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August 8, 2006
Company Naming: To Merge or Not?
I find it interesting to see how two companies that merge, combine, or get acquired, end up with a new company name. In most cases, there is no right or wrong way of naming the new entity.
Usually, when mergers are billed as a "merger of equals", both names survive. Most recently, the Lucent and Alcatel "merger of equals" is not surprisingly called Lucent-Alcatel.
Other examples of "mergers of equals" are DaimlerChrysler and ExxonMobil. For more examples, please see this Business 2.0 article in our In the News section.
In other cases where, relatively speaking, a larger company acquires a smaller company, the latter name does not survive. The most recent example of this is AMD acquiring ATI.
AMD's nomenclature generally has product names ending in the suffix "-on". For instance:
- Athlon
- Opteron
- Turion
- Sempron
In our June 13th blog post, Old Names for New Things, we discussed the reasons why technology companies tend to favor names that end in "-on". They sound scientific and high-tech to us on account of the way biologists (mis)use Greek and Latin to name species and diseases, and chemists use them for the names of elements.
It'll be interesting to see how the "-on" suffix nomenclature will be employed on future ATI product names.
Technorati Tags: AMD, ATI, Mergers, Company Names, Athlon, Nomenclature
Posted by William Lozito at August 8, 2006 1:52 PM
Posted to Brand Naming
| Branding
| Company Naming
| Consumer Electronics
| Marketing
| Product Naming
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