雅虎更名“Altaba”有感
The good news: Yahoo clearly has not spent a cent devising “Altaba”, the new name for the investment company that will be left after the operating business is sold to Verizon. The bankers’ working title of “RemainCo” is hardly less exciting.
在將主營業務出售給Verizon公司後，雅虎(Yahoo)剩下的投資公司將更名爲“Altaba”。好消息是：雅虎在設計Altaba的公司名時顯然沒花一分錢。該公司之前的暫定名稱“RemainCo”令人興奮的程度一點也不遜色。Further good news: the people who came up with what seems to be a combination of “alternative” and “Alibaba” (Yahoo’s stake in which is its most valuable asset) did not decide to call the new company “Alibernative”.
更大的好消息是：想出這個貌似是“alternative”（替代物）與“Alibaba”（雅虎持有的阿里巴巴股份是其最有價值的資產）結合體的名稱的人，沒有決定給新公司取名爲“Alibernative”。The bad news: one underwhelming naming ceremony does not signal an end to wilder rebrandings.
壞消息是：一場平淡無奇的命名儀式並不意味着更瘋狂的重命名的結束。
Fuelled by the never-ending cycle of mergers and demergers, inventing new names is an annuity business for brand gurus and a dependable source of nonsensical justifications from the marketing department.
在企業合併、分拆的無休止循環的推動下，發明新名稱成了品牌大師們的一項賺取年金的業務，而企業營銷部門對於新名稱如何高妙會給出層出不窮的荒謬解釋。
I thought this sector had reached a low point in 2014, when PwC rebranded Booz & Company, the consultancy it had bought, as Strategy&. But the past year has seen the birth of Conduent, which sounds more like an intimate skin balm than the business process services group that was part of Xerox. Arconic, which makes multi-material products for aerospace groups and carmakers and emerged from Alcoa, could be an old-fashioned cocktail mixer. In fact, according to the group, the A stands for Alcoa, the “arc” for the “arc of progress”, and the “conic” alludes to the iconic products the company produces.
我以爲這一行業在2014年進入了低潮期，當時，普華永道(PwC)將其收購的諮詢公司博斯(Booz & Company)更名爲Strategy&。但過去一年還誕生了一家名爲Conduent的公司，聽起來更像一款私密的護膚膏，而非施樂(Xerox)旗下的業務流程服務集團。Arconic是一家分拆自美國鋁業(Alcoa)併爲航空航天集團和汽車製造商提供多材料產品的公司，其名稱聽起來更像一種老式雞尾酒混合器。實際上，按該集團的說法，A代表美國鋁業，“arc”代表“進步弧線”，而“conic”暗指該公司生產的標誌性產品。Whatever. History suggests that if a company is successful, people do get used to its new handle, however outlandish it seems at first (think of Accenture or Diageo, at first ribbed for their portmanteau brands).
隨便怎麼說。歷史經驗表明，只要企業取得成功，人們就會習慣於它的新名稱，無論這個名字起初聽起來多麼古怪——想一想當初因使用合成詞作爲品牌名稱而遭調侃的Accenture（埃森哲）或Diageo（帝亞吉歐）。The people I usually pity in rebranding exercises are the front-line employees. They suffer the indignity of having to explain themselves — and their new name — long after the marketing department has packed away the jargon and the branded freebies. For instance, I can only imagine the pain of staff at “Everything Everywhere” before that 2010 telecoms joint venture was renamed EE.
在公司品牌重塑的過程中，我通常比較同情的是一線員工。在營銷部門將宣傳行話和印着品牌名稱的免費贈品收起來很久以後，他們還不得不費力向別人解釋自己及公司的新名稱。例如，我可以想象合資電信公司Everything Everywhere的員工在2010年公司更名爲EE後的痛苦。Yahoo looked an odd brand at first — though co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo’s original name “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was never going to last. Still, the brand was enough to energise its early hires. According to Karen Angel’s book Inside Yahoo!, published in 2002, the group’s first head of marketing even replanted her garden to bloom in Yahoo’s purple and yellow colours.
雅虎起初聽起來也有些怪異——雖然公司創始人楊致遠(Jerry Yang)和戴維?費羅(David Filo)最初選擇的公司名“Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web”（傑瑞的萬維網指南）註定不會長久。不過，這一品牌足以激勵公司早期的員工。據凱倫?安吉爾(Karen Angel) 2002年出版的《雅虎內幕》(Inside Yahoo!)一書描述，該集團首任營銷主管甚至在自家花園中改種了象徵雅虎紫色和黃色的花。Those flowers have long since wilted. Now, my sympathies are with the staff who will continue to work at the operating businesses, under the unchanged Yahoo banner, rather than the few who will run Altaba. As the once-mighty internet group’s reputation suffers slow death by a billion data breaches, a rebrand, however dull or wacky, would probably come as a merciful relief to Yahoo’s job-seeking employees.
那些花早已凋零。現在，我開始同情那些頂着雅虎舊名繼續從事主營業務的員工，而不是少數將運營Altaba的員工。隨着這家曾盛極一時的互聯網集團因10億用戶數據外泄而聲譽漸毀，新名稱——不管多麼乏味或古怪——對於雅虎忙着找新工作的員工來說或許是仁慈的解脫。
