Kraft Proves Picks New Name (Mondelez) Based on Domain Availability And It’s Pretty Bad

Kraft Foods has decided to make a name change. Kraft Foods will remain Kraft in North America but in the rest of the world it now be known as Mondelez International Inc.   According to Kraft….“Mondelez” (pronounced mohn-dah-LEEZ’) is a newly coined word that evokes the idea of “delicious world.”  “Monde” derives from the Latin word for “world,” and “delez” is a fanciful expression of “delicious.” In addition, “International” captures the global nature of the business.”

The name change had every one in the marketing industry baffled.  One of the reasons thrown around was the fact that the domain name was available.  It wasn’t even taken until March 12th of this year according to DomainTools.  They were at least smart enough to get almost ALL the tlds when they did choose the name.  But it is still an AWFUL name.

If you have to put in a phonetic spelling of your name in your press release you don’t have a very good name.  There are at least 3 different ways you can say the name and the way they are choosing to pronounce it isn’t the way I would have chosen. And the macron, the line over the e, it’s not that easy to type in many languages including English without changing the settings in your keyboard.   To type out a macron all you have to do is these little easy steps

1. First, enable the U.S. Extended keyboard layout.
   1. To do this, open System Preferences by clicking the apple logo in the upper-lefthand corner of your screen and then clicking “System Preferences…” or the method that you prefer to open System Preferences.
   2. Open Language & Text by clicking the icon in the System Preferences labeled “Language & Text.”
   3. Switch to the Input Sources section by clicking on the “Input Sources” button near the top of the window.
   4. Scroll down to the layout labeled “U.S. extended” and click the checkbox next to it. The U.S. Extended layout has now been enabled, in addition to any keyboard layouts which had previously been enabled.
   5. Once the U.S. Extended layout is enabled, it will always remain enabled, but not necessarily active. To quickly switch between the U.S. Extended layout and other keyboard layouts, make sure the “Show input menu in menu bar” checkbox at the bottom of the window is checked. A new icon should appear in your menu bar when this box is checked.
2. Next, switch to the U.S. extended keyboard layout.
   1. Click the input menu icon (which was enabled in the previous step) in your menu bar.
   2. Select “U.S. Extended” from your list. U.S Extended has now been activated.
3. Finally, enter the macroned letter from the keyboard.
   1. First type option-a (this means to hold down the “option” key and then press “a”).
   2. Type in the letter you wish to place a macron above. Congratulations! You have now typed in a macroned letter

You get the point, putting that in a brand name isn’t very smart.  It would only take me 3 or 4 minutes to type out their name.  But if you really think about it nobody is going to really care.  We don’t care who makes the product. We only care about the individual products themselves not who makes it.  Sure the main brand brings trust but I’m going to eat Fig Newtons and drink Gatorade and could really care less who owns them.  Heck, half the people don’t even know that Pepsi owns Gatorade, further proving my point.  So as long as they keep the individual brand names strong then this won’t matter to 99% of the world except in the part of the world were Russian is spoken.

Why does Russian matter?  Mondelez in Russian sounds very close to the word for “blowjob” in which actually could improve sales quite a bit.