In the wake of their announcement of a $14.1 million loss for the second quarter of 2005, Lions Gate Films has decided that they don’t like the way they look anymore and has gone under the brand marketing knife.
The studio claims that the losses are the result of marketing costs for Lords of War and The Devil’s Rejects. Marketing costs to the tune of a whopping $26 million dollars. With the glut of movies that are being released these days, trying to get your picture in the spotlight can cost an awful lot of money and many studios are feeling the strain.
Lions Gate has decided they need to revamp their image to “build upon this brand awareness and create a bold and exciting new look for an integrated, unified company that is greater than the sum of its parts”, in the words of CEO John Feltheimer. They’ve changed their name to Lionsgate Films (dropping the all important space) and unveiled a new animated logo for use on the company’s projects.
You know what? Good. I was always so tempted to put Lion’s…there should be an apostrophe in there I tell you! But by changing to Lionsgate, I’ll be far less bothered by the grammatical irritation and so I wish them the best of luck. They’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of them and placing hope on a new name and logo might be putting the cart before the horse.
December 20th, 2005 at 6:48 am
Hm. I’m not sure they’re putting the cart before the horse, but then I may be marketing biased. For me it just makes sense to set up all company logos and communication ‘tools’ first - then you can start communicating effectively about the changes you’re actually making. But I’ll agree that if the changes stop there it’s quite likely that it won’t be enough to make a difference.
December 20th, 2005 at 4:23 pm
I was only referring to the fact that there’s a lot more to be done than just change the name and hope for the best. I bet they have a rather nice corporate plan ready for implementation, as you suggested.