• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, December 23, 2014

When Fiat announced that the Chrysler corporate name is heading into the dustbin of history, to be replaced by FCA U.S. LLC, my first thought was something along the lines of, "Now that's a rebranding guaranteed to generate real passion." 

Not such a great idea, I thought, to take a brand, even a corporate brand, with a deep history, and replace it with a string of capital letters suitable to a government agency or maybe an insurance company (Finance and Cost Administration? Fire, Casualty, and Automotive, Inc.?) 

But my second thought was "who cares?" Will anyone even notice if a global corporate brand has a memorable name? Chrysler will soldier on, presumably, as a divisional brand, which is what it should be. How many Jaguar fans have heard of Tata? 

I remember when General Motors, not terribly long ago, tried to bring the GM logo to the fore by putting the GM “mark of excellence” on cars like a magical fetish to create some unity and confidence. That was a bad idea. GM isn't a consumer brand, it's a global corporation and strategic holding company. 

Jennifer Meyers, current executive director of strategy at global branding consultancy Sullivan, argued to me that a move like that, taking a name and making it an acronym, is a sensible one for a company with global ambitions, where the U.S. is, in the scheme of things, just one of many markets (and not a growing one). And not only is Chrysler vanishing from the new global name, so is Fiat.

"The company is sending out a message that it is a global corporation and that in the not-too-distant future will not be associated with the U.S., or Italy for that matter," she says.

Meyers, who has consulted with brands like John Deere, Tyco, Ingersoll Rand, New York Life, AARP, Chase and Ally Bank, points out that a quick look around the landscape beyond automotive provides lots of examples. "We see it in professional services with Price Waterhouse Cooper, which became PwC. General Electric became GE, and International Business Machines became IBM. They are very different entities today. It's much easier to communicate globally."

Chrysler has, of course, done this corporate name change dance more than most automakers: Chrysler Corp., Chrysler Group, DaimlerChrysler, a hassle for the supplier companies that have to reconfigure their ledgers. But on the B-to-C side this is all a non-issue, says Meyers, who points out that people get used to new names fast, even when they aren't names.

Sure, a consumer a half century ago would have been amazed to learn that some day General Electric would be just GE, and that its main revenue would come from industrial business, not, say, dishwashers. But now GE is an industrial powerhouse and the company's global marketing campaigns, including on channels like BuzzFeed, focus on that. 

"We are in a global business world where the brand in each nation becomes less and less important," says Meyers. “If you ask the average person where the Philips Corporation is from, for example, most don't know." Actually, it's a very good bet that, unless that Philips is next to its Norelco brand, most probably have no idea what Philips makes. They're Dutch. And yes, they make shavers.