Office Depot’s parent company, formerly known as The ODP Group, has rebranded as Office Depot Group, retiring its distribution business’s name, ODP Business Solutions, in favor of Office Depot Business. The move unifies the 40-year-old Office Depot brand across both its retail stores and B2B distribution operations.
Company officials applauded the move as providing branding consistency.
“Office Depot is a brand with more than 40 years of history behind it — the kind of recognition that can’t be built overnight, only earned over decades by showing up for our customers, our partners and the communities we serve,” Craig Gunckel, the CEO at Office Depot, wrote in a LinkedIn post.
Why The ODP Group changed its name to the Office Depot Group
Gunckel said the Office Depot Group name will be reflected across the company’s website, communications and social channels in the coming weeks.
“As we continue rebuilding this business for the future, we believe returning to that legacy will have a tremendous, positive impact — for our co-workers, our customers and everyone who has relied on Office Depot for a generation,” Gunckel said.
Office Depot is No. 24 in the Top 2000 Database. The Top 2000 ranks North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales and more. Office Depot is also the second-largest retailer in the Office Supplies category, behind Staples.
Risks associated with the change
Branding experts said the move makes sense, but also commented on potential risk.
“One big concern is that procurement officers have already built four decades of connotations to the Office Depot brand as a brick-and-mortar entity, which could dilute the identity of the company and its perceived areas of expertise,” said Alys Reynders, chief marketing officer at the operations platform Quickbase.
Reynders sees challenges ahead for a brand that has 40 years of name recognition associated with it. In the meantime, it will face continuing questions about how to unify business units across existing brands.
“This may carry an unwanted impact where the aligned branding masks the broader scope of the company as a whole, which runs the risk of limiting what clients believe the firm can and can’t do for them,” Reynders noted.
Still, from an overall brand consistency standpoint, she said the move makes sense.
“Overall, this stronger alignment means that Office Depot has the opportunity to unify its identities beyond the barriers created by operating under different names. It can take some smoothing out by marketing teams, but when managed effectively, operating under a single entity can stamp out customer confusion about who the brand is and its heritage,” Reynders assessed.
The Office Depot Group’s future in B2B sales
Shailendra Pratap Jain, professor of marketing at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, said the company gains recognition but potentially inherits the constraints of its legacy positioning.
“The B2B side is particularly interesting. Renaming ODP Business Solutions as Office Depot Business gives the company immediate familiarity and legitimacy,” he stated. “It also creates a strategic challenge: can a brand strongly associated with retail office supplies stretch credibly into a broader B2B solutions and distribution identity?”
Overall, though, he sees the rebrand as a useful turnaround signal.
“But the name itself cannot accomplish the turnaround,” he cautioned. “The real test is whether Office Depot can convert legacy brand awareness into a new meaning — from ‘the place where businesses buy office supplies’ to ‘the company that helps businesses operate.'”
Jain added that the conversion will require the company to think strategically about its targeting and positioning strategy, its product mix, pricing, distribution, promotion and a host of other factors.
“Whether the move successfully accomplishes this shift will determine whether returning to the past becomes an asset for the future,” Jain said.
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