Weekly Re-Brand #7: Comcast

Welcome to the Blade Weekly Re-Brand, a place for us to take a quick look at some of the rebranding going on in the world and give a quick impression of what went right and what went wrong.

This week, our focus is on Comcast, one of the largest media conglomerates in the US, who have made an interesting re-branding move.

The old Comcast logo (left) vs. the new Comcast logo (right).

What was wrong with the old Comcast?
Believe it or not, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) found that Comcast has the lowest customer satisfaction rating of any company or government agency in the United States, including the IRS! Although Comcast remains the only viable option in many markets for cable and internet access, being held in such low esteem by your brand community doesn’t bode well for any company, and as more and more players enter the field, Comcast is looking to clean up their image. Additionally, their recent acquisition of NBCUniversal is not reflected in their current logo; Presumably a media provider would be interested in conveying to its brand community that it now owns a vast TV/Film empire as well.

A large version of the new Comcast logo.

Does the new version fix the problem?
No new look is going to fix years of unhappy customers, but setting that aside for the moment, the new logo is a little strange. Let’s start with the font, it’s half rounded and half squared. At smaller sizes, it has the illusion of being entirely rounded. This does give it a softer look than many of its competitors, but looks more like a fashion label wordmark than a media conglomerate. Then there’s the NBC peacock. This is really odd. When NBC and Universal merged to become NBCUniversal, they decided that neither the peacock nor globe icons should be used. Here though, Comcast is definitively tying itself to NBC, which is a major network that is not only carried by all of its competitors, but is also an over-the-air broadcast station in most markets.

What new problems have been introduced?
For one, it still does nothing to convey that they’ve purchased major movie studio Universal, arguably something a cable TV provider should be more interested in promoting than a broadcast network. Next up, by tying themselves so tightly to NBC, they are presumably trying to latch on to the goodwill generated by NBC, but if NBC should should start to perform poorly at any time, they may have to risk another rebrand.

Is it an overall improvement?
Between the font and the peacock, this is a really confused brand. I sincerely doubt that this new look is going to help Comcast at all.

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