Yes indeed.  Because this is a “merger of equals” (aren’t they all — remember AOL-Time Warner?  DaimlerChrysler? Or even PriceWaterhouseCoopers?), we can’t have one airline appear to “acquire” the other, hence the merged carrier will keep a bit of this and a little of that from each.  The United name, Chairman Glenn Tilton and Chicago HQ stay, but the new airline will adopt the Continental livery, logo and CEO Jeffrey Smisek (who will have offices — you guessed it — in both Chicago and Houston)!  Does this placate various constituencies?  You bet.  Is this smart brand-building?  No.

Recasting the United name in the Continental typeface looks like, well, recasting the United name in the Continental typeface.  Sure, over time, people will grow accustomed to seeing the planes say “United” rather than “Continental” next to the stylized globe logo.  But it’s a missed brand-building opportunity.  Instead of creating a new visual identity commensurate with creating “The World’s Leading Airline,” this pastiche just looks like — and is — a hodgepodge of elements, rather than an integrated, cohesive entity that represents a unique, new assertion of value.

As anyone who has poked around BrandCultureTalk knows, we believe that great brands make tough choices.  We also believe that great brands have to start with an idea.  The most famous assertion of United’s idea developed way back in 1965 by Leo Burnett, “Fly the Friendly Skies” ran an unprecedented 32 years and became one of the most successful and memorable in the history not just of aviation, but branding.

After some less memorable intervening incarnations (Does anyone remember, “It’s important for the human race to stay United“?  Neither do we.) United most recently exhorted, “It’s time to fly.”  We’d argue that providing singularly friendly service beats the more vague temporal urgency of the current United slogan (although we admire the trailblazing pluck of United’s legal department in that they evidently felt this assertion to be of sufficient importance to merit not one giant registered trademark symbol, but two in a row up in the header of this web page).

Continental, on the other hand, currently uses the more aggressive “Work Hard.  Fly Right.“  This promise of honoring and acknowledging the realities of the present business environment — as well as the present realities of flying — firmly puts the carrier on the side of the business traveler.  As itinerant carpetbagging brand-builders who spend a good bit of time in the air, this assertion resonates even more directly with us.

Unlike what they did with the logo and livery, the United merger marketing staff didn’t simply jam the words together into a meaningless amalgam of “It’s time to work hard and fly right.”  Instead they created a new assertion of “Let’s fly together.”  While it may not rival the “Friendly Skies” for the branding record books, it does seem on strategy with the “together” part, and the “Let’s fly” portion feels inclusive, elevated, even vaguely anagogical, as it reaches out toward the limitless possibilities in the wild blue yonder that the carrier . . . and its customers can now seize.

Here’s another idea for how the new United’s brand should look:  start over.  After all,  if ultra-low fare carrier Ryan air can carve out a visually distinctive look, so can the new United.  Think about what the word “United” really means.  It’s fantastic from a brand-building perspective.  And consider the possibilities to dramatize what a new era of aviation (willingly suspend that disbelief!) that will be ushered in by this global colossus.

Now we acknowledge that our being in the business of drawing logos and developing brand lines (among other things) could make us appear less than completely objective in assessing the wisdom of retreading existing brand elements vs. creating new ones.  But we don’t exactly have a lock on the airline design business that, say Landor does, and we like to think we can still opine relatively uncorrupted.  So come on, new United!  Develop a new look worthy of your new brand.  After all, you can’t build the airline of the future based on the trade dress of the past.

On a personal level, he’s more Sir Paul than Sir Gawain – that is, he has reconciled his iconic status with an endearing, shaggy-haired-bloke accessibility. He’s larger than life, but somehow not remote, and he has impressively navigated the tricky art of expanding a master brand without overextending it.

Ask anyone to indulge you in a round of the Virgin Brand Word Association Game, and you’ll likely get a variety of responses. When I say Virgin, you may think of:

(1) The origin of it all, Virgin Records. From its humble beginnings in the 1970’s as a mail order record catalog, the business grew into a chain of Virgin Megastores, with the record company ultimately absorbed by the world’s third largest record company, EMI.

The record company and Megastore laid the foundation for decades of brand equity, as the Virgin name became synonymous with hipness as well as accessibility.

(2) If your respondent is an Angeleno, they may say Virgin Australia (technically named V Australia, as Virgin Atlantic shareholder Singapore Airlines put the kibosh on using the master brand name for the Aussie endeavor), whose ubiquitous billboards illuminate a large portion of LA skyline. Capitalizing on the insanely lucrative LA to Australia air travel route, not to mention minimal brand competition, Branson et al recently launched Virgin Australia, an appendage of his Virgin Air brand, which also includes Virgin America and Virgin Atlantic. For the record, one BrandCulture member is quite smitten with the latter after a recent trip to the UK.

The airline has garnered success by wisely positioning itself as a cheeky, quirky, and fun airline, while also asserting value and bang for buck. In the generally staid, beige airline industry, Virgin offers a vibrant crimson shot in the arm.

(3) If your respondent is a brand enthusiast, hospitality maven or luxury connoisseur, they may cite Virgin’s Limited Edition venture, Branson’s foray into luxury hospitality.  According to a BrandCulture sibling residing in London, the poshest club in town is, you guessed it, part of the VLE group.  We’ve not yet hobnobbed there, but from afar we’re delighting in the Virgin sub-brand’s name, a departure from traditionally descriptive names in favor of the evocatively luxurious and exclusive tones that Virgin Limited Edition exudes.

Is there anything Branson can’t do? Well, Virgin Cola probably won’t topple its biggest competitor (also crimson in hue) anytime soon – but we look forward to seeing what this lovable Renaissance Man rolls out next.

The earlier “Pass it on” FedEx commercial was even more explicit about the need for speed, featuring a package with the admonition, “If this package doesn’t arrive in Peoria tomorrow, it’ll be your job.”

Over the years, FedEx naturally expanded its shipping operations from urgent overnight delivery to shipping packages and parcels to less than truckload to full truckload freight to FedEx Ground.

Then in February 2004, FedEx took a major step beyond logistics when it acquired print and copy shop Kinko’s for $2.4 billion. Last year, FedEx spent nearly $700 million to rebrand the 1,900 FedEx Kinko’s “FedEx Office.”

But with FedEx now standing for so many different services in addition to overnight delivery, the consolidation may be fracturing the core FedEx brand promise to the point of fracture. An example: the other day, a member of the old guard here at BrandCulture HQ was out of the office and enlisted the aid of a colleague to ship some urgently needed documents. A frenzy of coordinated activity ensued, with electronically circulated drafts edited, finalized, packaged, labeled and dispatched by the early evening. But instead of arriving at their destinations the next morning, the FedEx envelopes greeted the dawn in the same courier bin where they had been deposited after the FedEx pickup the previous afternoon.

Our old guard member never explicitly said “these documents absolutely, positively need to be there overnight,” but instead thought that “these need to go out by FedEx” meant the same thing.  Back at HQ, the co-worker (who wasn’t even alive when the spot above aired, let alone in 1971 when FedEx started its overnight delivery service) simply didn’t realize that there was a need to get the package out that day. Apparently lost in intergenerational translation as FedEx has expanded its brand significance is the focus on speed; the FedEx brand is no longer inextricably interwoven with “extremely urgent,” but spans the value proposition of “Make it, Print it, Pack it, Ship it” — all valuable offerings to have under one roof, but no one of them terribly imperative.

FedEx is without question one of the great companies and among the most valuable brands the world. It is perennially ranked among the world’s best companies to work for by FORTUNE, this year claiming the 7th spot tied with Southwest Airlines.  But perhaps it is time for FedEx to adopt a more explicitly tiered brand architecure, separating ancillary services from the core promise of reliably pulling off the nearly impossible through millions of overnight deliveries a day thoughout the world.  Not only would this help FedEx justify continued premium pricing, it could help usher in a new era of Baby Boomer/Gen X/Millennial workplace productivity and harmony.  Perhaps a switch back to FedEx Kinko’s for another $700 million?

Some moves, however, just don’t make a lot of sense. Take Tropicana. Not long after a wholesale redesign of their packaging and identity, PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) responded to consumer complaints with an abrupt about face. (for the record, BrandCulture thought the packaging was a little 2005 for our tastes)

Or did they?

Check out this ad for Trop50, the company’s new low-calorie juice.

Maybe PepsiCo segmented the complaints and saw that everyone hated the new packaging except health-conscious women between 34-54?

We can imagine the brand architecture arguments rationalizing the coexisting designs, but we just can’t convince ourselves it’s a smart move to have a homespun, almost hokey design and an abstract, minimal expression of the same brands on the same shelf.

And yes – they are expressions of the same brand, even if they are different products.

It’s too much flex, not the right consistency, and the new design – well – it’s just not fresh enough for us to swallow.

Choosing a name is fun, but it can be a tough and nuanced challenge. Every two-bit flack with a bottle of tequila and a white board thinks, “How hard could this be”? In reality, coining the perfect name is really, really hard. It must be memorable without being obnoxious; evocative, but not to the point of distraction; and emblematic of the company’s brand promise without reaching too far. Oh, and most importantly, available for use.

As much as we prize the human ingenuity that goes into disseminating winning names, we’re enamored of this name generator we stumbled across recently. We just hope that little apps like this aren’t a sign of branding professionals’ imminent obsolescence.

Whether the following names were chosen by man or machine, we’ve identified them as naming gems:

Her storied curiosity proved calamitous, but her name captures a sense of mischief and novelty when applied to the internet radio provider; as one song ends you can’t help but wonder what Pandora’s box will unleash next.

It’s delightfully onomatopoetic, and its amphibious connotations perfectly capture the communications platform’s dual voice/web browser capabilities. Water, land, web, phone – Ribbit covers it all.

Regardless of your where you stand on the product itself, you can’t deny that Plan B is aptly named. Unlike other pharmaceutical names, which increasingly sound like fake Latin words, its name is colloquial, accessible, and really sums up its essence: it’s an available alternative for when the unexpected occurs.

And a few that don’t make the cut:

It sounds OK, but why would anyone know the paparazzi-fueled entertainment conglomerate’s acronym stands for LA’s Thirty Mile Zone, from whence it derives its scandalous fodder?

“The world’s largest domain name registrar” evokes zoot suits, not websites, with its cringe-worthy name.

Apparently no one said this name aloud before greenlighting it.

Of course, as these three examples show us, a bad name doesn’t preclude success, but it certainly doesn’t help a brand. What do you think? Drop us a comment and tell us brand name hits and misses. We’d love to hear from you.