116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
On Topic: Name calling
Michael Chevy Castranova
Dec. 7, 2011 8:48 am
What's the difference between a rat and a squirrel? A bushy tail. That, and good public relations.
Your company's brand - and by extension, its name - telegraphs specific qualities. “Rat” conjures up cowardice and dishonesty (think James Cagney in the movie “Taxi!” - “Come on out and take it, ya dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to ya through the door”) and the Black Death.
“Squirrel,” on the other hand, brings to mind friskiness, sort of like Chip and Dale (the cute Walt Disney cartoon chipmunks, I mean, not so much the male dancers).
So a name is not something you want to mess with. And while corporations as a rule give much thought to this key branding issue as part of their overall strategy when merging with or buying another entity, you can't always tell.
You have to wonder what decision-makers were thinking back in 1998 when they cobbled together giant accounting firms Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse, and agreed to the name PricewaterhouseCoopers - especially with the funky capital “C.”
They tried toughing it out with that, but last year announced the company henceforth wanted to be known as PwC.
Sort of like when your 12-year-old comes home from school one afternoon and declares from now on she's no longer going to answer to Debbie, but wants to be called Madison. Or Bella.
When discussions began a few years back to consider changing the name of a chain of business newspapers where I worked in Michigan, I urged against it. Or, I suggested, if some of the newer papers in other parts of the state wanted to re-christen themselves, let 'em - but we should stick to what we'd been calling ourselves, to the brand we'd built up, over several years.
As it turned out, this was not a voting issue. The name of the all the papers were changed.
So we, in our corner of the state, had to work to re-brand our publication all over again.
I'll always remember Stephen Trivers, at the time co-owner of a group of radio stations in one of the principal towns in our circulation area, and someone who knew a heck of a lot about branding, telephoned me when he heard about the name-change notion.
He said, and I quote: “That's - how shall I put this - dumb.”
Yet companies manage it all the time, sometimes successfully. Verizon Wireless has done OK, name-recognition-wise, since it dropped both the Bell Atlantic and GTE names after its 2000 merger.
Back in the late 1990s when lots of banks were pushing and shoving across the Midwest in their rush to stake claims in the Chicago area, National City of Cleveland gobbled up the First of America group of Kalamazoo, Mich.
One community leader, a wise man in many ways, told me at the time he was certain the Cleveland officials would retain the local brand - FoA was a known entity in southwest Michigan, after all.
The signs in town all got changed to the National City moniker within a year.
(Today, after the most recent waves of mergers and acquisitions, National City no longer exists - it was bought and re-branded in 2008 by PNC.)
A note about “mergers”: Many times what corporations really are doing is acquiring other entities. But they believe the word “merger” sounds so much more civilized - like a Sunday picnic - than “takeover.”
There historically have been occasions when such changeovers have been friendly affairs, but sometimes they are plenty messy. Why do you think the mergers-and-acquisitions department in Bret Easton Ellis's novel, “American Psycho,” is referred to as “murders and executions”?
But often, progress and events demand a fresh look.
Exxon - née Standard Oil - can label itself Exxon Mobile and sponsor “Masterpiece Theatre” on Public Television. But we'll probably still associate that name with the Exxon Valdez and Prince William Sound for a long time yet.
Closer to home, Archer Daniels Midland ran into a spot of bother in 1993 with the Justice Department over price fixing, and settled some air-pollution lawsuits with big wads of money. ADM, as it's now called, however, has been named among the world's “most admired” food producers by Fortune magazine three times since 2009.
On a much more benign note, when PepsiCo suggested earlier this year it would replace long-standing Quaker Oats signs on its mighty mill that sits along the Cedar River, not everyone in Cedar Rapids was not pleased.
So, like Horton hearing a Who, the powers-that-be in Purchase, N.Y., nodded, and two shiny red Quaker Oats signs remain today to light the way.
Someone there, I guess, understands the message of the squirrel's tail.
SUBMITTED BY KATHY VACEK: ONE OF 13 POST CARDS DATED BETWEEN 1918 AND 1919. Home of Quaker Oats