AstraZeneca recently announced that they would be releasing their Coronavirus vaccine under a different name. Instead of ‘COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca’, they opted for ‘VaxZevria’, a clear shift away from the parent company’s name. A conscious choice or motivated by negative publicity?
AstraZeneca’s initial choice was therefore to link their name to that of the vaccine. And that is striking, to say the least, because a glance at their website is enough to discover that they always link a specific name to their medicines. Why choose a different strategy right now?
The first possible reason, and the most obvious one, is that the company didn’t want to lose time developing a separate brand. As a marketing agency, we find that a pity, of course, but given the urgency, we can understand it.
However, we cannot imagine that a company like AstraZeneca did not handle this deliberately. That brings us to the second possible reason: they wanted to put their own company name in the spotlight via the unique global stage offered to them. Something that sounds logical if you want to compete against more mainstream, well-known players like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
As Johan Cruyff famously said, choices come with pros and cons. The choice for a brand architecture that is fully linked to the parent company is not plucked out of thin air. It ensures the creation of a strong brand and is cost-effective. We know such successful ‘monolithic’ brand strategies from companies like Siemens and Google.
But… the disadvantage is that negative publicity can have a knock-on effect on the image of the entire organization. And that is precisely the reason why we find AstraZeneca’s choice remarkable.
With their experience in developing medicines, the pharmaceutical company could have known that the extremely short lead time and the discarding of their trusted procedures would inevitably cause some side effects. And no matter how small, those side effects would be enormously magnified in the media. When you release beta software on the market, a few bugs are no problem, but with a life-saving vaccine, that’s a different story altogether. It is then all the more remarkable that the company deviates from its normal brand strategy at that exact moment and opts for such a risky image experiment. We certainly wouldn’t have advised them to do that.
Did it still make sense to change the name? Will we keep talking about the ‘AstraZeneca’ vaccine? That could well be the case. But in the past, it has often been proven that it pays to change names after image damage. Just think of Dexia, which now goes through life as Belfius. And it doesn’t always have to stem from a negative impulse. For example, ‘De Post’ was renamed ‘bpost’ to modernize. And in other cases, your brand is so strong that a name change after a global scandal isn’t even necessary. Think of Volkswagen and their so-called ‘cheat software’.
For AstraZeneca, the intention was always to give the vaccine its own ‘face’. However, in our opinion, they should have done this a bit sooner. Without the controversy surrounding the side effects, this could also have been a very successful move. But the chance of it turning out that way, given the circumstances, was very small indeed. In that case, a different, more cautious marketing path might have been less littered with image landmines.
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