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We won’t delve too deeply into the logic of this branding exercise, other than to note it’s a valiant, if not borderline creative, effort to break way from the new-car syndrome of making up a word like
Accenture, the new moniker of Andersen Consulting that’s proven to be rocket science on par with inventing warp drive following the meltdown of Arthur Andersen’s accounting biz in the wake of
Enrongate. Given the company’s black belt in silly nomenclature with PricewaterhouseCoopers (undoubtedly the world’s longest single-word English trademark) and PwC (a rare double machoCap acronym), Monday generated a lot of media attention, much of it even favorable.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet, where much of the firm’s firepower will be aimed on behalf of clients desperate to justify all those Sun servers they purchased in 1999 to turbocharge their web presence in the face of an imminent customer rebellion led by the People’s Republic of
Amazonia.
First, you go through the hassle of convincing Canada’s Monday Magazine to change its longstanding
www.monday.com URL to
www.mondaymag.com
(and probably paid a pretty penny for the privilege). Then, someone in marketing gets the bright idea to launch a
"teaser" site using www.introducingmonday.com. Senior management signs off, the designers fire up FrontPage, and everybody sits back to watch the hit counters twirl.
Remember "organisation"? This was taken directly from the "About
Us" page of the www.pwcconsulting.com
site. It’s a very British spelling for a company with headquarters in New York, but not altogether surprising, given it boasts 15 offices in the U.K. In fact, one would suspect that someone in one of those Angloid offices might have mentioned that it would be a jolly good idea to register country-specific domains for the new Monday brand.
Whoops (http://www.introducingmonday.co.uk).
Better make that a double whoops (http://www.monday.co.uk).
It’s bad enough when jokers hijack a one-time URL and make merry. But it’s a complete disgrace to allow the
"official" version of your country-specific Internet address in a key market to be held captive by domain speculators when you’re in the middle of a global branding exercise that could make or break the firm.
And we suspect the fun is just beginning, given that Monday is translated as
Lundi, Montag, Lunedi, Lunes, Måndag and/or Maanantai, among dozens of other language-specific words around the world. In those countries, the term
"Monday" might as well be "Antidisestablishmentarianism."
Or PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Based in Brussels, Chris
Clark is senior vice president of strategic services for
Mainsail. He is also the author of "Byte Back," a monthly
humor column for Adweek Magazines' Technology Marketing.
Click here for more information on Mainsail
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