Really bad corporate name changes
Jennifer McClelland | RSS | 6 Comments
It can be amusing when a corporation goes through an identity crisis. Usually a corporate name change stems from the board or owner’s desire to move the company in a new direction or to pretend that they know what the consumer wants. I suppose sometimes they actually do know what the consumer wants, but more often a name change on an established company makes customers go, “huh?” more than anything else.
I think that more often though, companies decide to change their corporate name to get out from under a dark cloud that they imposed only on themselves.
Here are some of the worst of the worst corporate name changes:
The Shack::Radio Shack. This was so bad that I had to write about it in a previous post. While I now know that the company isn’t completely changing its name to the Shack, I still am not quite sure what the company was thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to align their company with a rickety old building. When I think Hi Tech, I’m not thinking about shacks.
Xe :: Blackwater. Earlier this year Blackwater decided that it would change its name to Xe because the Blackwater name was tarnished thanks to a 2007 incident that led to the death of 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians. Thankfully, even after the name change the government did not renew the company’s contract.
Altria :: Philip Morris Co. When the company changed its name on the same exact day that the company was cleared of responsibility for a woman’s smoking related death in late January 2003, it obviously wanted to escape the bad PR it had been getting. However, all that ended up happening was a magnifying glass on the company. Every time customers are reminded about the name change, they are reminded that this is the same Philip Morris they knew and they only tried to change their name to escape responsibility.
SyFy :: SciFi. This one I can’t quite figure out. All the cable station did was change the spelling of the already abbreviated name.
You can read more about bad name changes as well as the worst offender, I’ll give you a hint, it has something to do about the company who changed the name of the Sears Tower, all at the SOURCE.
Corporate Name Changes Change the Game or Just Confuse?
Tags: company, government, time customers
Hiro | Fri, Sep 11 2009
Hey Jennifer – Since you wrote this article, I got a question for ya!
In your dead honest opinion, what do you think of My $10,000 as a domain name for an investment blog?
Jessica from Savvy Sponds | Fri, Sep 11 2009
The Altria name change was definitely a bad idea. Thought the name itself was fine, the day they chose to perform it was very poorly planned, and the reason behind the name change will linger in peoples’ memories for days to come.
Jennifer McClelland | Fri, Sep 11 2009
Hiro, If you market the name right then the site is a good name. You can see that we call our blog something different than the actual domain name haha
Chris McClelland | Fri, Sep 11 2009
Hiro, Jennifer is right if you market something right the name can in fact sometimes not matter very much. However, when it comes to the net I try to incorporate keywords into a website, as well as the business name.
For example our business is Lucrative Investing, Inc when people use our name and hyperlink it with that anchor tag we get a small boost for two of our main keywords, lucrative(which is not really a main keyword for us, but we want to rank high for it, we are number 3 for it on Google), and investing which is a really really hard word to get in the top ten for(we rank around #8-#17 at any one time on Google.)
In this manner people simply mentioning you not only gets you word of mouth but also raises your in the serps for tough keywords. The fact that we are on a different domain, than our business name, is simply because the person who owns the domain is asking a very substantial price on it. We did own it at one time, but our domain registrar messed up the renew so it got swapped from us.
Instead of bending to buying back our domain which we had been paying $6.95 a year for, in exchange for five figures, we simply registered a domain which had similar keywords in it.
Your domain does not have much keyword use, but it is catchy which I personally think can be marketed well. The important part about any domain name is it should tell people what the site is about before they even click on it. This simply gives you an edge to help convert people and let them know what to expect before hitting your site.
It’s really a balance, a catchy rememberable name might not be so SEO friendly and vise versa. For instance http://www.etrade.com is a really good example for a domain name in terms of seo, explanation, and easy to remember. However http://www.google.com technically is not very SEO friendly but is very catchy and has to marketed differently.
Hiro | Sat, Sep 12 2009
Good to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks guys
Ranking on the 2nd page on Google for investing is pretty big.
Craig from Annuity Rates | Wed, Sep 30 2009
The Shack, my god that is so bad what was wrong with Radio Shack?