It’s common - unremarkable, even - for a company to start marketing a product under a new brand name. (E.g. Electrasol detergent tabs became Finish in 2009.) Are there any examples where consumers started calling a product by a different brand name, or at least a different form of the name, even though the management never officially changed it?
(The example that inspired this thread: Six Flags Great Adventure. Sometime in (IIRC) the late 90s, people started calling it “Six Flags” instead of “Great Adventure,” likely because its ownership started using the words “Six Flags” more prominently in their ad campaigns.)
Interesting - I guess those would count if consumers stopped using the original names. (There’s also “KFC” for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but they officially rebranded as “KFC”…)
No one seems to know exactly who first gave the Willys MB utility vehicle its nickname, but it’s generally accepted that soldiers called it “jeep” before either the company or the Army did.
This is a marginal case, because the “popular” name is so similar to the real name. In the UK and Ireland, it is common for the public to add the letter “S” to shop names: “Marks and Spencer” => “Marks and Spencers”, “Eason” => “Easons”, “WH Smiths”, etc.
In the case of Eason (an Irish bookstore) it is so nearly universally referred to as “Easons” that most people are probably unaware that it’s not the real name of the business.
It might be on the model of (correct) brand names such as Harrods, Morrissons and Sainsbury’s. Or it might be related to the general habit of adding “s” to names that don’t have one such as Christopher Reeve(s).
Isn’t it officially “Harrod’s Stores, Limited”? Harrod = some guy; Harrod’s = genitive [in fact spelled with an ‘s’, plus an apostrophe if you know how to spell]
Aspirin can be used by any brand of ASA in the US (but not in Canada) because the trademark was seized during WW II by the alien property office. Esso did not change to Exxon in Canada (I have no idea why) so we still have Esso stations here.
I imagine sports teams would have experienced this a lot especially in bilingual markets. I think you’ll probably hear reference to “The Habs” in English language conversation much more than you will hear “the Montreal Canadiens”. Even in French, the name “Le Tricolore” is ubiquitous, along with other nicknames (La Sainte Flanelle, les Habitants…). For newcomers, it might not be obvious what the name is referring to as these names don’t show up in marketing, just news and discussions.
Kraft Dinner has leaned into the name “KD” in Canada, though I’m not sure if it’s more popular to refer to it as such than it’s actual name.
The beforementioned Esso that became Exxon was also branded in some states as Enco. In fact I think it was the Enco name that got them mired in legal processes because it was a copyrighted brand name for something utterly unrelated such as dog food.
They went with “Exxon” because their market researchers said double X’s were not found in any extant language and therefore unlikely to crop up in the same way as Enco.
Coming back to this…I had to Google it, but apparently the Coca-Cola company didn’t start using the brand name “Coke” until it had already caught on as a popular nickname for their soda:
