UPS was locked-in as the number one delivery service for small packages. Their original logo was simply a small parcel with a bow tied around it; they outwardly identified themselves with small packages, confining their image to small package delivery. In order to break away from small packages, UPS needed to have a strong repositioning.
Instead of coming across with an in-your-face strategy to rebrand, UPS took an incredibly intelligent approach- they made an intermediate connection, or a new node, in order to link their new positioning to their old one. They took a random, boring color, brown, and "made it cool." They associated their product with brown in several ways. They repainted all of their trucks, changed their employee's uniforms, and even changed their slogan to "What can brown do for you?," essentially making "UPS" synonymous with "brown."
After UPS was known specifically for the color brown, a process that took several years, they were disassociated with their original positioning as only a small parcel delivery service. They could then shift their positioning through the color brown to their new goal: a shipping logistics company.
This leads us to today. UPS no longer has the slogan "What can brown do for you?"
They now have "We <3 logistics."
This just goes to show the extreme power of spreading activation and the associative networks our long-term memory maintains on how we view, understand, and coexist with even the most well-known and established brands. By finding an unrelated node (brown), UPS was able to shift an extremely deep association away from its roots to something completely different.
Article on the slogan shift from 2010:
http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/09/13/UPS-New-Global-Campaign.aspx
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