Spending a lot of time in airports and on airplanes gives you plenty of time to think about random things. And right now I’m wondering about the rationale behind corporations who re-name themselves with these non-descript names or acronyms that don’t actually mean anything to anyone hearing them.
I was thinking about that this morning when I wrote the blog post about the Austrian fruit processor we visited during the International Ag Journalism congress last week. They used to be called Steirerfrucht – German which essentially means “Styrian Fruit”, Styria being the province in which the plant is located. Then they were absorbed into a larger multinational conglomerate, and now they’re called Agrana. If you just simply heard that name, how would you possibly know what they do? It could be fertilizer, biotechnology, chemicals – food isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind.
This led me to think of the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. It had operated under that name for generations in the Canadian west, then it became someone’s acquisition and is now part of a new company called Viterra. Again, a non-descript name that doesn’t tell you anything about who they are or what they do.
Maybe that’s the point? Maybe some of these companies don’t want the public to know what they’re up to? Most of the major Canadian banks have, over the last few years, become acronyms and I figure at some point, no one will really remember what they mean. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal have been replaced by CIBC, RBC and BMO. And my favourite example, really, is Kentucky Fried Chicken. It is now known the world over as KFC – with nothing in the name implying that it’s chicken or how it’s prepared.
I’m not sure what this all means, I just know it tends to annoy me somewhat. In my world, I like to call a spade a spade wherever possible – anything else just serves to blur and confuse. Acronyms and non-descript monikers included.
Any thoughts?
