Giving yourself a hip nickname and hoping it catches on strikes me as a desperate act. What would you think if I went around calling myself Flash or El Guapo? When people started calling Ben Affleck BenLo and Bennifer, it was cute. If he had started calling himself BenLo, that would have been sort of sad.
These things are supposed happen organically. Only after "FedEx" had become a common verb did Federal Express change its name. Sure, KFC was eager to drop "fried" from its name, but everyone called it that by the time they changed their logo. Target has enough dignity not to play along with the French pronunciation (Tar-zhay) despite its popular usage.
So I reject Southern Comfort's attempt to re-brand itself as SoCo. I suppose they think drunks are struggling with the two extra syllables and they are losing market share to Jim Beam. Or maybe they're trying to make inroads in Yankee states. Did they even stop to check what soco means in Portuguese? (I did. It means punch as in blow, jab).
Their new ad must have aired six times during last week's SNL re-run. Ah, there's another one. We all call it SNL, but NBC generally uses the full name. Can you imagine? "L, from New York, it's SN!"
Even more hokey, Washington Mutual Bank now wants us to call it WaMu. Its new headquarters in Seattle is called the WaMu Center. As hip and now as WaMu might sound (see San Francisco's SoMa and New York City's SoHo), I'm not moving my accounts there.
I'll stick with BofA. And that's not "Bee of Aye" like most people call Bank of America. I pronounce it "BOE-FA." And if that catches on, I won't even mind if the bank starts using it too.
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2 comments:
Jim Beam? Don't you mean JiBe?
FYI... Customers were calling Washington Mutual by WaMu long before they decided to change their name... so in fact, it was the same thing that FedEx did, and you approved of that.
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