• Business Insider/MSNBC, Friday, April 16, 2010 10:41 AM

At the top of Bianca Male's list of recent rebranding disasters is the renaming of the SciFi Channel to the copyrightable, "syfy." The eminently textable name made the company "feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip," president David Howe told TVWeek. One problem, writes Male: "Syfy" is a slang term for syphilis.

Also on the Top 10 list, which Male compiled after talking to branding agency Method, Inc. and branding "guru" Rob Frankel, are PepsiCo's redesign of the Tropicana carton; the "childish, ridiculous, ugly" logo for the London 2012 Olympic games; Capital One's "swoosh," which is deemed about a decade too late, and Andersen Consulting's decision to dub itself Accenture -- "the ultimate corporate name that means nothing."

"The real reason to rebrand is to alter the expectations you're setting for the public," Frankel tells Male. "Changing your brand strategy means becoming a different company.... it's not just changing your name or your logo."

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