Al Qaeda: The Rebrand

Osama bin Laden was a leader with too much time on his hands.

Idling away the years in his compound, he fretted in his final writings that al-Qaeda was suffering from a branding problem.

In an undated letter discovered among bin Laden’s recent writings the al-Qaeda CEO lamented that his organization was losing its focus and the West was winning the public relations war. All his old trusty lieutenants were dead and he barely knew their replacements.

It was time for a rebrand.

As bin Laden saw it, the problem was the group’s full name, al-Qaeda al-Jihad, which means ‘The Base of Holy War’. It had become shortened to al-Qaeda, ‘The Base’, which does not quite get the point across.  By lopping off the ‘Holy War’ part of the name, bin Laden wrote, it allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.”

Maybe it was time for al-Qaeda to bring back its full original name. Or maybe change it to something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group. Or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.

Now, as any branding consultant could have told him, names do not work like that. al-Qaeda al-Jihad and those other names are just too long, and long names get shortened. It’s the Fedex, Bevmo and MetLife syndrome – you can’t do too much about it once it’s out there except go with the flow, or find a shorter alternative.

The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman appears to have uncovered some additional documents — or brainstorming notes from an international marketing firm — that show where the terrorist organization may had been moving.

To: Osama Bin Laden
From: Ron Johnson, Vice President, International Marketing

After receiving the keychain flash drive and reviewing your memo, I wanted to get back to you with some of my initial thoughts regarding this matter. And let me be honest from the outset. While I am sensitive to your concern that Al Qaeda has exhausted its usefulness as a brand, I am not entirely convinced that either of the two suggestions you proposed—Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida—is the solution to your problem. We have spent time with some of our best people and we have come up with a few ideas. Here are the four that received the most traction in-house.

1. aQ: The Al Qaeda name may not be doing everything you want, but its international name recognition is huge. It tests out higher than almost any other brand, corporate or personal; it’s in the same neighborhood as Coca-Cola, Nike, and Shaq. So how about a simple streamline? aQ would retain the connection with Al Qaeda while introducing a sense of high design and elegance. And I can already see the campaign: “Q: aQ? A: aQ!”

2. Terrora: Extensive market research on pills and cars has shown decisively that the soft vowel ending greatly increases trust. I assume that’s why you selected Al Qaeda in the first place. So let’s stick with that but emphasize to a much greater extent what you do—which is, let’s be frank, terrorism. Like it or not, English is still the world’s principal language where corporate identities are concerned.

3. Boomtown: We’re really high on this one, which conveys a sense of excitement and possibility while still incorporating your commitment to explosives. A few people in the office have suggested that it sounds too American, and I encourage you to be frank with me on this point. The more serious issue here is that it skews extremely young—the closest comp we could find in terms of positive reaction was Chuck E. Cheese—but isn’t youth appeal an important part of what you want? Build toward the future, we always say, not away from the past.

4. Qaravan: Earlier I mentioned that the pharmaceutical and automotive industries have done great things with vowels at the ends of words. That’s true. But they have also made magic with simple, strong names. You’re familiar with the Dodge Caravan, I assume? It’s one of America’s most potent brands: in or near the top ten of vehicle nameplates worldwide. Well, one of the guys here, Paul, was doing some research and he discovered the Caravan Raids in the seventh century, which were one of the first times that Muhammad gave his followers permission to fight back against the Meccans. Given that your main concern with Al Qaeda is that it has lost the connection to religious combat, this seemed like kismet, and just like that we came up with Qaravan: strong, memorable, familiar, and also nostalgic. I should stress the last of these. Earlier I mentioned that we like to try to build toward the future, but there are also cases where it makes sense not to build away from the past but to build upon it. Creating a strong bond with what came before is vital in these kinds of things. As Don Draper said of nostalgia, “It’s delicate but potent.” (You may not know who that is, and that’s O.K.—I think the insight stands on its own.)

At any rate, those are the early contenders. We are open to a dialogue. Feel free to respond on the enclosed flash drive and have your answer sent anonymously from an Internet café.

Related articles

• Al-Qaeda has an image problem, needs a new name, Bin Laden wrote in letter (theglobeandmail.com)

The Blackberry brand runs out of juice

Quote of the week: “BlackBerry has a strong international brand and a loyal customer base.”

Whenever you hear a CEO invoke the power of a brand to allay fears about a company’s future, you know it’s time to run for the exits.

In this case it was Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of Blackberry maker Research In Motion (RIM), drastically reducing the company’s earnings outlook last week and implicitly telling investors the company has run out of ideas.

No amount of brand strength can save a technology company in trouble. A strong brand is halo created by the power and continuing ‘relevance’ of products that stay ahead of the game and keep customers loyal. Once that relevance goes, loyalty goes with it. The BlackBerry, the device that revolutionized the way workers communicate, has run its course from a hot gadget with pent-up demand to a discounted product that has been eclipsed by the next new thing.

As it fumbles to launch new models and tardily reacts to the innovations of Apple’s iPhone and devices powered by Google’s Android software, demand for the Blackberry has dropped like a stone. RIM has seen its share of the North American smartphone market shrink to 17% from 50% in 2009.

Critics say time is running out for RIM, as for Finland’s Nokia, another company that fell from its perch as a cellphone leader at warp speed. The speed of Nokia’s decline is breathtaking.

What all brands need

In 2007 Nokia was at the peak of its power. It made four in every 10 mobile phones sold worldwide and demand was exploding. BusinessWeek lauded the Nokia brand as the 5th ‘best’ in the world, one place behind GE. In June that year Apple released the iPhone and the game abruptly changed.

Nokia’s share price has fallen by two-thirds since then as it tried, unsuccessfully, to produce an iPhone killer. In the meantime, low-cost Chinese manufacturers, using Google’s Android software, have eaten into Nokia’s sales of basic handsets in emerging markets and are moving up the value chain quickly, commoditizing the entire industry in the process.

To survive, every technology company needs a healthy dose of paranoia, as prescribed by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. In his landmark book “Only the paranoid survive” Grove refers not only to the idea that everyone else may well be out to get you, but that the best way to be prepared for changes in the market is to anticipate those changes.

The changes to be alert to are called strategic inflection points – points in time when a new technology, or the innovative application of an existing technology (like touch screen), disrupts the market.

Successful companies in decline rarely recover to their previous greatness because they become complacent and reactive, like Nokia, Motorola and RIM.

As one analyst put it in reference to Blackberry: “A soufflé doesn’t rise twice.”

The Blackberry name: Research in Motion struck gold when it developed a portable wireless device that allows users to get and send e-mail, phone and browse the Internet. Why Blackberry? David Placek, president of Lexicon Branding, says he steered away from names that were directly linked to the word “e-mail,” since consumer research shows that word can increase clients’ blood pressure. Instead, his team looked for something “more natural, more entertaining and more joyful that might decrease blood pressure.” Someone (who?) pointed out that the tiny buttons on the device keyboard looked like a collection of seeds, Lexicon began exploring different fruity names: strawberry, melon and an assortment of vegetables were all bandied about, with no success. The company finally settled on blackberry because the word is pleasing to most ears and the device, at the time, was black.

BlackBerry sticks better than something like ProMail or MegaMail. If you want to get attention, you don’t describe something, you create a new concept.

Related articles

• How the iPhone and Android sandbagged the BlackBerry (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• RIM: What Did You Know and When Did You Know It? (mondaynote.com)
• BlackBerry Still Not Ripe for Investors (online.wsj.com)
• RIM’s BlackBerry Can Rise Again (fool.com)

The naming of the quark

Happy Bloomsday!

Each year on this day, June 16, literary geeks worldwide honor the life and work of Irish writer James Joyce.

Bloomsday is a commemoration of events in his novel Ulysses, all of which took place on the same day in Dublin in 1904. Joyce chose the date because his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle happened on that day. Bloomsday is named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.

James Joyce: Blooming

In celebration, artist and writer Jonathon Keats shared his essay on NPR on the naming of the quark — a name inspired, in part, by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I share part of it here for your edification.

“The quark first came into the world in 1964 as a mathematical entity rather than a physical one. The physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently speculated that protons and neutrons might be construed as different combinations of a more fundamental form of matter coming in three varieties.

Zweig called them aces. Gell-Mann preferred the sound of kwork or quork, which to his ear sounded like the noise made by a duck.

Exactly what theoretical physics had to do with ducks he never explained, but the weird sound he’d chosen was almost Joycian: In one of his “occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake” (as he relates in his memoirs), he happened upon the nonsense poem “Three quarks for Muster Mark”. Noting the coincidence that the number of quarks in Joyce’s book matched the number in his own theory, he adopted that spelling, lending his particles a literary pedigree with which aces couldn’t compete (even when it was later determined that quarks – Gell-Mann’s, not Muster Mark’s ­– came in more than three varieties).”

So now you know.

The essay is from Keats’  book, Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology.

Branding Whistler’s Mother

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the right words matter in titles of pictures.

In 1872, James McNeill Whistler submitted a recent work to the Royal Academy of Art in London for its 104th exhibition. He titled it “Arrangement in Grey and Black”.

The Academy came close to rejecting it. In its lofty view the British public would be uneasy with a portrait described solely as an “arrangement” of colors. So Whistler appended the explanatory words “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” to the title, just for the exhibition.

The name stuck. The painting became popularly known as “Whistler’s Mother,” his most famous work.

Giving a name to a work of art is a relatively recent phenomenon, according to the Wall Street Journal, and it is even more recent that artists provide the title.

Nude with a black cat, aka Olympia.

Edouard Manet’s most famous work, “Olympia”,  outraged French society in when it appeared in 1863. Manet  had no name for it at the time. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire referred to it matter-of-factly as “Nude With a Black Cat.”

It was Manet’s friend Zacharie Astruc, a critic and fellow painter, who named the painting “Olympia,” – a common “professional” name taken by prostitutes at the time. Manet used the name when he submitted the work to the 1865 salon.

More recently, Jack Levine credited his wife with providing the title for his painting “Gangster Funeral,” which now resides in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

What is at work here is a form of branding in which a short, memorable name captures popular imagination and becomes synonymous with the work itself: a great painting ceases to be a picture and becomes a brand.

Leonardo da Vinci never referred to “La Gioconda” or, as it is better known in the English-speaking world, the “Mona Lisa,” but by what other name could the painting of the lady with the enigmatic smile be possibly known? It’s a fair bet that the name “Mona Lisa” is more widely recognized than the picture itself.

So how come the current record price of US$140 million is for a work simply titled No. 5, 1948 ? The artist is Jackson Pollock. I would posit that Jackson Pollock is the brand – a Jackson Pollock is a Jackson Pollock. No 5, 1948 just happens to be the last work of his to come on the market.

See also:

The Scream, and the new phenomenon of art brands

PODS, a name that contains a great idea

It was a smart idea with a clever name.

PODS are portable storage containers. They are delivered to your door and collected for storage. While there are many such businesses out there the name PODS just says it all: it’s a succinct, apt, friendly and easy-to-remember brand in what is a highly undifferentiated and fragmented industry. They even own domain name – pods.com. Perfect.

Look more closely and you will see it says Portable On Demand Storage underneath the word PODS. It started me thinking – is PODS an extremely serendipitous acronym of Portable On Demand Storage, or is that a post-rationalized reverse acronym of PODS – a backronym?

To create a backronym, you take a word that isn’t an acronym and create a fictitious expansion for it.

Microsoft’s Bing, some quip, is an acronym for “Because It’s Not Google”. Some car owners insist that Ford stands for “Fix Or Repair Daily”. The Apple Lisa, predecessor to the Apple Macintosh, was said to refer to “Local Integrated Software Architecture”. It was named after Steve Jobs’ daughter, Lisa, who was born 1978. Likewise, the Amber Alert program is said to mean “America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response” although it was actually named after a missing child, Amber Hagerman.

PODS has logically evolved its business from storage to include moving, so the neat symmetry between PODS and Portable On Demand Storage has been stretched to include Portable On Demand Moving. A new tagline has appeared in an attempt to integrate the two thoughts:

Now that’s a shame.