By Liz Hoffman and Rachel Louise Ensign
What is Truist? It isn't the name of an artificial sweetener or
a misspelled word in Shakespearean English, as some on the internet
have posited.
It's the new name of the nation's sixth-largest retail bank.
BB&T Corp. and SunTrust Banks Inc., which announced plans to
merge in February, rebranded the combined entity on Wednesday as
Truist Financial Corp.
Not everyone approves. Among more than 1,700 voters in a Twitter
poll conducted by trade publication American Banker, 11% said they
loved the new name; 68% hated it.
"It sounds like a pharmaceutical drug, not something I would be
happy to have on my checks," said Cory D. Raines, a lawyer in
Atlanta who is a SunTrust customer. "Did y'all do any focus
groups?" The bank, in fact, did many.
The reception online, said Dontá Wilson, Truist's incoming chief
digital and client experience officer, has been "overwhelmingly
neutral." That leaves an opening for the company to make a good
impression with its products and customer service, Mr. Wilson
said.
Bank mergers of the past have often combined the partners'
names, as in the 2000 merger that created JPMorgan Chase & Co.,
or chosen the stronger of the two brands, as in the 1998 merger of
Norwest Corp. with Wells Fargo & Co.
Truist took another approach, following a path blazed -- not
without some public umbrage -- by companies such as Verizon
Communications Inc. and Mondelez International Inc. It hired
consultants to help make up a new name. The practice has expanded
as companies seek out novel ways to stand out.
"You basically need to find a word that means nothing in every
language, " said Andrew Essex, chief executive of Plan A, a
collection of marketing agencies that has helped companies come up
with new names. (Plan A didn't work on Truist.)
Plus, Mr. Essex said, you need a name "that is also capable of
evoking pleasant feelings and hasn't been taken by an internet
squatter."
BB&T and SunTrust needed a name that helped them shed any
reputation of being stodgy old banks without alienating employees
and customers.
The banks already had some well-established names, of course.
BB&T's can be traced back to Alpheus Branch, who co-founded the
bank in North Carolina after the Civil War. The name SunTrust was
the product of a 1985 tie-up between Trust Company of Georgia and
SunBanks Inc.
Even though the significantly larger BB&T acquired SunTrust,
the deal was billed as a merger of equals. That required many
concessions toward equality, including choosing a new name and
headquarters city.
Home will be Charlotte, N.C., geographically between SunTrust's
Atlanta headquarters and BB&T's in Winston-Salem. The combined
bank boasts $324 billion in deposits and a branch network across
the southeastern U.S.
In the new name, the "tru" part is meant to evoke "staying true"
to the banks' legacy of taking care of clients, Mr. Wilson
explained.
And the "-st"? That means "standing for better" communities and
services, he said.
In a video announcing the name, a diverse cast of mostly young
people stroll, ride scooters and clutch coffee cups in the middle
of a Main Street with an Anytown, U.S.A., feel. Nobody sets foot in
an actual bank branch.
Tori Miner of Interbrand, the firm hired to help come up with a
name, said in a video that it gathered suggestions from employees
through its "More Than a Name" game. The video shows them wearing
name tags and sorting through flashcards of animals like eagle and
elephant. One scene has a white board that reads "loss of
identity," among other things.
The naming process was a "great balance of creativity and
strategy, of science and art, and of the heart and the mind," said
Ms. Miner, whose title at Interbrand is director of verbal
identity.
Plenty of other companies have consulted their way into similar
reboots. Mondelez, which was spun out of Kraft in 2012, chose a
resilient, if in some eyes regrettable, portmanteau of "monde," the
Latin word for "world, " and an etymologically vague adaptation of
"delicious." The influential investor Nelson Peltz once said it
"sounds like a disease."
Sometimes it goes the other way. When Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
was looking for a name for its new consumer bank in 2016, a
consulting firm suggested Muni, a play on "money" that embraces
Silicon Valley's occasional flexibility with spelling.
Bank executives awkwardly pointed out that they already had a
bustling "muni" department -- selling municipal bonds on behalf of
local governments. Goldman chose the name Marcus.
Another example: In its infancy, Google was called BackRub.
"People made fun of 'Google' when they first heard of it," said
Mr. Essex of Plan A. "At a certain point, things just harden into
permanence. As long as it doesn't mean human sacrifice in another
language, it's going to be OK."
Truist has a long way to go until it is lodged in consumers'
brains. When BB&T and SunTrust announced their new name,
investors flooded bank analysts with unsolicited emails mostly
complaining about it. "If they had named it BB Trust, then it could
have been a jazz guitarist," said Mike Mayo, a bank-stock analyst
at Wells Fargo.
Nathan Arthur, the 40-year-old owner of the @Truist Twitter
handle, was among those surprised. For years, friends suggested
that he try to sell it, but he couldn't fathom the commercial
potential, even after he sold the corresponding website,
Truist.com, where he blogged about family, politics and
technology.
The handle @TruistFinancial was registered on Twitter this
month.
"I didn't think anyone would want it," said Mr. Arthur, a
software engineer in Cleveland. "But here we are."
--Charlie McGee contributed to this article.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 13, 2019 18:34 ET (22:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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