ISSUE #03

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With branding some things can (and maybe should) change, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Last week I was out camping in Kananaskis, Alberta with the family. It was great to get away from the desk for a week and honestly no cell reception in Peter Lougheed Provincial Park was one of the biggest highlights. Highly recommend.

Walking the loop of sites in our campground after a shower, I was checking out other camping setups - I can't help it. One couple had a tent from Mountain Equipment Company, or "MEC" as most people refer to it. The tent reminded me that I’ve been meaning to do some form of writing about the the company and the two fairly recent re-brands. I'll give it my two cents here, and maybe a more refined case study could happen at some point.

For those outside of Canada, MEC has been a mainstay retail brand for outdoor pursuits for many years. Formed in the 70's in Vancouver, the company started out as a small, scrappy co-op that had the simple goal of making climbing and camping equipment more accessible to hikers and climbers in the lower mainland.

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For the first 40 years (or so) of its life, the co-op held to a few core tenets: You could only buy goods if you were a member (think Costco - although the membership was only a one-time $5 fee), and the goods that you could expect were well-made brands and products, especially the house line of goods, which typically made basic essentials at a good price, but still used quality components and materials. The idea was that getting outside and experiencing the outdoors shouldn't be a luxury or cost a lot of money. My dad grew up in Calgary and he has fond memories of the rustic first location in Calgary. The company, it's staff, and it's products were all very down to earth and approachable.

At some point though in the 2010's, the brand started to go transition further away from this. A new head office was built, a redesign of the brand identity, and an #outsiders marketing campaign was introduced. It seemed as if the company was signalling that they were stepping out from the old identity to represent a modern vision for outdoor life in Canada.

Here's a quote from Anne Donohoe - MEC's chief marketing officer at the time via bcbusiness.ca​

"the company hopes the "simple, yet bold” design will “communicate to Canadians the breadth and depth of what MEC has to offer” and “will help us extend our reach to inspire and enable more Canadians to live active outdoor lifestyles.”

From a graphic design point of view, there's nothing "wrong" with the 2013 identity. Subjectively I find it a bit boring. Some co-op members did not like the drop of the mountain silhouette though. I also don't think the "We are all Outsiders" campaign is very strong - the double-meaning is fun, and encouraging people to be/go outside is nice, but telling your customers you're an outsider or inviting them to see themselves that way is a miss for me. The quote from Donohoe says they want to inspire Canadians though simplicity and boldness - but the simplicity in my view drains all the personality out of the brand and loses the focus. It shouldn't be about who you are as a customer, it should be about what you want to do.

That being said, the outward markers of change for the company weren't the biggest deal. The brand identity was serviceable, and sometimes things could use an update now and then. Campaigns can be hit or miss. It happens. To me the bigger problems for the brand were under the surface.

As a customer around that time, you could start to tell on some MEC-brand products that the quality started to feel cheaper. I have two of the exact same duffle bags from MEC—only purchased 10 years apart—and it's hard to not notice the difference in quality. The BC Business article above references members feeling as though they weren't involved in the decision making process. While including customers in brand decisions is tricky (they aren't always right it turns out), it shouldn't be taken lightly.

The company made some other curious decisions around that time - the biggest example (at least to me) was relocating the Edmonton store out of of the downtown core to a monstrous big box shopping complex on the south edge of the city. They've since re-opened a second location 5-6 blocks away from the original location.

This might all sound like me whining about inconsequential things. I get that companies need to relocate for a various number of reasons, product designs change over time, and brand identities could use updates from time to time.

However in my view this all indicated a shift in the company values. No one one single factor that led to it, but all the decisions and changes in aggregate started to show that the core values of the company were shifting, and they were shifting in a way that was disenfranchising the core customer base. The series of decisions showed the company lost touch with who it was, its core reason for being, and who the core customer was.

It likely knew it, and over time its customers knew it. The memberships were stagnating and the revenue was down. I think the rebrand was likely a response to the flagging performance, or to connect with new customers while trying to hang on to the current ones.

None of the changes helped though, and the co-op found itself on the verge of bankruptcy. Around 2019, MEC had announced a new store location in Saskatoon (where I live). It's 2023 and there's still a beautiful vacant space downtown where it would have been. Branding missteps may not have caused the business troubles, but they sure didn't help.

In 2021, a firm ended up buying the business and all of its assets/inventory, to take the company private. Guess what one of the first things it changed? The logo. Back to the classic mountain profile next to the word mark. A big glaring difference though: "Company" now replaces "Co-op".

I think this redesign is great - and it's likely the right move. But I can't help feel a bit of sadness that the brand now has lost something that was special about it.

This email has gotten long - congrats if you made it this far! I'll wrap things up with an attempt at a larger point: What irks me when we talk about "rebrands" is that we're often too fixated with the window dressing of a new identity. The change.org petition from member wanted the mountain in the logo back - but the logo mountain wasn't the point. The real issues brands face are the underlying issues - economic factors, business decisions, changes in trends, new goals, or new pressures. The reality is that a new logo can't fix those underlying problems or erase the past mistakes of a brand single-handedly. It's a tool, a very visible one, but it can only do (or signal) so much. A redesign even good ones can't get to the heart of things between a company and a customer base.

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For MEC the heart of the brand was making quality equipment accessible in Canada - and for a long time the business decisions were aligned to keep that as the primary goal. At some point that stopped being the core motivator of the company. That's something a redesign can't fix.