INQUIRER Top 5 Wrong Tech Rebrands

OK, QUICK NOW. Name the US company that Apple named as its sole carrier for the iPhone. Sorry, you're wrong, it was Cingular but by the time the iPhone ships it's going to be AT&T thanks to another rebranding exercise.

We all know that large organisations are stuffed with people who move around bits of paper and earn a crust by virtue of showing up, nodding a lot and doing something that chimes with a popular notion du jour. Some of these are ordinary people whereas others might be chief marketing officers or even CEOs.

At this level, the paper shuffling tends to be more strategic-sounding but it's still pretty much the same look-busy stuff. When stuck for something to do, these people will often come up with some well-tried stunts. Restructuring is a popular option as it seems decisive and different and offers the prospect of new flow charts and diagrams, dotted lines and impressive sounding job titles. (What can a senior vice-president know that a vice-president doesn't? Anybody?) The next guy in will change it back anyway so no big deal apart from some unhappy customers who have to deal with a bunch of new reps.

Another option is to take a look at branding. It's a subject that everybody thinks they know about, it's generally agreed to be important and yet the ways it is measured leave plenty of room for fiddling around, tweaking colours and logos and of course, names. So the Cingular brand is buying the farm despite being known even to irregular visitors to the country like your correspondent. It loses out to AT&T, which most of us foreigners thought might have died a death somewhere around the early 1850s on the back of some dreary 100 years regulatory war that the US seems to like to inflict on its successful businesses.

Don't worry though, there's plenty of form when it comes to technology brand changes. So here are our

Top Five Wrong Tech Brand Revamps

5. Deloitte-Braxton. When audit/consulting firms were under the cosh from regulators some years ago, several indulged in spectacular bifurcation and rebranding exercises. Andersen Consulting became Accenture, KPMG became BearingPoint and Deloitte Touche chose Braxton, possibly in deference to Toni, the soul singer who belted out that mid-90s dance-floor filler Unbreak My Heart. A quick U-turn meant the name was never used, however, leaving Deloitte Consulting CEO Paul Robinson in a bit of a quandary.

As he told Consulting Magazine: "I would have been the chairman of the board of Braxton … and so I was very involved in it. And I thought, as we were going through the separation, that it was the most difficult thing that I had ever done or seen done. … Until we changed direction, at which point I realized that there's only one thing more difficult than separation. It's reintegration after you've decided to separate."

Apparently, names rejected by Deloitte included Ledoitte, Adroit and Can of Whup Ass Consulting.

4. PwC-Monday. Deloitte had marked a line in the sand for rebranding absurdity but PricewaterhouseCoopers effortlessly sailed past it. PwC hemmed and hawed and eventually came up with the name Monday for its consulting unit. Because that's a great day, right? The day you spend all week looking forward to because you're eager to get back to that office. Having announced the new moniker and paid handsomely for the Monday.com URL, PwC Consulting was acquired by IBM and the plan was scrapped.

3. HP-Agilent Technologies. It wouldn't be a marketing-related list of daft things tech companies do if we didn't mention HP. HP spun off its test and measurement business in 1999 and called it Agilent, possibly the duffest, most man-made, prefabricated, soul-destroying name ever given to an organisation.

2. HP-OpenView. It wouldn't be a marketing-related list of daft things etch companies do if we didn't mention HP twice. HP's software business has always been a soap opera but its rock-steady epicentre has long been OpenView. Last month, with lack of fanfare, HP decided it wasn't needed. An HP exec told ZDNet that "no one really cares about the brand". The new brand? Drumroll, please… HP Software. Sheesh.

1. Sony Ericsson. Not really a wrong branding decision, just a lot of fuss over nothing. When Sony and Ericsson entered into a joint-venture in mobile phones, they kept a long silence about branding until unveiling, with no shortage of hype, this little belter and accompanying bouncing ball logo. It is not known whether the company hired a specialist consultancy for this act of marketing genius. µ