The news of the disappearance of the WH Smith name from British high streets after 233 years has rapidly been supplanted by a question: who, or perhaps what, is its replacement TGJones?
Included in the announcement from the new owner, Modella Capital, which has acquired the 480-store high street chain for just £76m, is the detail that after a “short transitional period” visitors to its shops will be greeted with the fictitious “family” brand name.
WH Smith derived its name from William Henry Smith, its founders’ youngest son, and the chain’s new owners have said that the entirely new name TGJones “feels like a worthy successor”.
“Jones carries the same sense of family and reflects these stores being at the heart of everyone’s high street,” gushed a spokesperson. “It’s obviously based on another familiar surname – Smith, Jones.”
However, branding experts feel decidedly differently, and expect that TGJones will join the ranks of ill-fated rebrands such as New Coke, Royal Mail’s millennial makeover to Consignia and the fund manager Aberdeen’s influencer-inspired vowel-dropping change to Abrdn.
“This is like Trumpian chaos theory,” says Mark Borkowski, branding and reputation expert. “You want to be talked about, to create massive debate, but what will it evaporate down to? Probably not what the new owners want it to. It sounds like an accountancy practice. This is laughably see-through and we are already talking about it as a desperate pivot.”
Modella has made clear that the brand is “not a reference to any individual”, a point taken to heart by fans of Thomas George “TG” Jones, the “prince of centre halves” who played for Everton and Wales in the 1930s and 1940s and died in 2004.
Jones’s Wikipedia page has been rapidly updated to reflect that he is not associated with either WH Smith or TGJones, although in later life he did end up running a newsagent in North Wales.
And naturally, the debate about Smith and Jones conjures memories of Alas Smith and Jones, the BBC comedy series of the 1980s and 1990s starring Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones.
To further reinforce that the new name is a branding-lite facsimile of WH Smith, an internal email to staff has said that Modella has “chosen to keep the blue and white brand colours which you will all be familiar with”, for “a sense of reassuring continuity”.
“It feels incredibly close, a poor mirror of WH Smith and not necessarily very well thought through,” says Charlotte Black, the chief strategy officer at Saffron Brand Consultants. “I would say it feels hasty – an ‘insert here’ strategy – and a bit of a missed opportunity. Buying the high street stores could have been a blank sheet of paper to put a lot of meaning behind what the future offering might be for the public.”
WH Smith is the latest in a string of once-ubiquitous names to disappear from high streets, including Debenhams, Topshop, Woolworths and Littlewoods, and rebrandings have a decidedly patchy history of working out.
In 2019, John and Irene Hays snapped up Thomas Cook’s 555 UK shops in a deal that saw the 178-year old brand name disappear – in a rebrand to Hays Travel – a move that seems to still be working out just fine for the new owners. In the 1980s, River Island’s switch from Chelsea Girl and Kendall’s to Next also proved successful.
While the first public outing of the TGJones name has been an inauspicious start for WH Smith’s new owners, the replacement of such a venerable household was always likely to have come in for criticism.
“When it comes down to putting out a new name, especially dealing with such an iconic legacy brand, there is always going to be a lot of negative sentiment,” says Black. “By just changing the name in the way they have, they now really need to come swiftly to what their new value proposition is going to be.
“They could have used the new name as a way to ignite change. So now what is important is what they do next to put meaning behind TGJones.”
