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Versicor changes name to Vicuron. Huh? Yup, you read that correctly. Says company president and CEO George F. Horner III:
“The new name, which is effective immediately, reflects Vicuron’s vision to become a hospital-based biopharmaceutical company that provides vital medicine for serious indications.”
And this is how the company described itself back in the halcyon days when it was fondly known as Veriscor:
Versicor is an international biopharmaceutical company focused on discovering, developing, manufacturing and commercializing novel, broad-spectrum antibiotic and antifungal agents with distinct competitive advantages.
What they aren’t saying is that this elective surgery replaced the phonetically negative guts of the old name with a more positive set of entrails:
Versicor was pronounced “Ver-SICK-Or”.
Vicuron is pronounced “Vi-CURE-On”.
Unfortunately, this patient needed more than just a tummy tuck.
According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, mutual funds that underwent cosmetic name changes were rewarded with a huge ROI:
Funds that changed their names attracted 22 percent more new money than funds of similar size, investment style and other features that didn’t undergo a name makeover, the research shows. And that is true even if the name changes are purely cosmetic. …
Funds amending their names reaped an average of $67 million more than similar funds over the course of the 12 months after the name change, with funds hewing to hot trends getting most of the gain, the study found. On average, the funds studied each had assets of $299 million, so the new money amounted to a significant increase. All told, during the seven years from 1994 through 2001, 296 funds raked in $19.9 billion in additional money that could be attributed to name changes.
The researchers found that it made little difference whether funds changed their investment strategies to match their name changes. What did matter was how much funds raised their so-called 12(b)1 fees, which are largely devoted to marketing spending, and how much they levy in one-time sales charges. The more these expenses rise, the more new money the funds making name changes were likely to attract.
Sometimes the name changes were as simple as adding words such as “large,” “growth” or “large growth” to the name.
The United Colors of Aeroflot: The Russian airline Aeroflot is embarking on an image makeover to shed its old Soviet associations in favor of a sprightly new, post-postmodern look, and the make-believe-nonsensical-consultant-spawned language of color is a huge part of the process.
The color scheme of the new Aeroflot was chosen by the British image firm Identica. The new Airbus planes will be mostly silver, with the belly and rear section painted blue, and the two areas separated by an orange stripe:
The three colors were chosen to represent the carrier’s new image and the design of the tail coloring will feature a fluttering Russian tricolor.
“The new colors convey the message that we want to pass on to our passengers,” Tatyana Zotova, Aeroflot’s marketing-department chief, said by telephone Tuesday.
“Blue relates that we are professional and able to provide security for the passenger, while orange shows the passenger we are comfortable and dedicated to customer service. It also sparks images of sunrises, cupolas, golden autumns and poetry,” Zotova said.
It’s official: the orange stripes near the tail section are not intended to spark images of flames.
Would you buy a cookbook from this woman? Sure, why not. At least that’s what Le Gourmet Company (OTC BB: LGRM), fine purveyors of “gourmet cookbooks & kitchen gadgets,” hopes the reaction will be.
The company recently hired the subject of this photo, Estelle Reyna, “to help strengthen its online presence and e-commerce initiatives.” Besides her obvious marketing cred, Ms. Reyna aspires to become “the most downloaded woman on the Internet,” according to her website.
Estelle’s marketing breakthrough for Le Gourmet? Simple: rename the company Estelle Reyna, Inc. Why would a cookbook and kitchenware seller want to name itself after an Internet sexpot? Ms. Reyna’s site provides the answer:
Estelle embodies all that is sensual: from her chocolate brown bedroom eyes, to the femininity of her curvaceous body, to the luscious pout of her lips. Her beauty is classic, addicting, captivating. Some have even been known to faint in her presence. Well, some of the men that got a little too close!
Apparently the company wants its customers, when perusing a new gourmet cookbook or luxury spatula, to envision Ms. Reyna’s curvaceous chocolatude on the serving platter.
Not content with taking over the gourmet cooking industry, another web project of Ms. Reyna’s, searchestelle.com, is poised to knock Google off it’s pedestal at the top of the search engine pile. A search for the term “gourmet cookbooks” turned up two whole search results, though neither happened to be Le Gourmet. She’ll have to fine-tune her algorithms.
The French have a word for it: but soon, America will not. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pushed a culinary name change through the House cafeteria, where French fries and French toast are now called “freedom fries” and “freedom toast.”
If this kind of pressure isn’t enough to get France to play ball, Congress is prepared to turn up the heat and legislate the following changes to the American lexicon:
| Old Name |
New Name |
| excuse my French |
freedom cussing |
| French bread |
freedom bread |
| French curve |
freedom curve |
| French door |
freedom door |
| French Foreign Legion |
fake freedom fighters |
| French kiss |
Lithuanian liplock |
| French Open |
Freedom Open |
| French press |
freedom press |
| French Quarter |
Freedom Quarter |
| French Revolution |
Freedom Revolt |
| French Riviera |
Costa Freedonia |
| French tickler |
bush tickler |
| French window |
freedom window |
While the terms “Spanish rice” and “English muffins” are secure at the moment, other countries are in danger of having their names stripped from the Lexicon of Freedom if they fail to back America’s war plans in the U.N. Security Council. Chilean sea bass, already endangered, will have to be renamed “freedom sea bass;” 
the Mexican hat dance will appear on ballet programs as the “freedom hat dance;” Russian roulette will be listed as a cause of death in police reports as “freedom oulette;” Chinese checkers will fly off toy store shelves once they’ve been renamed “freedom checkers;”
if Guinea doesn’t come through, then guinea pigs will be called “African freedom pigs;” and if Turkey fails to allow America the use of its bases to invade Iraq from the north, then the official bird served up on Thanksgiving tables across the U.S. next November is slated to be chicken.
Back on the culinary front, Julia Child will henceforth specialize in Angolan cuisine. Look for her new cookbook, Freedom-loving Angolan Eats at an underground book bunker near you.
Thought for Food: Benetton, famous for its controversial, politically-charged advertising over the past twenty years, has a new ad campaign created in partnership with the World Food Program of the United Nations that not only makes a statement, but could help make a difference as well.
The new $15 million campaign, called “Food for Life,” takes world hunger out of the realm of statistical abstractions by focusing on individual people suffering from hunger. The photographs used in the magazine ads,
…are respectful images of people, mostly children, with a remarkably engaging gaze. They are among the 77 million of the poorest people in the world in 82 countries who received U.N. food last year, and text in the ads tells brief stories about them.
For example, one group of the ads shows Afghan children, one of them a 12- year-old boy named Masoud. He is among 1,300 pupils at the Ashuqan and Arifan School in Kabul who receive free bread every day. “School feeding encourages families to send their children to class,” the ad reads.
Even before considering the prospect of war with Iraq, the outlook for world hunger in 2003 is stark: The World Food Program’s food requirements in Africa alone, where 40 million people will need food assistance this year, are equal to the $1.8 billion total the program spent in 82 countries in 2002.
Commenting on the campaign,
Paul Venables, founder and co-creative director of Venables, Bell & Partners, calls “Food for Life” a “nice evolution” for Benetton. “Previous campaigns turned on something of shock value or a political statement, and you could see the puppet strings of the marketer clearly,” he said.
“Food for Life,” he noted, is “a nice solution because if you think about the shallowness of fashion advertising, and you try to make a statement in books that are 150 pages thick with beautiful images of models, clothes, perfumes, handbags and sweaters, it’s pretty hard to cut through that.”
Hopefully, what Benetton is doing will serve as a model for other companies to follow suit. A growing number of people are tired of the hollow old clichés and glossy pretenses they see in the messages of politics, commerce and culture, and are craving a sense of realness from companies, a sense that they really do care about the world, rather than mere lip service.
Consumers are not naive, noted Venables, and know that corporations hope a halo will result from cause-related marketing.
He added, “We see it, we know it, but if it is done well with taste and with art, we let it happen to us, and we feel OK about it.”
Sure it’s self-serving, but as long as good deeds are being done, it makes more sense to reward companies with our business than to castigate them for trying such “schemes.” Consumer support will help foster a growing trend of companies becoming positive forces for social and environmental change, as corporations wake up to the reality that live consumers buy more of their products than dead ones.
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