RadioShack |Rebrand

John Butler, executive creative director and founding partner of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, said the TV ads, in conjunction with all the various elements of the campaign, are meant to offer bits of information that in total tell RadioShack's story. "We looked at it almost like snacking. We could have a lot of little snacks throughout our broadcast and it felt like it would allow us to do a lot of different messages quickly. They are almost like interstitials," said Butler. "It's very music and design centric and products are front and center."

Tomorrow, the company will kick off a three-day event in New York's Time Square and San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza. "The Shack Summer Netogether" will use two 11 x 17-foot "laptops" broadcasting live video to connect activities in both cities.

RadioShack plans to use digital media to connect consumers with its experiential program via a new Web site designed by BSSP and its new Facebook page.

"The idea was to use Facebook as a platform to break into social media," said David Blum, executive director of interactive services at BSSP. "It's the predominant place where social interaction happens on the Web nowadays."


Major media spending on the brand is approximately $120 million annually, excluding online spending. Aegis' Carat, Dallas, handles media dutie

The campaign includes new in-store signage, digital media, out-of-home, direct and a three-day bi-coastal event that will broadcast live video connecting New York and San Francisco. It aims to give the 88-year-old brand, which began in the 1920s as a provider of equipment for the then-budding field of amateur radio, a more modern image that speaks to its premium brand offerings in wireless and connectivity.

The ads are decidedly quirky and range in style and tone from the introductory spot described above to a commercial that tells consumers "The Shack sells more phones than the population of Scandinavia." In the latter, an animated ad is set in "Phonelandia" and features thumping European dance music and phones and PDAs dressed in wigs and hats, drinking beer and smoking pipes and generally chillin' in a grassy field with a mountain range backdrop.


Another spot stresses that the electronics retailer has more "expertise than a truck full of Einsteins" with imagery of a lorry crammed with just that.

This 15-second commercial is one of 12 new TV ads to begin running nationally tomorrow as part of the Fort Worth, Texas-based retailer's ambitious effort from Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners in Sausalito, Calif., to rebrand itself, at least informally in its marketing materials, with the shorter, presumably friendlier nickname.

"If you think about how you use nicknames, you generally use them with friends, people for whom you have an affinity and trust. Those are important attributes for any brand and certainly for us," said Lee Applbaum, CMO of RadioShack, who explained that consumers and the company have used brand name shorthand for years. "If you can latch onto a brand truth, it's a really wonderful thing."

----------------------UPDATE-------------------------------

Radio Shack launched yesterday a new marketing initiative to position itself as The Shack. “Our friends,” they claim “call us the Shack.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

“Trust is a critical attribute of any successful retailer, and the reality is that most people trust friends, not corporations. When a brand becomes a friend, it often gets a nickname — take FedEx or Coke, for example. Our customers, associates and even the investor community have long referred to RadioShack as ‘The Shack,’ so we decided to embrace that fact and share it with the world,” said Lee Applbaum, RadioShack’s chief marketing officer.

— The Business Journal

As far as I understand, the Radio Shack name and logo will NOT be replaced with this new name or “logo.” It’s simply part of a campaign to help seed this new persona, created by Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners. Which is good news, because The Shack is extremely ridiculous — even more so than The Hut— and does nothing but dig Radio Shack into a bigger hole of un-coolness. The effort is in no way aided by the unimaginative graphics and “logo” that have accompanied the launch. The type is boringly simple, even annoying in its lackluster execution. And, seriously, giant laptops to create buzz in the two cities (New York and San Francisco) where there are more people with their head buried in an iPhone per capita than anywhere else? Oh, and yes, they are plain lame. Giant pumpkins on ice sound more appealing.

Radio Shack needs a major overhaul and it should take advantage of the idiosyncratic products they carry that you can hardly find anywhere else, a sort of geek thrift store. The Shack campaign is insipid at best and harmful to the brand at worst.

Giant laptop in the making. Image source.

Launch at Times Square in New York. Photos by Flickr user Brechtbug