A renaming analogy

Hi,

In thinking about the renaming issue, I remembered a case that is a
good analogy with ours: FedEx.

The Company Formerly Known as Federal Express changed their name.  I
can still recall their old slogan: "Federal Express: When it
absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."  For reasons I
don't know (but could probably learn if I spent some time doing the
research), they concluded that they should re-brand as FedEx.  They
had something going for them in that new name: that's what everyone
"in the know" _already_ called them.

It was still a big change, because _other_ people who had been
exposed to "Federal Express" for a long time, but didn't use couriers
regularly, maybe didn't use that short form.

Perhaps we could study that case as a means to understand how such
changes ought to be undertaken.  It looks to me like they did a good
job.  Certainly my paper reports that they're doing reasonably well,
for a company so dependent on fuel prices for profit.

[Note that this is not a post on the topic of whether or when to
change names as such, so I have kept my promise not to post in that
thread any more. :) ]

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
        --George Orwell