The Rise of Abbreviated Brands
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.
darren 
