It’s a useful rule of thumb that any business which reduces its name to its initials is heading for trouble. Having gone that way under Goodwin, RBS almost doubled down last year by becoming the lower-case ‘rbs’, before apparently thinking better of it. British Petroleum became ‘BP’ after its 1998 merger with Amoco, tried to claim a greener image by suggesting that the B might stand for ‘Beyond’, and has never really been stable since. ‘British’, like Scottish, was evidently an unsuitable tag for a global player.
Likewise BG, the former exploration arm of British Gas, was an unhappy ship for years before its recent takeover by the robustly unabbreviated Royal Dutch Shell. The homely British Home Stores became faux-trendy BhS (later Bhs and BHS, as if it made any difference) as the lost sheep of the Storehouse group, following its merger with Habitat and Mothercare in 1986; when the full name was eventually revived in small print below the big letters, it was too late.
You’ve probably got the gist of this theory by now, but I’ve always wondered why Kentucky Fried Chicken — as part of a lacklustre fast-food division of PepsiCo in the early 1990s — reduced itself to ‘KFC’. Some say it’s because ‘Fried’ sounded bad, even though pressure-frying in super-hot oil was what most customers thought made the product ‘finger lickin’ good’. Others claimed that it was because the product wasn’t actually ‘Chicken’, but meat of a factory-bred featherless mutant. That — I hasten to add — was categorically an urban myth.
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