David Vest
Losing The Corporate Name Game
Is there anything worse than corporate naming? (Yeah,
I know -- corporate behavior, but that's another story.)
The Invesco mutual funds group paid $120 million for "naming
rights" to a new football stadium in Denver. They would like
everyone to call it Invesco Field at Mile High.
However, according to the Associated Press, the Denver Post and
everyone else is calling it Mile High Stadium, just like the old
stadium that will soon be torn down.
Maybe enough is enough.
As the "naming rights" fees get bigger, the official
names get worse. Some of them, people seem to accept. At some of
them, they balk. Can't you just hear Invesco's executives? "God
damn it, they didn't have these problems at Safeco Field in
Seattle. Why are we being singled out for persecution?"
Possibly because the good people of Denver have already been
forced to pretend to call their baseball team the "Rockies,"
when everyone knows the baseball team in Denver has always been
and will always be the Denver Bears!
See, the Denver Bears were named with baseball fans in mind. The
Colorado Rockies were named with cap sales in mind.
Corporations can't even name themselves. What kind of people
would name a company "Invesco" in the first place?
Surely they weren't trying to make us think of Robert Vesco? (For
all I know, Invesco may be a great company. I never heard of them
until they paid $120 million to alienate the city of Denver and
embarrass themselves in this stadium fiasco.)
It's almost as bad as the name "Enron," now stuck very
expensively atop a field in Houston. A name like Enron would mean
nothing if it didn't have a history. Alas, it does. Formerly
known as Houston Natural Gas, a name that made entirely too much
sense, the company paid a consultant big bucks to come up with a
glitzy new name. The consultant's recommendation: Enteron. Great,
said the execs, here's the check. Then someone thought to look up
the word in a dictionary, just in case.
Sure enough, "enteron" means entrails, guts, innards,
intestines. (You're already thinking logo, aren't you? So did the
pipeline people, to their immediate and commendable horror.)
Quickly, and I do mean quickly, they took out the "t"
and the "e" and got Enron. "Enron" isn't in
the dictionary; it doesn't mean anything. Why did they stay with
the word at all? They had paid a fortune for it and wanted to
salvage something, I guess. So evidently everyone has to call it
Enron Field because some high-priced consultant was too lazy to
look in a dictionary and because the people bright enough to hire
that consultant had to take over the job themselves.
First it was bowl games. Remember when Alabama played in the
Sugar Bowl? Now teams play in the Fulke Greville/Elena Strzlecki
Commemorative Fudge Bowl on Bug Spray Field in Big Write-Off
Memorial Stadium.
And now even North Dakota is trying to buy naming rights -- to
itself.
What's next? Parents selling naming rights to their own children?
Why not start out with "naming licenses" (the right to
buy naming rights) and ease into selling people the right to name
their own sweet selves (we already have to pay to change our
names in court). We could probably save Social Security by having
people buy their numbers, too.
Why do corporations never think of hiring somebody like Buckwheat
Zydeco or Bo Diddley to come up with names? Who named Slim Harpo
or Big Walter the Thunderbird? Luckily we didn't get "Slender
Harpesto" or something worse. Next time, let namers do the
naming!
I don't care what it is, you can pay all you've got for the right
to "name" it.
But we'll reserve the right to call it any damn thing we like.
PLUS
Huh? Is Dubya a
Reincarnation?