Hacker News Reader

Comment by arnvald | Hacker News Reader

Do these rebrands even work? I see a couple of examples in other comments, like Comcast -> Xfinity, Philip Morris -> Altria, but this is the first time I see the name Altria. Even earlier this month when I was reading an article about tobacco, it used the name Philip Morris.

Google's rebranding to Alphabet also feels semi-successful. Technically Fitbit is a Google's sister company under the Alphabet umbrella, but all the news I've seen reported it as "Google acquires Fitbit". I only see the Alphabet name when I read about earnings reports and their stock value, and even then it's always introduced as "Alphabet, the Google parent company"

View on HN

The notorious military contractor Blackwater rebranded to 'Xe Services' in 2009. They were coming off a lot of heat 2007 incident where their employees killed a number of Iraqi citizens. I remember hearing that the name change was meant to obfuscate the company as searching for Xe didn't yield many results in search or documents. And Blackwater sounds dangerous. Newspapers continued to use "the company formerly known as Blackwater". Even wikipedia has it under Blackwater.

In 2011, they went a step further and changed their name again to 'Academi', which is pretty funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(company)

Anecdotally, a notorious real estate developer named Blackstone where I lived got into a lot of heat, and afterwards rebranded to a local-language version of "DearCity". Now everyone seems to have forgotten their ruthless practices. To be fair, they went from a hilarious villain-like name to an almost cartoonishly cute one. But jokes on the public, because it works. They're largely off the hook in the publics eye now

It always feels like a shark-jump when somebody's marketing department needs a bonus and has nothing better to do than "rebrand".

It's also insulting your customers when communicating that (a) there's more value after a rebrand when there's obviously none; and (b) customer is dumb or shallow enough to be swayed by messaging and not the product.

In Google's case the intention wasn't to use Alphabet as a brand. They don't even own the domain name, Twitter handle etc. for it. They didn't change their stock ticker name either. Google is way too successful and positive a brand to give it up.

Alphabet is a holding company, nothing more.

So ByteDance and Snap Inc didn't work?

Not sure about ByteDance, what did they rebrand from?

Snap - this one worked, but I think partially because it's a name drop, rather than a full rebranding. I think it has higher chance to be successful (like "Apple Computers" -> "Apple" or "GrabTaxi" -> "Grab"), because it expands on the current brand instead of trying to be something different. I think if Snapchat rebranded to "Spectacle" or "CamCom" or something different, we'd still be reading "previously known as Snapchat" for years to come

Phillip Morris international is a separate company from altria

citibank to targo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com