Last night, I had the opportunity to hear a marketing presentation from an IBM Vice President. He talked a lot about the future of marketing and Web 2.0-compatible ideas like “swarm marketing.” There were so many important takeaways that I could have the foundations for writing an awesome book about the future of marketing and product management. Unfortunately, my mind kept coming back to an example he used about the re-branding efforts of Blackwater, the para-military security training and consulting company that caught a lot of heat a few years ago in Iraq. Recently, they announced that they were going to change their name to Xe (pronounced Zee). What the hell does that mean?
I don’t think a namechange is the best route to go, especially one that is quite enigmatic. At some point during the presentation, I wrote in my notebook the following (picture a grandmotherly type holding a steaming apple pie in front of you on a tray): ”Grandma was going to bake an apple pie, until the terrorists came. But Blackwater stopped them.” I had to try really hard to hold back the laughter, since it was so cheesy, but I bet it would work. Take the message to the people in a public relations campaign that relates Blackwater to the warm, happy parts of what it means to be in America, a war against evil forces, duty, honor, and all those things that have nothing to do with Blackwater’s core mission of killing people. I mean, it worked for Bush (at least for a while).
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BSOD — I agree with you that Xe is a terrible name. In my real life, I do a lot of corporate and product naming. “Xe” fails on multiple grounds: 1) it is phonologically weak, because the average person won’t know how to pronounce it and, the average person hearing it won’t know how to spell it; 2) it is not evocative — the best names are always evocative, whereas “Xe” evokes absolutely nothing.
However, I disagree with your position that Blackwater does not need a name change. Your PR idea is actually quite an excellent one, but it won’t work. The reason is that mollycoddled, Milquetoasted politicians and executives do not want any searchable association or correlation with the name “Blackwater.” It can and will be used against them, even if such use is grossly unfair. It is the reality. In other words, you’ve got to look at the praxis of the marketplace, even if you don’t like the actors therein or the rules. If the company is renamed as XYZ, then there will be few associations between Sen. Greatman and Blackwater and many between Greatman and XYZ and few will make the transitive link. Therefore, in order to do business in the reality of the political environment, Blackwater needs a new name to provide its customers, constituents and supporters will political cover. “Blackwater” is itself a fine, memorable, even evocative name. It’s a shame it has to go the way of AirTran (a terrible name) and AYDS (an OK name until AIDS came along), but so it must. “Xe,” however, is not that name.