In 2017, Tesla ( TSLA) even dropped the 'Motors' from its name.
Last year, payments company Square became Block ( SQ) and, in 2016, Snapchat became Snap ( SNAP). “Sometimes there's just a lot of baggage with an existing name, in a way that the firm may want to lose some of what comes with that baggage.”īeyond Facebook and Google, a wide range of companies have changed names in recent years.
“Sometimes the name itself just gets a little bit outdated,” she said. Sometimes, the current name doesn’t really make sense for the direction the company’s moving in, or it's looking to shed the baggage associated with its current name, said Patti Williams, a marketing professor and vice dean of executive education at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. There are a few basic reasons a big-name company would enforce a name swap. So, why would a company go against the linguistic grain in the first place?
