Blimpie Identity Deflates

I was catching up on some reading this past week and came across a post on Brand New, a great site that showcases major identity redesigns, about the sub shop Blimpie. If you’ve spent much time in the good ol’ US of A, you’re probably familiar with the chain. They’re everywhere – over 2,000 of them from coast to coast. In fact, they’re the second largest submarine sandwich shop behind Subway according to Wikipedia.

Recently the Blimpie brand underwent a makeover, and the results were…not so good. It has been a really long time since I’ve seen an identity change that has headed so far in the wrong direction. Here’s the before and after:

What do you think? To me, if there’s one thing the Blimpie brand has always stood for in my mind it was a sense of fun and light-heartedness. Who could really take themselves seriously with a name like Blimpie anyway? And hey, they even have a “Fun Zone” section on their website – although admittedly there’s not much “fun” there. For the most part this “fun” was something that both of its major competitors (Quiznos and Subway) lacked, so Blimpie had a real opportunity to claim that position in the consumers’ minds.

With the redesign, the rounded, fatter logo has given way to a straight forward sans-serif Futura typeface, virtually personality free – they even settled on a duller color. And they didn’t stop there with the blandness. They chose “America’s Sub Shop” as the tag line. I’m really not sure what they were trying to accomplish with this tag, but they certainly don’t appear to further develop this patriotic idea in any of their materials online or otherwise.

Identity redesigns usually present a huge opportunity for an organization - they allow creatives to harness the energy of a company and make the branding match the actual brand. What Blimpie did with this redesign was to in effect tell the American public that there’s really nothing interesting going on at Blimpie. Somehow I doubt that was the strategic goal of this exercise, especially considering the millions of dollars it will cost to roll this new identity out to 2000+ retail stores. Yikes. I can’t help but think this might have been the result of a design by committee process gone wrong.

NOTE: Hey Blimpie, if you’re having cold feet with the revised identity, I know a talented group of creative communicators that would love to come up with something that’s actually reminiscent of a sub shop rather than an IT firm.  ; )

by Garret Ohm

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