Mark Kassof Quotations of Chairman Mark

Anyone in the radio business who thinks it’s screwed up right now should also acknowledge that radio hardly has a monopoly on self-defeating behavior. Businesses in every market sector do dumb things.

I just became aware of a whopper when I went searching for an upgrade to my SPSS software. SPSS stands for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences and has been around in various forms for 40 years now. It’s what we use to crunch the numbers from the research that we do.

Now, I’m not one to reflexively upgrade software. I think most software upgrades are for the benefit of software companies, not users. But I’m working on a new research product that requires functionality my SPSS version doesn’t have, so I wanted to check out the latest version.

I went to the SPSS website, but couldn’t find the SPSS program…frustrating! Finally, I deduced that that SPSS is now called PASW, for some reason. It’s now owned by IBM, I learned, and they changed the name to PASW.

Four decades as a market leader. A name known by researchers and students around the world. Tossed out in favor of something that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. The company is still SPSS, the website is spss.com, but the product is PASW. Why???

IBM isn’t only company to abandon a perfectly good brand name. The cars we now know as Nissans were — for the first half of its history in the U.S. — called Datsuns. By the mid-1970’s Datsun had become the biggest importer of vehicles to this country.

But in the early ’80s, the cars’ parent company — Nissan Motor Company — changed the name to Nissan. They wanted to be marketed under the same name around the world. In other words, pure corporate ego.

It didn’t work out so well. From Wikipedia:

Ultimately, the name change campaign lasted for a three year period from 1982 to 1984, and cost Nissan a figure in the region of US$500 million…Five years after the name change program was over, Datsun still remained more familiar than Nissan.

And it hurt the cars’ sales. The ’90s were not kind to Nissan, and by ‘99, the company had severe financial difficulties…to the point where its future was in doubt. Certainly, this wasn’t entirely because Datsuns became Nissans, but it was at best an unnecessary change.

At least in radio, we almost always change names for good reasons. Stations that change formats invariably need to change names. Stations with serious perceptual problems should strongly consider a name change. But stations with positive brand equity — even when they have some negatives — should retain their names.

And that’s pretty much how it’s done in our business.  Isn’t it interesting how major companies — like IBM and Nissan — don’t know what we do?