Some companies switch to letters because the words became bad for the brand. Kentucky Fried Chicken didn't want to remind consumers that their food wasn't the healthiest and opted for the less descriptive KFC. When the giant Korean electronics and chemical company Lucky-Goldstar grew tired of a name that seemed to have a bargain-basement ring, it became LG. The next step was to redefine the letters, so LG was promoted to mean "Life's Good"—the perfect marriage of a two-letter name and an uplifting message.
This gimmick appears in surprising places. In 2001British Petroleum adopted the marketing name BP and spent many millions trying to persuade the public that the letters stood for Beyond Petroleum. Public-relations reps lauded the move, but it drew mockery from environmentalists. The massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 didn't help.
The entertainment industry was one of the first to favor letters-only names. The National Broadcasting Co. was going by NBC as early as 1926. The Columbia Broadcasting System was CBS by 1941, and the American Broadcasting Co. was ABC by 1952. Home Box Office's logo featured only the letters HBO when it went into circulation in 1975, and C-Span didn't even bothering launching under its full name—Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. Today, it's all letters. The Wall Street Journal even styles itself WSJ, though mostly on the weekends.
Yet even as much of corporate America is shifting to letters, the newest video outlets favor old-fashioned names. Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and NBC's new streaming service, Peacock, are almost impossible to abbreviate. The reason may come back to the internet: There are no unclaimed two-, three- or four-letter URLs left in the dot-com domain. None.
In some ways the notion of using letters as shorthand goes back to the founding of America. Few countries have names that are chanted in letter form the way "U-S-A!" fills the air at many American political and sports events. We're either lazy, or simply a land of letter-loving pioneers.
(c) Peter Funt. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.
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