This is a Disaster: SciFi rebrands as Syfy
By Laurel Sutton
From our friend Nancy Friedman comes this disturbing news:
Syfy The New York Times reports that cable television’s Sci Fi Channel has been renamed Syfy. The pronunciation remains “sigh-fie.” The new slogan is “Imagine Greater,” and the old SciFi.com website is moving to Syfy.com. The new name was developed by an internal team with the help of San Francisco-based Landor Associates, which is famous (or infamous) for creating corporate names like Lucent, Agilent, and Accenture.
Thanks for nothing, Landor!
Seriously, I can’t imagine a worse choice. “Sci fi”, as a shorthand for “science fiction”, has been around since 1954 and is universally recognized as the designator for that category. Over the years, people have objected to it as a lightweight, silly-sounding nickname that demeans the content (Harlan Ellison, for one, always insists on pronouncing it “skiffy”); a lot of writers prefer “speculative fiction“, which is a broader category, but perhaps more accurate. Science fiction is all about asking “what if?”; Syfy makes me ask “WTF?”
The blogosphere is full of reactions this morning, but I think this one is my favorite.
FYI, “This is a disaster” is now my current cliché fangirl overreaction to anything relating to science fiction. I stole it from this discussion amongst Trekkers about how putting Scotty in the navigator’s seat on a Star Trek cake was the worst thing ever. The title of the article is “Star Trek Cake Upsets Nerds”. This is a disaster, indeed!
Tags: naming disaster, Sci Fi, Syfy, Syfy name, Syfy naming
April 29th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Laurel,
I disagreed with you on the name “tangle” awhile back (http://www.semanticargument.com/?p=244) but just saw this and am happy to report a complete eye-to-eye experience. And I love “what if?” versus “WTF?” For what it’s worth, here’s my 2 cents on this…distaster: http://www.semanticargument.com/?p=175.
I also thought it was a little shocking when Landor ducked responsibility for this on their blog. Could very well be that they didn’t have much to do with it, or even that they tried to talk their client out of it. But still seems like a breach of normal agency-client relationship to me…what do you think?
May 4th, 2009 at 11:58 am
Thanks for the comment, Rob – you know, a lot of people thought that the change to SyFy was an April Fool’s joke, but apparently they are still going ahead with this madness. And yes, Landor had to know that word would get around that they were (at least partially) responsible. Seems like good business sense to support the client in their choices, even if you disagree with that choice…not that this has ever happened to any of us in creative services!
July 8th, 2009 at 10:38 am
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