There’s been so much written about Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) since its servers were hacked in November, 2014. As a lot of private information, including emails and full copies of unreleased movies were made public without permission. It has been a PR nightmare for the company in many ways, with calls for executives to lose their jobs, amongst other things.
The SPE brand, and actually the entire Sony brand is currently in trouble. As a result, Sony could drop its name from its film and TV entertainment properties and rebrand under the name of its flagship film studio, Columbia Pictures.
Now Sony, a Japanese company who’s primary business is home electronics, has gone the opposite way in recent branding. For the past few years, the Sony logo has appeared before the logos of its multiple film & TV brands, including Tri-Star, Castle Rock and of course Columbia. This same approach has been used in promoting Sony’s PlayStation video game consoles. The term for finding new places for a company to plaster their logo everywhere, coined by writer Paul Lukas is “logo creep“.
That is way too much Sony in Sony’s branding.
A few years ago, one company that failed to rebrand when there was a crisis was BP. After the BP oil spill, the company could have renamed it US business to the previous name, AMOCO or something else. As much as BP keeps its name and logo, they will continue to be known as “The Oil Spill People”, no matter what good they’re claiming to do.
Sony Pictures Entertainment can start the rebuilding of its brand as simple as becoming Columbia, and downplay its Sony corporate ownership.