Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne discusses Games Workshop’s rebranding of Citadel accessories to Warhammer accessories.
Over the last several months, as the store has received restocks of Games Workshop’s Citadel brand of paints and tools, I’ve noticed a rebranding of these products, going from Citadel Colour and Citadel Tools to Warhammer Colour and Warhammer Tools. A rebranding for their paint and accessories lines was long overdue as few GW customers have any idea what Citadel is or why GW used it as a brand name for its paint and tool line.
GW actually started off as an actual workshop, making wooden game boards for games (like checkers, chess, backgammon, etc.). As Dungeons & Dragons grew in popularity in the late 1970s, the owners saw an opportunity to diversify their business and arranged for TSR Inc. to export the D&D product line into the United Kingdom. As sales of D&D products grew, GW saw another business opportunity and started producing its own lines of board games, RPGs, and the Owl and Weasel, a magazine dedicated to promoting the product lines GW was importing and producing. Soon White Dwarf superseded Owl and Weasel, becoming the house organ for the GW line of products.
In 1978, GW needed a line of miniatures to complement its lines of board games and RPGs, so they helped fund the startup of the Citadel Miniatures company (see “Tabletop Miniatures Titan“). GW later absorbed Citadel and retained the Citadel Miniatures name as its brand name for its miniatures and hobby tools lines. As the miniatures division of the company grew in profitability, spurred by the release of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in 1983 and Warhammer 40,000 in 1987, the focus of the company shifted from RPGs and board games to its much more lucrative miniature wargame rules, using the Games Workshop brand name for the miniatures rules and the Citadel Miniatures brand for its paints, tools and miniatures lines.
Although Citadel has remained the official brand name since then for GW miniatures, few players refer to them as such (instead looking for Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40,000, Blood Bowl etc. figures). Since GW developed specific brands of models for each game line, customers do not come in looking for Citadel Miniatures or even GW miniatures, but rather Age of Sigmar, Warhammer 40,000 or Necromunda models. It therefore makes sense for GW to stop supporting the Citadel brand, which has lost much of its meaning over the last thirty years in favor of its much stronger Warhammer brand. So, with little to no fanfare, the 45-year-old Citadel brand passes into obscurity.
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