In recent months, I’ve noticed an increasingly popular trend in brands and advertising. Companies are abbreviating existing brands or devising new ones by removing letters–mostly vowels–from existing works. Here are a few examples:
- The Motorola Rokr mobile phone
- Reebok has become RBK
- The Phoenix Suns basketball team have a kind of sub-brand of PHX.
This is different, I think, than Flickr’s removal of an ‘e’. I suspect that was just expedient–they needed a short, memorable URL.
Here’s my theory: the abbreviation trend is reflective of the increasingly popular IM and SMS slang. Users, particularly young people, tend to use abbreviations and initialisms when they chat over MSN Messenger, Skype, AIM, in game chat and especially when texting with their mobile devices. For example:
FooFighter37: r u serious?
l33thead69: totally! LOL! OMG, door bell, brb.
Though I wish IMers’ and texters’ spelling and grammar was better, I’m not going to rail against this trend. The evolution of language is pretty much an unstoppable force, so there’s no point in fighting it.
It will be interesting to see if this brand initialism trend continues. Here are a few potential shortened brands:
UPDATE: Another recent example of this phenomenon is the reduction of Washington Mutual to WaMu.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
This post got killed in the great server switch-over of 2006. That’s why I’m reposting it.
Do we have to post our original comments again?
And, hey, wasn’t the switch-over done this year? 2007?
Not so recent a trend. I remember YWYH and INRI from Sunday School.
Double: I’ll try and recover the comments from the Google cache.
Good point on 2006/2007.
Vancouver is responsible for both Flickr and YVR. Perhaps it’s the result of living in a placed called BC.
Well, I think in Reebok’s case it was kind of necessary because Reebok is so freakin’ dorky. They resuscitated their brand by redefining it in a way that would still say “Reebok” without saying “Reebok.” Catch my drift? Oh, guess where else it’s been happening? JLo. KFed. It’s beyond abbreviations: it’s vernacular and colloquial. We don’t have *time* to say “Jennifer Lopez,” or “Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes.” At the same time, it’s kind of a thing of being enamoured and bringing celebrities into one’s social circles. Anyway… I think “ROKR” is cute but easy to say wrong. Cell phone names in general were pretty nondescript before ROKR, SLVR, RAZR and PEBL came into being. Its shortness is basically required. Motorola’s MOTO thing just kind of pisses me off, though. Like JLo. … Thanks for reading…