I have noticed lately that a lot of companies keep changing their names. Audio King is now Ultimate Electronics, Verizon is a relatively new name, Dayton’s decided to be Marshall Field’s, Accenture used to be another name (some accounting firm, I think).
Those are the only examples I can think of off the top of my head, but I am curious as to why it seems so frequent lately. Is it because they have no clearly defined corporate identity, or is there usually a legal reason behind it?
1 - They merge with another company
2 - To create a new corporate identity or brand image
3 - They spin off from a larger company
Accenture used to be the consulting arm of Arthur Andersen, the Big-5 accounting firm. Several years back they spun off into a separate entity called ‘Andersen Consulting’. After a big lawsuit for the ‘Andersen’ name, Andersen Consulting became Accenture and Arthru Andersen became simply ‘Andersen Worldwide’. Then they fucked themselves over that Enron thing and were carved up and acquired by the other Big-5s.
Seems to me it’s a good clue that they are about to go under when they start playing around with their name. Especially if they change it to something where you can’t tell who founded them or what they do anymore. Like Enron, MCIWorldCom, etc.
Maybe it’s just coincidence, but personally I think it says something about their management when they start spending time on playing with their name instead of concentrating on whatever they are producing or selling.
I expect you could have done well in the stock market during the past decade by selling off companies when they start playing around with their name. At the least, you could have avoided some big losses.
Company names have an intangible value called goodwill. When the goodwill is negative, it’s not a bad idea to change the name. I knew a company back in the early 80s called AIDS. Arthur Andersen’s consulting division spun-off and changed their name to Accenture.
I’m not sure where Enron came from, t-bonham. As far as I know they changed their name once, very early on when they were small and remained Enron from then on. They certainly didn’t change it when things started to go wrong. They haven’t even changed it now even though it’s got about the worst goodwill capital of any name ever.
I think a lot of name changes come from two sources. The first is companies named after what they do (like the UK Post Office) wanting to disassociate themselves from that one activity as their products diversify (hence the Post Office becoming, for a while, Consignia).
The other source is corporate re-imagining where the marketing drones think the company needs to be rebadged in order to create a dynamic fusion of the diverse synergies drawn from their ensemble business units.
Either that or they’re being sued for the name (WWF…)
Then there’s Gator.
“CNet reports that Gator, everyone’s favorite ad software, is changing its name to Claria. Gator’s CEO says “We feel that the Claria Corporation name will allow us to better communicate the expanding breadth of offerings that we provide to consumers and advertisers.” He fails to mention what “Claria” is supposed to mean or how it accomplishes this goal, but it seems that the name change may be no more than an attempt to distance the company from a moniker which has become involved in allegations of spyware.”
Are you possibly confused about the company that made diet candy called “Ayds”?
What often bugs me is when a well-established, respected brand name is changed to a meaningless jumble of sounds. Examples: International Harvestor became Navistor. OK, maybe they wanted to reflect that they were no longer primarily made agricultural products. But what do they do now? The name gives no clue.
Another company (I can’t recall their old name) became Novartis, which, frankly, suggests to me that they manufacture Beano.
There was a computer consulting firm in the Chicago area named AIDS. I was surprised they kept the name as long as they did. I think they changed it around 1992(?).
International Harvester became Navistar. However, I believe their products still bear the “International” mark.
As you can see, there are all kinds of reasons. One of the most common is this one here – a company has become part of a huge conglomerate that no longer wants to be specifically associated with the type of goods they’ve become known for. Another reason is a merger, where the new parent company wants to assert its own corporate brand (BP). Another reason is legal, where the company no longer has the right to a name (Andersen Consulting, WWF (kind of)). Another reason is to dissasociate itself from infamy (
Valujet). Another reason is just an excuse for a new high-profile advertising campaign.
This was because of a merger. Bell Atlantic merged with GTE.
Very often merged companies will take a name completely different from either of their components so neither of the original companies is implied to be the “lesser partner.”
Verizon was formed when Bell Atlantic and GTE merged. They were both huge companies at the time.
(Which is what cmkeller just said, of course.)
Enron, IIRC, evolved out of Houston Oil and Gas Corporation.
Similarly, once upon a time Exxon Mobil Corporation was Standard Oil of New Jersey and Standard Oil of New York. The name “Exxon”, incidentally, is said to have been generated at random by a computer.
There seems to have been a general trend in recent decades towards abstract, nonspecific names for corporations. This may be in part because such names cannot give the false impression that a company is limited to a particular locality or a particular line of products.
I suspect it also has to do with a desire for something akin to “political correctness”; one reason companies adopt such bland names which effectively mean nothing is that they wish to avoid any connotations which someone, somewhere, might find offensive. I’ve long wondered if executives at 3M dropped the name Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing because they were afraid that some people might think of Minnesota as a hick place, or that “mining” would evoke images of dirt and sweat. Possibly somebody at K-Mart decided that “Kresge” sounded too ethnic, despite the name having built up decades of goodwill with the public.
There has been a similar trend to substitute distinctive, representative logos with bland, abstract logos. Proctor & Gamble chose to phase out use of its venerable “man in the moon” emblem after a large part of the public came to the well-reasoned conclusion that the symbol was a way for the corporation to advertise that it endorsed Satan worship. Yet in recent decades a great many other companies have also stopped using traditional mascots, so that where the shelves of stores used to be littered with pictures of cute kids, cuddly kittens, elves, etc., we now mostly see arrows inside of circles, circles inside of arrows, arrows inside of circles inside of triangles, triangles inside of circles inside of arrows inside of circles inside of stars…
Changing names can also be an effort to shed existing hostility or notoriety. This seems like a fool’s game. It is said–no kidding–that The Internal Revenue Bureau had its name changed to The Internal Revenue Service because it was thought that taxpayers would feel friendlier towards it if they were told the agency was “serving” them. The town of Darren, Massachusetts had a negative image after a series of trials there which the town fathers hoped people would forget, so it changed its name–and people have spoken of the Salem Witch Trials ever since.
Grandiosity also plays a role. Some years back the City of St. Louis briefly changed the name of Lambert Field to St. Louis International Airport in the belief that putting “international” into the name would give the city prestige. After public protests, a compromise was struck and the facility became St. Louis International Airport. I’ve never been able to look at that name in print without remembering that the folks in Green Acres used to fly out of Pixley International Airport.
Also bear in mind globalisation. Deloitte & Touche recently rebranded as “Deloitte” to make the brand name consistent across the globe, since the local entities in different countries often have different legal names. As part of this consistency exercise there’s often an element of namechanging to ensure whatever’s used is inoffensive and not already used in any country – hence the move towards “meaningless” names, the ones most likely to be unused anywhere.
When Monsanto sold off it’s chemical division, both sides quickly agreed that there could only be one Monsanto. After some wrangling, Monsanto remained the name for the agricultural products company and the chemical company became Solutia.
On the other hand, the Singer Corporation no longer makes sewing machines, having sold that division years ago.
Sometimes names really should be changed.
When Ralston Purina sold off its livestock feeds division, the new company was named Purina Mills. The two companies agreed to share the Checkerboard logo. But Ralston Purina kept its international livestock feed division, so in North America, Purina livestock feed was made by Purina Mills, while in Europe it was made by Ralston Purina. A few years later, when Purina Mills wanted to go international, they had to come up with a new brand, and without the Checkerboard.
Then Ralston Purina spun its cereal division into a separate company (Ralcorp) and THEY got to use the Checkerboard, as well. Mind you, these were now three separate companies with no common ownership, no interlocking boards of directors, and with three separate lines of business.
The result has been 20 years of confusion. People continue to call one company for information or complaints about one of the others. Some feed stores sell both Purina Mills livestock feeds and Ralston Purina pet food. And to top it off, all three companies are now owned by other companies.
I’ll take Verizon any day.
Many name changes are part of a corporate restructuring. Then there are the “rebranding” campaigns. These get very fuzzy. Consultants get paid big $$ to sit around and string phonemes together and tell executives that the resulting gibberish “conveys” some admirable abstract quality. Accenture had a reason for needing a new name, but what does its new name mean? Well, they planned to spend $100M to tell us that it “conveys” “an accent on the future”. A survey found only 11% of respondents made this association; as large a portion that thought it had something to do with dentures.
Landor is one of the larger consultancies in this field. Responsible for such successes as “Federal Express changes name to FedEx”
Other times rebranding is an attempt to dodge previous illwill: Altria corp is the former Philip Morris, for example.
The Dayton’s stores became Marshall Field’s, but the name of the Dayton Hudson Corporation was actually changed in honor of its now biggest and best-known division, to the Target Corporation. This was so, in newspaper articles, etc. outlining the big discount chains, people weren’t confused by a listing of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Dayton Hudson. Now, Target is owned by the Target Corporation, just as you’d expect.
At about the same time, they wanted to have more uniformity among the names of their department stores. Some had been known as Dayton’s, some had been known as Hudson’s, some had been known as Marshall Field’s, and there may have been other names as well. I think it was determined that, while the name “Dayton’s” is pretty firmly tied with Minnesota, “Marshall Field’s” is best-known nationally, so they decided to go with that name for all the department stores.
It is very strange, though. We used to have Dayton’s and Norwest Bank and USWest, and now we have Marshall Field’s and Wells Fargo and Qwest…it’s all the fun of moving to a new part of the country without the hassle of packing, I guess.