Why I don't have to like "Monday:"
So just a couple of weeks ago, I was laughing at Monday: (Their colon, not mine. They wouldn't like my colon.) The rebranding struck me as the last spastic hyper-hypo twitch of the 90s' super-high-energy-please-God-make-them-like-me theme. The Register, bless their souls, don't like Monday:'s either.
It reminds me of when one of my old employers tried rebranding themselves from a very lawyerly name (Wunderman Cato Johnson) to a suffix: ".ology" It would have been great, I heard. We would have been studies of everything: marketing.ology, analytics.ology, urinal-cake.ology.
Instead, at the last minute demand of an assumedly more rational high level muckety-muck, they dropped that and picked "Impiric (with a funny all-encompassing bracket)" at the last minute. They also tossed out months of work and research into positioning, presentations, and common corp speak. This new name, however, was to imply empirical knowledge of all our subjects - i.e. experience. A fun, hip way to spin the fact that we were all working for a practically ancient company in the computer age. I felt really bad for the team who had to jackknife their whole process, throw out their baby, and throw together a shitty last minute collection of branding consisting of a Fatboy Slim song ("Right Here, Right Now"), and a vaguely topical epileptic flashing stream of clip art images.
But then, after about two years of this crap, they decide they (kinda) liked their original name better, and wandered back to "Wunderman". Of course, it's worth noting that the "they" are probably the old guard who never wanted it changed in the first place and who are happy all the morons who thought "Impiric (funny all-encompassing bracket)" was a good name are out on the street now.
And, today, The Register tells me that IBM has put Monday: out of our misery by purchasing them. Monday: has now returned to the more respectable "PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting", soon to become just "IBM". Thankfully, Monday:'s demise took about a month. Any longer, and I'd've been cringing at the day when we would have started pitching to them as a client.
Thing is, I loved the 90's. There were a lot of good things, even if many of them were all a "Who Shot J.R.?" dream. I'd like to see the genuine ingenuity and innovation survive. I'd also like to see all the fake raver-boy-wannabe marketing execs lined up and shot. And, it'd be neat to see us all try again at a "new economy", only this time let's start with real things that do real stuff for real people and make real money.
Hmm, which reminds me: I wish my company would rebrand, and drop the 'e'. It really doesn't do us justice since we survived the dot-com days with a real business model and solid products.
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