Someday soon, this group will have to modernize its full name, as the word advertising is less and less what its members do, the word national doesn’t work anymore for obvious reasons, and the word association is a bit too 20th century. In its case, all three names send the wrong signal.
One trifecta example is the Association of National Advertisers, generally known as the ANA. Companies with long names sometimes abbreviate too soonĪs with AARP, there are other companies and associations whose initialized names hide dated or legacy terms, often with good reason. Another push for abbreviation use only comes from the perhaps once-logical but now-dated term 'retired'. For a 33-million-member organization that promotes active senior lifestyles, the word retired just doesn’t compute. Years ago – and saddled with a too-long-to-say name – association leaders adopted AARP and now rarely spell it out. The same with AARP and its original moniker, the American Association of Retired Persons. In fact, the company, I’m sure, would rather not have the quaint term 'business machines' be widely known, especially as the company is more into software and services these days. It has become such an iconic name that it matters no longer what it once stood for. As many know, though I’m not sure about millennials, IBM once stood for International Business Machines. These are abbreviations that have stood the test of time and are meaningful in their own right today, even if what the initials stand or stood for are long forgotten. Some of the world's biggest company names are abbreviations: think IBM, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and many others. Should companies consider trimming down their names to a more manageable size? Gary Slack explores