Overstock.com recently gave up on its effort to fully change the company to O.co . When will brands learn that anything but a “.com” address of snow is fraught with disaster? People have said they bailed on their “rebranding.” They didn’t bail out on “branding” They bailed out on a name change.

What these brand managers who make these decisions are missing is an understanding of what branding actually is. It is fundamentally disturbing to me that so many “brand managers” do not understand what they are actually managing.

Branding is NOT a name. I repeat, branding is NOT a name. Branding is the emotional and physical components of our  system which get triggered during name recognition. The name itself DOES NOT MATTER. A company name becomes disambiguated if there is a brand, and not if there is not. Simple.

A company name becomes disambiguated if there is a brand, and not if there is not.

You know you have a “brand” when it elevates out of the name to our limbic systems and evokes sensations in the body interpreted as emotions. It is a physiological reaction, not a thought process.

Overstock got worried about being only “Overstocked” items. RadioShack tried to ditch its Radio heritage. Burger King wants to move beyond burgers… Regardless, what these types of brands forget is that people often do not even associate the brand with the part of the name. Remember Boston Chicken? They thought that to move beyond Chicken they had to change their name… oops. Why don’t these moronic brand managers learn? How about Netflix? Ouch… what was that company they were going to launch for DVDs?

All I usually have to explain to people when I talk about branding is “Mountain Dew.” When I hear the name I think X Games, extreme sports, youth etc… Seriously it is named Mountain fraking Dew!!! You could not choose a more Heidi-frolicking-in-the-hills name. But people do not associate that name with what the name actually is. They manage their brand. They do not call it MoDew (although I guarantee that has been tossed around.) They understand that the actual words in their name do not matter anymore… they have become disambiguated from their original meanings.

Overstock failed where so many of these companies fail. They think their name is their brand. And CMO’s seeking to “make their mark” trump up consumer research that shows how the brand is limited by their name.

I ran marketing at Ask.com for 3 years as we switched from AskJeeves. It was a question and answer search engines as AskJeeves, and became just a Search engine as Ask.com (after much work and positioning work.) It is named bloody ASK. Do you know what fights I had to sit through when they wanted to completely change over to a brand new name? You do not even want to know the options… Yes, it still has problems there, and the new CEO who came in, in his infinite moronic wisdom decided to try to switch back after I left. He lasted 11 months as CEO as he watched the performance gains we achieved through marketing and a better product get wiped out. It is now just an arbitration engine living off the back of Google. Unfortunately a program I launched while there… oops.

The book Positioning is right. You have to EARN your nickname in branding. FedEx, HoJo’s etc… If you try and choose your own it fails just as miserably as when you tried to choose your own nickname in grade-school. No one is going to call you Slash, or Killer.. unless you are going to grade school in prison.

You have to EARN your nickname in branding.

Heck I didn’t even choose Sean X. A brand is NOT what your company thinks it is, it is what your consumers think it is. Hold any other view at your peril.

ranty rant signing off…