Virgin Radio rebrand must hit the right button - and fast

by Colin Grimshaw Media Week 10-Jun-08, 07:30

What's in a name? Not a lot, according to Absolute Radio, the new owners of Virgin Radio, who paid £53m for a station without a name, having relinquished the rights to the famed Virgin brand.

Absolute profess to be unconcerned and claim that rebranding the station can only be positive, pointing to a loss of 1.7 million weekly listeners to the station since the start of the decade.

It reminded me of a young women's magazine that launched in the late 1990s on the back of the ladette vogue. The target audience was young women who had taken to acting like Loaded lads, with the same penchant for drunken excess. The magazine was called Minx.

I suggested to the senior executive responsible for the title - a doyenne of women's glossies - that Minx was a term more redolent of a mischievous infant than a sassy harlot. "Who cares, the name's not important," was her reply.

Given the seemingly random naming of some magazines, even successful ones, maybe she was right. However, Minx did close within the year.

Back to Virgin Radio, and the problem for Absolute was that Virgin Group could not extend the rights to the brand, preventing the exploitation of it digitally and internationally. Virgin Radio already exists overseas in JVs set up by Virgin Group.

So, Absolute has set aside £15m to create a new brand - not a lot of money you might think to replace a brand with such musical heritage as Virgin. Indeed, NTL agreed to pay £9m a year for 30 years for the privilege of putting the Virgin name on the merged NTL/Virgin Mobile company.

Some experts thought this an exorbitant sum for an over-hyped brand that has been much diluted and tarnished over the years. Maybe Absolute is right in its belief that it is Virgin Radio's musical genre and personalities that are its assets, not its badge.

Still, it will be interesting to see how it fares in the Rajars after it has been rebranded. Will diary-fillers recall the new brand? Another concern for Absolute is the possibility that Virgin Group will launch a Virgin Radio of its own in the UK to fill the void in its Virgin Radio International stable, or license the badge to an existing station.

Should that occur, then Absolute will need to establish the new brand's affinity with its audience pretty quickly. If not, it may find that even a fading brand has more value than a new one.