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What's in an Acronym?
Yesterday, I received an announcement from Henry Fogel, the President of the American Symphony Orchestra League, announcing that the League will be changing its name to the League of American Orchestras. Assuming that the League’s membership ratifies the change of its name at its Nashville conference next week, the organization will finally leave behind what has to be one of the worst acronym-names imaginable: ASOL.
Gentility and good manners kept most people from pronouncing ASOL phonetically. Instead, insiders and members called it “the league� or spelled the name out: A-S-O-L.
Being in the branding business, I have often pondered why people feel compelled to transform names into acronyms. Is it simply laziness? Are a few extra syllables just too much trouble? Does the use of an acronym make the user feel like a smarter “insider?� Are people trying to signal “I know what this means and you don’t. I’m hip and you’re not?�
Nothing sets one alphabet soup name apart from another. As a name, ASOL endows no more meaning or insight than IBM, ICM, APAP, AEG, GMC or the myriad other acronym-names that are comprised simply of letters. Acronyms are nothing more than the skeletal remains of former names. Unless you’re a conjurer or forensic anthropologist, that perpetually grinning skull won’t summon the face that once was there.
An acronym says nothing but “generic.� Aside from whatever scanty residue might be left in the letter forms, there’s no personality. No juice. Acronyms are about as memorable as the last Excel spreadsheet you looked over.
What an acronym says to me is: “We couldn’t think of anything better.� These days, especially in the nonprofit sector, there are an abundance of names that are nothing more than generic keywords strung together. That’s because so-called well-intentioned, “practical people� believe that a name should describe what an organization does – as if that were the most important task a name should accomplish.
If these people had named Victoria’s Secret, the company would have been called The Amalgamated Ladies Undergarment Retailer. Maybe people adopt acronyms because they are tired of and bored by long, unimaginative, generic-sounding names without any juice.
What is perhaps more astonishing is that otherwise sensible marketing professionals are willing to run a very competitive brand race starting fifty yards or more behind their competitors. It takes a gigantic budget to build equities in an acronym. Just making an acronym memorable takes a very fat wallet. What’s worse, no matter how much money is spent on an acronym, it will never have the durability or memorability of a word.
Words are magical. They are talismans with meanings and stories embedded in them ever since the Druids started gazing upward at mighty English oaks. IBM is a great company, but as a name it can’t compete with Apple. The word “apple� is associated with the Biblical fall from grace-specifically the Tree of Knowledge, it is associated with sweetness, passion, seduction, juice, etc. It is a little word with big meaning.
Words make up the meta-narratives that drive the workings and ferment of culture. The most powerful brands tap into cultural meta-narratives that flow, like acquafers of meaning, under the fundaments of tangibility.
An acronym is, for all intents and purposes, an empty container.
Great brand names have rich and layered meanings. They are energetic and convey warmth and humanity. They’re simple, unique, durable, and memorable. They have big shoulders. Ask yourself, if you had a choice would you rather have your name explain what you do or prompt people to remember who you are? If a name isn’t memorable, it really doesn’t matter if it’s practical.
Anybody who has done naming, when they are confronted with the suggestion of an acronym over the course of a naming process, inevitably hears the question, “If acronyms are so bad, then why does IBM or GE use one?� The answer’s pretty simple: they’re stuck with it.
If you’re asking yourself why IBM hasn’t abandoned its acronym, it’s because they have invested so much money in that acronym that abandoning it now would mean abandoning that investment and all the equities associated with the brand. I don’t expect IBM to abandon its acronym any time soon, but I’m convinced that if the company had a choice, it would choose a name with some meaning.
I’m pleased for the League. Their work on brand is a big step forward. However, I’m worried that their membership might take what is still very much a name strung together with generic keywords, and transform League of American Orchestras into “LAO.� If the League wants to trade acronyms, it’s a good trade, but I think they could do better. On the positive side, they are continuing to leverage the equities embedded in the word “league.�
It is ironic that those of us who traffic in cultural products will ever countenance acronym-brands. We, better than any other sector, ought to understand how meaning freights words and how cultural threads color the fabric of identity.
In his revelations to the poet John Neihardt, the great Oglala Lakota medicine man, Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa), declared that “True wisdom is knowing the real name of things.� It sounds simple, but naming well is a tall order. Maybe it takes a shaman to reveal names, there are so many mediocre ones.
Posted on June 15, 2007 11:34 AM | Permalink
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Comments
I just want to point out that the acronym for Amalgamated Ladies Undergarment Retailer is ALUR.
Granted the type of people you suggest would come up with a name like that would probably be pretty pleased with their cleverness in generating a name with an acronym that expressed what they were selling.
Well, Joe, you get the award for the person most paying attention to acronyms! I wondered when I wrote this if anyone would get the joke here. Nobody gets much past you!
Thanks for your encouragement about our (hopefully) impending name change! We agree that the potential new name builds on the equity of the word "League"--and see the change more as a refreshing of who we are, as opposed to a radical, new direction. In other words, just like the orchestras we serve, it embraces our tradition while sensibly moving forward.
Further, through our branding, our intention is to refer to ourselves as the League, and not reduce ourselves to LAO (though I suppose it is inevitable that some folks will).
Ironically, though (and we did not plan this), in Chinese, "Lao" means "old, wise and respected. A bonus!
Thanks for giving this argument some oomph! I now have some ammunition beyond my standard "acronyms are stupid."
Although I will admit that after rebelling against this process for a new program I named...I found myself using an acronym in email correspondence to save typing time.