom and reflect the "authentic, empowered, and expressive spirit" of its customers, the company said in its press release.

But some retail experts quoted in a Retail Wire article thought the rebrand was a mistake. "A rebrand to Rack is not going to fix the off-price retailer's fundamental issue," Liza Amlani of Retail Strategy Group wrote. "Merchandising and assortment strategies are what brings customers to stores."