Mondelez is the new Mississippi

Kraft spun off its snack food business into a separate company, which means they had to come up with a name for that new company.  They decided to eschew the route of hiring a marketing agency to help find a new name and decided to solicit suggestions from their own employees.

After sifting through thousands of suggested names they settled upon the name Mondelez.  Yep, Mondelez.  Really, that’s what they decided was the best.  Makes me wonder if they sorted the list with worst on top instead of best.

It is pronounced mohn-duh-LEEZ.  Officially, the emphasis is on the last syllable.  I think the emphasis should be on the middle syllable instead – DUH.

The name is a combination of two words that mean “world” and “delicious” in several languages.  At least that was their interpretation.  After some crack investigation, I found that a small Pacific island where that name means “gullible sheep”.  (I haven’t figured out how you determine the difference between a gullible and non-gullible sheep, but that’s a different topic.)

When you name a company you have to conduct a trademark search to find out if that name is used anywhere else by another company or even sounds or is spelled similarly to another company or product.  On this one I think the search took about 10 minutes.  I hope the trademark search company was paid a fixed fee instead of by the hour.

One big problem is that all the good company names are already taken, so a company that needs a new name is forced to wander off into the land of made up mash up words.  The goal is usually to find some really cool name that conveys the history and mission of the company in three syllables or less.  That’s a tall task, for sure, but you have to know when to keep searching.

The company I work for went through a name change last year.  In the search for the perfect name we came up with many, many really, really bad names.  A few of these really, really bad names came frighteningly close to being “the name” but fortunately they were eventually ruled out.  Even the winning name wasn’t an instant success, but the heart did warm to it over time.

Growing up in Louisiana we were often low in categories that you’d rather not be low in, such as education.  No matter what, though, there was one saying that we could always take comfort in: “At least we’re not Mississippi”.  I imagine that people in Alabama used that one as well.  The point is that we may be bad, but someone else is worse.

That’s why Mondelez is the new Mississippi, at least in the corporate world.  No matter how bad the name of your company sucks, you can always say “At least we’re not Mondelez”.