Fungible Convictions

• British East India Company
• Alcoa
• Merrill Lynch
• CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet

One chooses a particular company name both to describe that one’s company’s business and to inspire confidence in its legitimacy and efficacy.

But as the list of four names above cherry-pickingly illustrates, company naming conventions have changed over time. The world’s most powerful joint-stock company, the British East India Company, which literally ruled India for parts of three centuries, existed in what we can call the “descriptive era” of company names. A lack of electronic media—and a lack of competition—meant there was no need to differentiate or spiffify a name: the company was named what it was. In this case, it was British, it had a mandate for India, and it was a company.

Later, two naming trends developed in parallel. One we’ll call the “modern descriptive,” simple (or simplified) semantic names applied to unfathomably complicated enterprises: Alcoa, Aramco, Bethlehem Steel, American Telephone and Telegraph. The other, the “nominative,” took a person’s name for the company name—Merrill Lynch, Bell, Johnson & Johnson. Neither convention was new in of itself, but they had never been applied to organizations so, well, big. Seeing “Johnson & Johnson” on a shingle outside a shop in a small 18th century town probably looked unassuming; Seeing “Johnson & Johnson” on a thousand different 21st century products in tens of thousands of different stores assumes a lot. It assumes that consumers will access the small-town part of their linguistic memory when they see a Johnson & Johnson product and not the chemical engineering and international marketing part. Imagine if J & J were called the American International Topical Cream Manufacturing and Distribution Company. You’d wonder if Baby Powder was, you know, powdered babies.

Then came the ultra-modern or post-modern ridiculousness that the Simpsons parodied as “CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet,” the “company” Homer created at the end of the dot-com boom. CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet naming is naming-by-committee, trying to cobble together a word from bits of other words in order to create a company name that vaguely invokes whatever feeling it is that that company wants to invoke—without actually naming it anything. From the Wikipedia article linked above:

Accenture—Accent on the Future. Greater-than ‘accent’ over the logo’s t points forward towards the future. The name Accenture was proposed by a company employee in Norway as part of an internal name finding process (BrandStorming). Prior to January 1, 2001 the company was called Andersen Consulting.

Novell—Novell, Inc. was earlier Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested by George’s wife who mistakenly thought that “Novell” meant new in French. (Nouvelle is the feminine form of the French adjective ‘Nouveau’. Nouvelle as a noun in French is ‘news’.)

Comcast—from communications and broadcast.

Genius.

Except for the first descriptive era, my family was close to a company that passed through the latter three phases in the span of eighteen years. It’s a simple illustration of how company names get worse whenever a company renames itself as a result of growth. It went:

Peat Marwick (1870-1987). Nice name, if a little wooden. Peaty even.
KPMG (1987-2001). Still kind of O.K., but big blocky letters are nearly as threatening as TIAA-CREF, as just as descriptive.
BearingPoint (2001-present). They’re making masts and spinnakers now?

But at least BearingPoint was unrelated to KPMG’s corporate anthem (link to audio)(link to “Teutonic Master mix”):

chorus
KPMG, we’re strong as can be
A team of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.

KPMG, we’re strong as can be
A dream of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.

verse one
We create, we innovate
We pass the ones that are la-a-ate.
A global team, this is our dream of success that we create.
We’ll be number one, with effort and fun
Together each of us will run for gold that shines like the sun in our eyes

chorus
KPMG, we’re strong as can be
A team of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.

KPMG, we’re strong as can be
A dream of power and energy
We go for the gold
Together we hold onto our vision of global strategy.

verse two
The time is now to lead the way
We share the same idea that may win by the end of the day
Our strength is here to stay
Identity, one energy, one strategy, with sympathy
These are the words that will lead us into our new world.

[ZDNet: IT Anthems]