Now here is something that makes no sense to me. FedEx purchased Kinkos in 2004 while it was still a thriving business. Today, four years later, they announce they will write off $891 million dollars worth of good will and assets associated with the Kinkos brand and drop the name all together. From what it looks like, that does not even include the cost of replacing their FedEx Kinkos logo everywhere it shows up.

ups logo changeWhen I think of changing logos and brand replacement two companies come to mind. In 2003 UPS announced that they would change their logo to a new more modern design. The estimated cost was $20 million and included changing their logo on thousands of vehicles, more than 250 aircraft, 1,700 facilities, 70,000 drop-off and retail boxes, and more than 1 million uniforms. FedEx has far less places to change the FedEx Kinkos logo but is spending over 40X more money to do so.

FedEx obviously did not plan for this. Why would they let the Kinkos brand thrive sync with the FedEx brand if they just planned on breaking it off and throwing it in the dumpster? The best example of a company succeeding in buying a huge company and then scrapping their brand just happened recently with AT&T and Cingular. One week AT&T bought Cingular, and the very next Monday AT&T had commercials and advertisements all over the United States saying "Cingular has joined AT&T". Just one month after that, AT&T incorporated the "Cingular Orange" into its logos and dropped the name completely. Even though BellSouth and Cingular spent a reported $4 billion dollars promoting the Cingular brand, AT&T crushed it in about two months but not before stealing various elements of the logo.

Kinkos is a big healthy brand. People still think of Kinkos first when they need copies or print jobs. I think the FedEx brand has actually benefitted from being associated with the Kinkos brand. Brandtags.net shows this best. The website displays a logo and then asks you to type in the first word that comes to mind. After entering your tag, it displays the results of everyone's responses in the form of a tag cloud. The larger the word, the more relevant it is to the brand. Maybe FedEx should think twice about dumping Kinkos all together. I'm sure a chain of print shops somewhere would pay good money to buy the Kinkos name. One things for sure, FedEx Office just dosn't have the same ring to it. Kinkos, R.I.P.