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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid people (regular people - not the HN following sort of people) are going to start getting confused between all the Circles and Squares and Stripes and so on.

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In the infancy of the following brands, would you be able to derive the function of the company from its name?:

Barnes and Noble

Ben and Jerry's

Black and Decker

Briggs and Stratton

Look, branding has trends. This is nothing new and has not negatively affected any of these brands.

McDonalds. KFC.

:) Just gotta say it - KFC is a bad example here.

It stands for Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is pretty much exactly their product.

Not any more! They abandoned that name for several reasons - the state of Kentucky enforced their name as a trademark, plus 'Fried' became a bad word. So now they're just 'KFC'

Sure, but they're KFC because everybody knows what the letters stand for. Circle, I can't figure out what they're trying to sell me.

So FWIW, the thing about the state of Kentucky isn't true. It's listed in 'The Repository of Lost Legends' on Snopes, which is their section of made up stuff.

I'm only mentioning this as I didn't realise for a very long time that the T.R.O.L.L. (now it should make sense) was all made up and I had a tendency to quote that section a lot.

I hope you haven't spent as many years believing that section as I did :)

That's a better description than the Art Director at one Digital Agency who explained that the reason for the name change to KFC was because "they weren't allowed to call it 'chicken' anymore."

Circle so far elucidates nothing of a product on this, it's shop front. Barnes & Nobel had a window full of books.

Meh. The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

Great! Finally companies will have an incentive to give themselves sensible names.

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