FYI

Acronym brands rule, OK

People love acronym brands. And rightly so. They can be so useful in life. Easier to say than those nasty, long full names; who wants to drive a Bayerische Motoren Werke AG? Acronyms are also useful at making local-looking brands, ambiguously global; reassuring investors as they put their savings into the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation bank. And they’re useful for covering things up that you’d rather people didn’t focus on; like the unpopular F-word in KFC.

Probably the corporation under most pressure right now is another acronymed identity brand, BP. It works well; ‘BP’ is easy, even nice, to say. ‘BP’ helps people unthink that definitive yet too specific word, ‘petroleum’. And, as international mergers have continued through its life, the acronym has helped dissolve the ‘British’ heritage of the B. It was helped along the way by a not often seen imaginative attempt of naming alchemy, to market the B into ‘Beyond’.

At the time of writing, BP have so far had 26,000 ideas submitted on the best way to cap the 3,000ft deep hole in the Gulf of Mexico. To make that 26,001, sincerely, we’d suggest applying the principles of their brand identity to solving the problem: be internationally open, be unrestrained and be imaginative.

300million © 2010