Call Me by My New Name

To come up with a winning moniker for your company, follow trends and consult a chatbot

In 2019, a budgeting app with a catchy name—Klover— made its debut. “The idea was for Klover to give consumers a sense of fortune or luck, like a four-leaf clover,” says Chief Executive Officer Brian Mandelbaum. Less than three years later, the company began expanding into business-to-business markets, prompting second thoughts about that branding. “Klover with a k is clever, but we have nothing to do with luck,” he says. “It’s really about science and statistics and tech, so we reconsidered the name.”

A decade ago, rechristening a company was considered perilous, if not unthinkable. Those that made a change often limited themselves to shortening a name, such as Weight Watchers’ move to WW in 2018 and Dunkin’ Donuts’ shift to Dunkin’ a few months later. Then global events made many companies reconsider everything from product names to the entire corporate identity.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Corvid by Wix—a website builder—became Velo by Wix. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian names have vanished in favor of generic global-sounding brands. A week into the war, Stoli Group rebranded its Stolichnaya vodka as simply Stoli. “I work with three companies who have renamed because of the war in Ukraine,” says Neri Karra Sillaman, a luxury brand adviser and professor at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School.