Friday, August 7, 2009

Enjoy it, Coach Dick 'n' Balls.

I’m so sick of re-branding. Like SciFi is changing to SyFy? That doesn’t even make sense. Like No... Just... No. If you’re going to re-brand you really have to make it count. Let me first share with you my very first encounter with a personal re-brand, aka someone trying to re-brand herself. This is an instance of something that annoyed me so much that I still talk about it on the reg, approx 6 years later and it still lights a fire under my ass every time I bring it up. God, I hate people sometimes.

My freshman year there was a girl in my orientation group named K.C. For months I legit thought her name was Casey. Which is fine. I like the name Casey, especially for a girl. But I later found out it was K.C., her initials. Which I guess is OK, since there was another girl on our hall with the same exact name as her except for a one-letter difference in the last name. And yeah, I get it. It’s fucked up that the school would put the two girls with the same exact name on the same hall their freshman year. So I get you wanting to do something different. But I also didn't realize until later that K.C. hadn't always been K.C., I just assumed that was her name. Because when people tell you what their name is, that is usually the safe assumption. Usually...

Well the two K.C.’s (Katie and K.C.) became best friends. To this day, they are best friends (as I have seen on Facebook). And after freshman year, the K.C. who requested to be called K.C. then requested to go back to her original name, Katie. Seriously? Seriously. You know what I said to that? Fuck you. It’s a name. You’re not Prince, you can’t just change your name on a whim to whatever you want and then to a symbol. The artist formerly known as Prince barely even pulled that off. You're definitely not going to be able to. Get the fuck over yourself and go with the name your parents gave you. And if you are douchey enough to change your name, don’t change it back after a year!!! How embarrassing for you. And if you’re not embarrassed by that, then there’s something seriously wrong with you.

I know a few other people who have decided to start going by their middle name, or change the spelling of their name. This is just as douchey and I’m also embarrassed for them, because apparently they are too unaware of social norms to be embarrassed for themselves. I may not identify with this situation as well as most, because I have a very original name. And I don’t mean to say that in a tone that makes me seem like I think that I’m better than you because of it, but I am…

Back to the battle of the K.C.’s: The way I reconciled that situation in my own head? Refuse to call K.C. Katie and continue calling her K.C. up to and including my last day of college. Everyone called her Katie. Everyone. Except for me. And if I were to ever see her again, I’d still call her K.C. and if she ever actually told me not to call her K.C.? I would flip out. And by flip out I mean I’d probably just be like “Nope, I prefer K.C.” But I really would rather not ever see K.C. again. Oh, and don’t worry, I just looked her up on Facebook to see what she’s up to these days and her Facebook name is listed as Katherine. I bet she goes by Katherine now.

My other experience with re-branding on the corporate level was changing all Court TV promos to say truTV instead of Court TV. If you know anything at all about my first job you know that this was not something I enjoyed. And when companies re-brand it’s as obnoxious as K.C. changing her name back to Katie unless you do a really phenomenal job. I mean, I'll excuse truTV because they weren't Court TV anymore. That just wasn't their programming half of the time so they had to do something about that. But I’m trying to think of a re-brand I can really get behind and I can’t. I’m embarrassed that SyFy thinks it’s like going to improve its viewership by changing the spelling of their name to something totally nonsensical because they think its cool. You won’t and it’s not.

And that… is how I feel about re-branding.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

when i was at TLC they were re-branding and they wanted to drop The Learning Channel as the name... and just use TLC so that it could fit with anything with those initials...it failed

Brady said...

TENDER LOVE AND CARE!?!?!?!?

Unknown said...

How do you feel about Pizza Hut changing names to "The Hut"? Just putting it out there...

Unknown said...

us original namers are better than everyone else... it's okay to put it out there.

Brady said...

Aurie, if only your name was Candle.