Brand new

Good morning, again, from the road.

All of the windshield time I’ve racked up of late gives me lots of time to think about….nothing in particular!

Oh, I am an avid podcast listener, depending on the subject (mostly tech, politics and baseball), as well as audiobooks (nonfiction and biographies are my preferences).  But sometimes I just play music I like and let my mind wander where it will.

So one of the many subjects my little brain landed on recently is the process companies go through when they rebrand certain products or even the entire company.  First example I happened upon was that of the Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix, syrup and other similar products.

No question, that but if rebranding was way overdue, as the name is offensive to many and always was.  But the company decided to pull a name out of obscurity, Pearl Milling Company, to replace their problematic former name.  Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it?

Worth noting that baseball’s Cleveland Indians and football’s Washington Redskins changed their names for similar reasons.

We bought some of their pancake mix a while back when our preferred brand was not available, and it’s the same stuff, just a different brand name.  Box looks roughly the same as well.

Facebook is now Meta.  Google’s parent company is now officially known as Alphabet.  Panera Bread is still known in Missouri as the Saint Louis Bread Company.

Here’s another one.  Who remembers the car brand Datsun?  It’s now Nissan, has been for a number of years and the parent company was called that for its entire history.  Why change something you spent millions of dollars building recognition for?  Consistency was the reason I remember being cited at the time, and they were and are the same cars from the same company.

The. There is the curious case of Chem-Lawn.  This company was a lawn treatment organization, and we were among its former clients.  They were accused repeatedly of charging people for treatments when it was found that in some cases they simply sprayed water into lawns.  We dropped them before these allegations began to surface because whatever they were doing didn’t kill the weeds in our yard.

Along about this time they either sold to or merged with a company called TruGreen, and were thus known as TruGreen ChemLawn.  We did not resume using them, and they eventually dropped the ChemLawn portion of the name.  My neighbor uses them and complains to me periodically that they are not killing all of the weeds in his yard.  Sounds familiar.

And think about the brands that used to be common but fell into limbo, only to return as brand names for cheap items that are vaguely related to what they used to make and sell.  Names like Polaroid and Bell and Howell ride again.  Not selling cameras or telescopes, but things like security cameras and printers.  Sorta related but not.

Once in a while a brand comes full circle.  Sinclair Oil (with the dinosaur on the sign) became ARCO, but a few years ago they went back to being known as Sinclair.  There used to be a chain of convenience stores in Kentucky called Minit Mart, went away twenty years ago and now it’s back over the past couple of years.

Maybe this isn’t all that interesting but I find it so.  And it will be interesting to see what else changes over the next few years.