As part of this newspaper’s upcoming redesign, the Chicago Tribune will change its name to Servicom.
Just kidding, or as they say in Webspeak, 🙂 Newspapers are still mired in the 20th Century notion that names should give you an idea of what you’re getting. But other companies have bravely moved with the times, choosing monikers that seem to have been generated by computers.
Cellular One, for instance, sounded like a cellular phone company, but Cingular, its new name, offers a host of new possibilities: It could be something devoted to self-expression, like the ads say — “self-expression” being a fine euphemism for treating restaurants, movie theaters and Metra cars as your own personal phone booths. Or it could suggest some secret society of narcissists who can’t spell. The real answer may be that choosing Cingular was a necessarily bold move to compete against other phone companies with names that sound like words but aren’t, like Verizon and Qwest.
Then there’s that evocative new name for Andersen Consulting: Accenture, which, for some reason, has a sideways “v” over the “t”. Andersen Consulting was, you guessed it, a consulting firm. In announcing the name change, the company called Accenture “a coined word that connotes putting an accent or emphasis on the future.” Either that or a curious combination of “accord” and “denture.”
Looking back, one can appreciate how ahead of the curve the Chicago-based truck maker International Harvester was when it changed its name to Navistar in 1986. A spokesman said then that the new name was intended to allow the company to make it mean whatever it wanted. Fifteen years later it means truckmaker that used to be International Harvester.
Other “stars” have since moved into the galaxy, such as Firstar, which swallowed banks with more stodgy but helpful names like First Colonial Bank, and Unistar, a name shared by a former radio chain, entertainment company and mortgage broker.
And don’t forget the Chicago-based Unitrin, the result of a 1990 insurance-firm merger, and Unicom, Commonwealth Edison’s corporate name as of 1994. Did you know that since Unicom and the Philadelphia-based Peco Energy Co. merged in October, ComEd’s parent company has been named Exelon?
At least Chicago’s sports venues haven’t caught prefab name fever. Yes, the Chicago Stadium and Rosemont Horizon gave way to the United Center and Allstate Arena, but those names have pedigrees, compared to San Francisco’s 3 Com Park (replacing Candlestick Park) and San Diego’s Qualcomm Park (formerly Jack Murphy Stadium). Such invented names may seem at home in these dot-com-driven days but in the long run they sound, well, cilly.
