WHAT'S IN A NAME? NOT MUCH.
It used to be that an organization, or a business, or a product, would be named after the person who invented it, or ran it, or established it, or would include something about what the product was or what it was supposed to do. It would, in the immortal journalism-school terms, tell the consumer who, what, when, where, or why. Like Swift and Company (the meat processors, established by the Swift family.) Or U.S. Steel (an American company that manufactured steel.) Or Commonwealth Edison (an electric utility--after Thomas Edison, who invented the electrical grid.) Or Southern Bell Telephone (named after Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the telephone, and operating in the Southern U.S.) Or the Chicago Board of Education (which ran the public school system of the city of Chicago.) United Airlines was presumably an airline composed of two or more smaller airlines which had at some time united.
Swift is now Esmark. Commonwealth Edison is now owned by something called Exelon. Southern Bell, which now owns phone companies all over the US, is SBC. The Chicago Board of Ed now calls itself CPS, which presumably stands for Chicago Public Schools, but is supposed to be used in the singular, as in "CPS has issued its budget for the next fiscal year..." (They has?) United Airlines became Allegis for a while, but Allegis is now a corporation that deals in employee recruitment, HR software, and all kinds of other stuff having nothing whatever to do with flying. And, the only one of the lot that makes any kind of sense, though presumably by accident, US Steel has now become USX at the same time that most of its steelworkers have become X-workers.
The renaming craze probably started when the original names started to seem too limited. The founding family no longer had anything to do with the business, or a regional business went nationwide, or conglomeration and buyouts brought various different kinds of businesses under one umbrella. And the people doing the naming generally had nothing much to do with the making or purveying of any particular commodity or service; they just needed something to put on the stock market listings so investors would know what to buy. (Although, interestingly enough, at least one investment expert advises us not to buy any stock in a company whose name doesn't tell you what it does.)
Apparently corporate naming is now big business (see Ruth Shalit's article on the subject in http://salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html). I remember many years ago when I worked in a collective that ran a countercultural newspaper (named, by the way, Chutzpah.) This was well before the days of word processing. In order to prepare copy for the printer, we had to type it up, and then copyedit it. That process involved cutting out the wrong or misspelled words or phrases with a razor blade and pasting in the corrections. The stuff we cut out lay scattered all over the floor until we finished the copy and sent it to the printer. Then we swept the floor. In the dustpan lay a vast assemblage of randomly assorted tiny words and phrases, just begging to be made into a surrealist poem. Something like "Untied...crobar..formicated...allis...knew." I mention this because the current name game seems to work the same way, only with syllables instead of words. "A...quent...X....fram" and so on. For more information, you may also want to look at http://www.snarkhunting.com/--"Snark Hunting, the naming and branding blog." (Now there's a name I can relate to!)
The problem, of course, is that names that don't mean anything are really hard to recognize or remember. I just finished taking an online survey about cell phone services that asked how many cell phone service names I could remember. Well, there's the one I use, and there's the one I used before that. And maybe a couple of other names. So much for brand name recognition. I don't even remember the brand names of the ones that do really clever advertising. I remember the ads, but not the brands. And I'm a word buff, probably better at remembering this sort of thing than most consumers.
Yet another problem is that in a climate of constant changes in corporate ownership, you not only have to remember the current brand name, you have to follow it through its succession of owners. My bank, which has had our family's account for over twenty years, has been through five changes of name and ownership during that time. All of my utility companies have changed names at least once each since we moved into Chicago.
The use of naming rights as a tool of corporate marketing on one side and institutional fund-raising on the other raises another set of questions. What are the sports stadiums and other public buildings going to do when the corporations to whom they have sold naming rights change their names, or go out of business entirely? The United Center (Chicago's sports stadium named by United Airlines) is likely to be in hot water soon, if United Airlines does not survive its current bankruptcy. Will United Cellular Field (a baseball field formerly named for Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox) have to change its name if United Cellular gets bought out or conglomerated into something else? Apparently the issue has not arisen yet, but it is obviously only a matter of time.
All of these problems are, I think, only a specialized subset of a much larger issue--the erosion of meaning in all kinds of language. More about this later.
Swift is now Esmark. Commonwealth Edison is now owned by something called Exelon. Southern Bell, which now owns phone companies all over the US, is SBC. The Chicago Board of Ed now calls itself CPS, which presumably stands for Chicago Public Schools, but is supposed to be used in the singular, as in "CPS has issued its budget for the next fiscal year..." (They has?) United Airlines became Allegis for a while, but Allegis is now a corporation that deals in employee recruitment, HR software, and all kinds of other stuff having nothing whatever to do with flying. And, the only one of the lot that makes any kind of sense, though presumably by accident, US Steel has now become USX at the same time that most of its steelworkers have become X-workers.
The renaming craze probably started when the original names started to seem too limited. The founding family no longer had anything to do with the business, or a regional business went nationwide, or conglomeration and buyouts brought various different kinds of businesses under one umbrella. And the people doing the naming generally had nothing much to do with the making or purveying of any particular commodity or service; they just needed something to put on the stock market listings so investors would know what to buy. (Although, interestingly enough, at least one investment expert advises us not to buy any stock in a company whose name doesn't tell you what it does.)
Apparently corporate naming is now big business (see Ruth Shalit's article on the subject in http://salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html). I remember many years ago when I worked in a collective that ran a countercultural newspaper (named, by the way, Chutzpah.) This was well before the days of word processing. In order to prepare copy for the printer, we had to type it up, and then copyedit it. That process involved cutting out the wrong or misspelled words or phrases with a razor blade and pasting in the corrections. The stuff we cut out lay scattered all over the floor until we finished the copy and sent it to the printer. Then we swept the floor. In the dustpan lay a vast assemblage of randomly assorted tiny words and phrases, just begging to be made into a surrealist poem. Something like "Untied...crobar..formicated...allis...knew." I mention this because the current name game seems to work the same way, only with syllables instead of words. "A...quent...X....fram" and so on. For more information, you may also want to look at http://www.snarkhunting.com/--"Snark Hunting, the naming and branding blog." (Now there's a name I can relate to!)
The problem, of course, is that names that don't mean anything are really hard to recognize or remember. I just finished taking an online survey about cell phone services that asked how many cell phone service names I could remember. Well, there's the one I use, and there's the one I used before that. And maybe a couple of other names. So much for brand name recognition. I don't even remember the brand names of the ones that do really clever advertising. I remember the ads, but not the brands. And I'm a word buff, probably better at remembering this sort of thing than most consumers.
Yet another problem is that in a climate of constant changes in corporate ownership, you not only have to remember the current brand name, you have to follow it through its succession of owners. My bank, which has had our family's account for over twenty years, has been through five changes of name and ownership during that time. All of my utility companies have changed names at least once each since we moved into Chicago.
The use of naming rights as a tool of corporate marketing on one side and institutional fund-raising on the other raises another set of questions. What are the sports stadiums and other public buildings going to do when the corporations to whom they have sold naming rights change their names, or go out of business entirely? The United Center (Chicago's sports stadium named by United Airlines) is likely to be in hot water soon, if United Airlines does not survive its current bankruptcy. Will United Cellular Field (a baseball field formerly named for Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox) have to change its name if United Cellular gets bought out or conglomerated into something else? Apparently the issue has not arisen yet, but it is obviously only a matter of time.
All of these problems are, I think, only a specialized subset of a much larger issue--the erosion of meaning in all kinds of language. More about this later.
posted by WiredSisters at 9:12 AM
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