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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

Ask any British person what 'The Met' is and they'll say 'London police' (or similar).

I doubt an American museum could ever change that, embracing something so generic is limiting for identity & brand awareness IMO.

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London has the Underground. Something that sounds generic actually is well known to the locals and is part of the culture, the identity, the attraction of a place. Same story here.

Everyone calls it the tube there but still.

As a non-local, when I hear "tube" I think toothpaste, swimming and repairing tire punctures. Mass transit may not even be in my top 5 - and that's fine.

Human language ambiguity and locals have their shibboleths - we don't have to optimize for tourists.

Swimming?

Another shibboleth: donut-shaped inflatable pool floaties are called "inner tubes" 'round here.

Oh! To be honest I'm not actually sure what we call those ('pool inflatables' is all I can think of, somewhat generic) but I don't think it's tubes/inner tubes.

The equivalent (similarly generic) name is 'the tube' as sibling commenter points out, which Transport for London doesn't use as far as I'm aware, but even if they did, they don't have the same goals as far as I'm aware.

One might think it'd be similarly aiming to capture the hearts and minds of tourists, but TfL's been so aggressively pro-Oyster, then/now contactless, that afaict it's always been just about as hard as possible for tourists while still being convenient for Londoners. It makes some sort of sense, it's subsidised by the London taxpayer after all - so it is 'by Londoners for Londoners' - but I think surely it would be possible simultaneously to make it easier for and capture more money from tourists. I digress - point was I think to be that TfL doesn't really care about brand, especially not globally. Maybe I'm wrong to assume that 'the met' does.

Ask anyone outside of Britain what "The Met" is and you'll hear about the museum.

I don't think one very small country should be the primary blocker to their branding decisions.

Curious as to what your definition of very small is. The UK is above median land area for a country, #21 for population, #6 for gdp, it's principal island is the 9th largest.

I mean, yes, the UK is not the same scale as the USA, China, India etc, but I'd put to you that it is not so very small

England has about 2% of the area of the US, so from a US perspective, it's quite small.

Double the population of Canada though.

I agree we're small, much smaller than the USA by any metric, but surely we're talking about population rather than land mass here.

That's true, population matters more. As does wealth and cultural influence, both of which are hugely outsized in England's case.

I imagine you'd hear more about the Opera. But then I am British.

American here. My first thought is the opera. And I've traveled to NYC just to visit the museum.

Spent most of my life in NYC, and if you say "The Met" in to someone in the city 99/100 people will assume you mean the museum.

Even in Britain, the context will clear it up straight away. Humans are, theoretically at least, very good at dealing with ambiguity. I'm hard pressed to think of a conversation where context clues wouldn't either make it abundantly clear, or prompt further questions about, which "Met" one is talking about, between a world famous art gallery and the police head quarters probably more famously known by another name.

Would this conversation ever happen?

I'm going on holiday to New York City. I'm going to the Met to check out their impressionist paintings.

Oh, they turned Scotland Yard into an art gallery now?

The met put out a press release

I'm applying for a job at/in (the only tiny difference) the met

Nevermind all the sentences you could come up with where the context is revealed only later, so yes you immediately realise you had it wrong, but you had it wrong.

It's not really about 'people will be confused' anyway, I just mean it's bad brand awareness, it weakens the identity.

The only example I can think of with a strong brand for a generic name is Apple.

Shouldn't it be Canada Yard or something?

I'm outside of Britain and I've never heard of the museum. never.

I didn't mean it like 'think of the British', I meant 'think of yourself' - you want a strong brand identity right, that's the whole point of this kind of exercise I assume, and you have a much better shot at that with something unique/specific/weird.

Nobody outside of the UK is thinking about police foremost when they here 'met', (unless there's similarly named constabularies elsewhere perhaps, wouldn't surprise me if someone piped up from HK/India/Australia to say their city's police is also 'the met' for example) but that doesn't matter to that met.

Say there's some artist called so-and-so Park, you'd be ill-advised to start a gallery called 'The Park', it's not at all unique, it's poorly googleable, it's unlikely to ever be the first thing that comes to mind when someone hears the name.

Another example: I think OnePlus (or is it OnePlusOne? I honestly don't even know) - the phone company - is held back by its poor choice of name. I'm not denying its success, I just think it's despite the name, that it could be a lot bigger, have a much stronger brand.

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