The whole “initials that don’t stand for anything” is part of a trend in corporate culture that emphasizes the marketing of the brand over marketing of any particular product. Companies look for meaningless names for several reasons, including that meaningless (specifically “fanciful” or “arbitrary”) names are easier to protect in trademark law. Companies these days want their brands to be admired solely as brands and not because they are tied to any particular product. That leaves corporations to pick up and drop specific products and services based on economic trends. It also helps to constantly rename companies in an effort to shed bad reputations.
Plus, about 99 percent of corporate entitiesdon’t actually do anything. If you look at the organizational structure of any large corporation, you’ll see a dizzying network of dozens of corporate entities, most of which are created solely for purposes such as avoiding taxes, liability, and regulatory requirements. Since most of these entities don’t actually do anything, it’s not worth it to give them meaningful names.
Oh, and maybe they chose a song about Alabama because the lyric
– “Blue moon of Kentucky keep on shining …” – may prompt images that KFC would not want associated with their food.
One of the earlier examples of a company that “de-meaninged” its abbreviation was the Columbia Broadcasting System, which became simply “CBS” in the 1970s or 1980s. Note, though, that they will continue to try to prevent anyone else from using the name “Columbia” in connection with broadcasting and other entertainment businesses, even though they long ago sold their recording and motino picture studios to Sony.
Similarly, the Texas Rangers continue to claim the rights to the name “Washington Senators,” which they haven’t used since 1971.
Is this any worse than Philadelphia Cream Cheese running ads with the song “New York, New York”? When the company itself is based in Chicago, of course.
There, they just wanted the opening line, “Start Spreading the News”. But still…
It works both ways. How do you think people are able to memorize pi out to a zillion digits or the order of a deck of cards? They assign words that are meaningful to them to the meaningless digits.
They aren’t “tricks.” They take advantage of how humans remember things in order to allow them to remember things people aren’t naturally very good at remembering - like strings of random letters. If you want cites for the science behind this, or for the efficacy of these techniques, I suggest you read “Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It” by Dr. Kenneth Higbee, a heavily researched and highly footnoted book on the subject.
The only cite you need is a typical password system for any computer network. The most secure passwords consist of a string of random letters and numbers, but most people hate this type of password because it’s difficult to remember a series of meaningless characters.
Corporate names work the same way. Meaningless abbreviations are basically a string of random letters. They’re only memorable because you know that KFC used to mean Kentucky Fried Chicken, or that AARP used to be the American Association of Retired Persons. Even if you don’t know exactly what ESPN means (or used to mean), you can still see the “S” and “N” and think “Sports Network.”
OTOH, I know that the three major networks are CBS, NBC, and ABC. But for the life of me I can’t remember which channels they correspond to without looking it up in the TV Guide. They’re just meaningless letters.
I was going to respond to this but I decided that I’ll just have to live with the fact that the boards would be a much less amusing place if people actually read their posts.
I could never understand why that song is so enormously popular among bar bands (and bar patrons) here in California. I don’t think I even know a single person who is actually from Alabama.
Columbia Broadcasting System, National Broadcasting Company, and American Broadcasting Company. (I like that “American” vs. “National,” just like the baseball leagues.)
The basic theme of the song is that we’re Southerners and if we want to keep black people out of our schools and burn their churches and lynch them then we’re going to go ahead and do it, because we’re proud of being Southerners and we don’t need no Canadian Yankee like Neil Young telling us that there’s something wrong with the way we do things.
Actually, I was thinking of channels as in broadcasting fequencies, ie channel 2, channel 4, etc. I know that, on my cable network, the Home & Garden Channel is channel 48, and the Sci-Fi Channel is 56, but I can never remember which of the local stations (2, 4, and 7) correspond to which networks. I think it’s because I’ve never thought of NBC as the National Broadcasting Company, or CBS as Colombia Broadcasting System. Their names are just three letters which don’t have any significance to me, and hence their brands aren’t very memorable.
