Re: A renaming analogy

On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 06:21:26AM -0400, Robert Bernier wrote:
>
> other examples of change
>
> BMO: Bank of Montreal
> KFC: Kentucky Fired Chicken
> TD: Toronto Dominion Bank
>
> This shortening of company names has been going ever since the term
> "trans-global corporation" came into common parlance.

Only the latter of those had ever been something everyone was already
using, though, which was the point of the analogy.

BMO is still rarely used by its customers (and more than I call my
bank, RBC -- it's still "the Royal").  The change to the
ticker-symbol name was really an attempt to attract a new kind of
customer -- corporate customers who do "big deals" that are either
spectacularly successful or take the bank down with them.

TD is a special case -- they never actually changed their name to TD.
That was their logo, though, so people called it that.  They're now
actually TDCanadaTrust, since they merged with Canada Trust.  But
everyone I know who banks there says they bank at TD.  So that's
actually a case where the branding effort has failed, and is entirely
similar to the current state of affairs in our project: there's an
official name (PostgreSQL) and the thing that people actually call it
(Postgres).  There are other strange things that people call it too
(some people still call their bank Canada Trust or, even, Lincoln
Trust!  They were annoyed about being soaked up by TD).

And KFC was yet a different case.  They had invested _years_ in their
old brand, but came to be convinced that the word "Fried" was doing
them in.  So they had to spend a great deal of money and effort
convincing everyone that you should call them KFC as opposed to
Kentucky Fried Chicken.  They actually took a hit in brand
recognition while they did it.  Surely that's not a strategy to ape.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
However important originality may be in some fields, restraint and
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great many others.   --Alain de Botton