The Death of the Sci Fi Channel: Or, Semper Sy Fy!

Just this morning the Sci Fi channel became Sy Fy, which you can be assured will be back as Sci Fi not long after that. Just about everyone who has heard about this wondered “What branding company is sleeping with who over there?” You cannot pretend to like this moniker. There are reasons for this change—though none make sense. I don’t know why they did it, but as someone who’s watched thousands of companies make change for no reason, I can make some guesses:

1. They needed a slogan and they’d run out of creativity (the New York Times called their new name an experimental laxative; that's pretty creative). Sci Fi conjured up the gag “Imagine Greater” because they want to be like Apple (“Think Different”). With a mindless slogan on their hands, they used sleight of hand and imagined a greater-than-dumb trademark name for the network so people would mock it rather than their ludicrous tagline.

2. Just like Headline News is now HLN, Learning Channel became TLC, American Movie Classics fell into AMC, Game Show Network calls itself GSN, or Outdoor Channel morphed into VS., it’s bad form now to have more than a few letters in your name. Sy Fy is fewer than Sci Fi. The History Channel even changed to just History last year; it would have been THC were it not been for similarities to the ingredient in pot. OXYGEN would have been OXY yet it sounds like oxycodone and better still, Bill Mays owns the prefix outright! This whole shortening routine got more bizarre since E! Channel’s True Hollywood Story is now called THS!

Then there is truTV, which is Court TV’s newish name. Know what? I just found out it has no content from the late Truman Capote! As for Spike, does Spike Lee know that it will be Spi soon, I’m sure?

3. Change is not good all the time and still people get antsy all the time. Sci Fi wants to program more than science-fiction shows. So, like Grandma used to say: Nu? There are subtle ways to manage this—for instance tell people, “We’re still Sci Fi but we have expanded into newer dimensions!” The concept of expansion without screaming is foreign to corporate monoliths (Sy part of the NBC Universal “family”).

4. A branding company sauntered in and told the suits it’s time to grow with the times. That happens a lot, and quite needlessly. Slick branders speak a hi-toned language to make Senior VPS, all of whom are worried about their jobs, go “Man we gotta do this now!” I harken back to truTV, which has fared horribly since the change. You don’t know this because no one watches it—tru is a trailer trash version of reality TV. Or, as they pointed out: it’s “Not Reality. It’s Actuality.” Both of these networks think its audience is the lowest of common denominators. And oh yeah,the former Court TV laid off over 150 people last week. That, my friends, is tru(e).

5. Sy Sims is funding the rebrand. That explains Sy. As for the Fy suffix, one of the Sci Fi chiefs was in the military and doesn’t know how to spell Semper Fi. That’s all I got.

I told my closest pal about Sy Fy and he said he wished he could have been in the room when the decision was made. Since he’s not in marketing, I wondered why. “So I could have seen the look on the faces of people who heard the top person say ‘Great idea’.”

What can we learn from this mess? Just because someone wants to do something ‘different’ or ‘greater than’ what existed before, your job as a marketing person is to step in with the loudest voice on record and suggest that aybe we should reconsider. Or better yet: “Do we need to change this much?” Even if the business isn’t skyrocketing this second, there is that one reality: a brand that’s known worldwide.

Alternatively, you can remind the doofuses how far Tropicana fell after the brand tossed a well-loved carton design this winter, after which it lost more market share than ever in history. When asked why 2009 was a downer, a spokesperson pointed to the carton: “Draw a line from there.”

Sometimes decisions are drawn with no rhyme or reason. You can get the rhythm back.

……This is the first of a series of Bad Pitch Blog post about brands run amok……Twittering @laermer .