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In an attempt to reach more tech-savvy customers, the 88 year old RadioShack has finally rebranded itself to “The Shack.”  $200 million is set to be spent on ads in order to promote the name change through digital and television ads.  Signs around brick and mortar stores will still read RadioShack. 

Hoping to compete with Best Buy, The Shack is looking to bolster key parts of their strategy.  For example, The Shack will continue to hire smart, and knowledgeable employees, and they even signed promotional contracts with T-Mobile and Lance Armstrong.  What do T-Mobile and Lance Armstrong have to do with one another?  Not much, but The Shack will be selling more T-Mobile phones and Lance Armstrong will be sponsoring The Shack in next year’s Tour de France.  Unfortunately for The Shack, there’s always a bit of risk involved whenever companies decide to change their name or name of a product.  Pizza Hut was kicking around the idea of changing their name to “The Hut,” but smartly decided to keep it as Pizza Hut.  In addition, sales of Gatorade declined after they became “G.” 

It will be interesting to see how customers respond to the name change and whether The Shack will bring in more customers than RadioShack did. 

Via [USAToday]