Radio Shack has launched an ad campaign aimed at overhauling its brand image. In its marketing, the retailer has shortened its name to “The Shack” and adopted a wacky tone (presumably à la the bizarro-world marketing antics of Burger King) that seems designed to reach a younger audience.

“If you think about how you use nicknames, you generally use them with friends, people for whom you have an affinity and trust. Those are important attributes for any brand and certainly for us,” RadioShack’s CMO Lee Applbaum told AdWeek, adding that the retailer’s customers have used the shortened name “for years.”

I for one have never heard a person, ever in my life, call a Radio Shack “The Shack.” But I’m more struck by a deep lack of self-perception of this company. Radio Shack has become one of those legacy brands that seems like they would fade into oblivion if it weren’t for a long-standing consumer belief that you can do anything — make any technologies work together, hack any electronic system — just by shopping at Radio Shack. It’s a brand that has bred a whole generation of mini MacGyvers.

The reality is in fact different than the perception: the Radio Shacks I’ve visited over the past several years have been stale, cluttered, dimly lit stores in strip malls and on blighted city blocks, inside which products are so poorly merchandised it’s impossible to find anything, the selection is very limited, and the salespeople are unknowledgeable and unhelpful. I get better experiences and better prices shopping for cables, routers, adapters, or whatever hack-it-myself equipment I need through online retailers. Yet whenever I bring up a technical problem I have, people automatically suggest I “buy something at Radio Shack” to rig up the solution myself. The brand has become synonymous with DIY technology.

Yet rather than leverage this brand perception and actually focus on delivering on the promise, Radio Shack instead seems to be distancing itself from the tech-geek crowd altogether and trying to make itself over into a hipster brand. I have to say, I’m puzzled and intrigued. The “informal” name change, as AdWeek termed it, is a tactic other long-standing consumer brands have been taking in their advertising of late, most notably and recently by Gatorade. Their Superbowl-timed advertising campaign relaunched the product as the swanky, cool-as-ice “G,” departing from the brand’s long-time image as the drink of sweaty, fresh-from-the-field athletes — a move that branding expert Sarah O’Leary called a “senseless marketing tragedy” on The Huffington Post:

If you have a brand with an awareness level that rivals God, the last thing you should do is walk (or in this case wind sprint run) away from it. Instead, the Gatorade team should have figured out why they were losing at retail and invested in that solve.

Gatorade’s brand stewards spent 40 years building unparalleled brand equity for the beverage, a true household name in an oversaturated marketplace. Most companies would kill to be in Gatorade’s place, O’Leary says. Yet with sales stagnant, the first thing PepsiCo execs did was decide to throw brand equity out the window.

Back at The Shack, the retailer’s attempt to be something different to a whole new audience feels unauthentic and miscalculated. If the retailer wants to move away from being just the “cable store,” fair enough — but it’s important to do that in a way that feels believable, rather than pandering.

This week a mailer announcing Target’s newly redesigned private brand landed in our mailbox, complete with coupons for many of the products in the private label family. The new Up & Up brand, with its multicolored category system and bubbly upward-pointing arrows, is a departure from the Target bullseye logo. It also seems like a natural design evolution for a brand that often refers to a ’60s British-invasion pop sensibility — fun, friendly and colorful.

Target executives have indicated in interviews that the new brand identity is a reaction to the economy and consumers’ ever-increasing search for value — Target private label sales have increased 25% over the past five years and typically provide shoppers with about 30% in savings, according to an article in MarketingDaily — as well as a corporate-wide effort to differentiate the brand from Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart, meanwhile, is rolling out its own private label redesign for the Great Values brand, its top-selling line of private brand products. Andrea Thomas, the retailer’s senior vice president of private label brands, told a group last month that the massive private brand redesign, which included revamping packaging for thousands of products and adding new products to the line, would help the company increase efficiencies in its packaging and therefore pass on savings to consumers.

The new private label rollouts represent a dramatic shift in the “old way” of doing private brand, which in the past has been comprised of a few different approaches:

1. Create “generic” packaging (with little design thought put into it)
2. Create packaging that closely mimics the major consumer brand to which the private label product is an alternative
3. Create lots of subbrands that attempt to hide or downplay the fact that the product is private label

Safeway is still taking the third approach. As I cruised through the baby products aisle the other morning an adorable label on a box of diaper rash cream caught my eye — the “mom-to-mom” brand, with a cute, crafty-looking logo and pretty script type. Intrigued, I picked it up and flipped it over, only to learn that it was manufactured by Lucerne, a subbrand of Safeway. Check out Safeway’s Web site, and you’ll see that they still feature a number of subbrands, all with different visual identities and unique brand names.

So does the very public and sweeping rollout of Target’s and Wal-Mart’s new private labels represent the future? It seems that retailers are beginning to be less shy about touting their private labels, investing in branding to promote the products’ quality and value while enjoying the economies of scale of having a single approach to branding and packaging.

Public opinion about private brands has also shifted: a study in April showed that 4 of 5 consumers are “sold” on private brand quality, and that 80% of consumers have positive attitudes toward private brands. Especially in an economy where consumers are thinking twice before paying brand prices, major retailers seem to be seeing an opportunity to unapologetically parade their private brands.