| Still A Bad Merger |
22 September 2003
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Time Warner Drops AOL from Name
AOL-Time Warner is about to become just Time Warner. The board of directors has decided that the AOL needs to go because ever since the merger, things have been going all wrong. In rearranging the deck furniture on this damaged cruise ship, the board hopes to refocus business on its old-economy income streams. The time it took to make this decision might better have been spent dealing with the accounting troubles and AOL's declining subscriber base.
Branding and name recognition is behind this, and someone from the marketing department needs to be sent on a vacation. By dropping AOL from its name, the company is accomplishing nothing. It was a bad deal, Ted Turner himself said so, and unless the internet service provider is spun off, Time Warner is stuck with it no matter what the name is.
By eliminating the AOL name, the firm actually runs the risk of undermining the AOL brand name. While a great many internet aficionados can't quite believe anyone would use AOL, it remains a very popular service, and is deliberately user-friendly (perhaps even to the point on being insulting to one's 'net acumen). And it has been associated with Time Warner, itself an amalgam of two distinct brands, for a few years, and AOL hasn't been hurt on Main Street by that association.
Of course, they could just as easily change the name to "Great People Who Love You, Inc.", and the company would still have accounting and subscriber problems. The name change is a distraction, and it makes the firm look less than serious in its efforts to resolve the issues it faces. One doubts that is the impression the board wanted to convey.
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