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Repositioning challenge: What happens when Enron is ready for a new company name search?

ATLANTA, May 9, 2002. A new dawn? Newspaper editorials -- the coalmine canary of public sentiment -- are beginning to take up the mantle of questioning the opacity of the emperor's new nomenclature.

In an Atlantic Journal-Constitution editorial opinion piece which maintains that a new name won't cleanse Enron, they note the following:

If recent history is any guide, Enron's new name will come from a computer. It will not be a real word. It could just as easily be produced by blindly striking a keyboard.

Or, some clever marketing group will concoct a near-word name like Verizon or Lucent, two companies that once went by names that had great equity -- GTE/Bell Atlantic and Bell Labs. And look where it got 'em: Verizon is down 30 percent from its high, and Lucent, which sold for $60 a share less than two years ago, closed Friday at a little above $4.

Add "Enron" to the above list of "near-word" names that are so close, and yet so far, from providing a satisfying jolt of meaning. As Stewart Copeland once crooned, "there's a pattern here to see, and it's point will soon be clear to me..."