Imagine you are an up-and-coming drug-lord. What do you need? Guns, police insiders, a badass nickname like… Barbie?

La Barbie is a drug-trafficking kingpin now sitting in jail in Mexico. The American born and raised Édgar Valdez Villareal, as La Barbie is formally known, apparently got the moniker from his Texas high school football coach because his blonde hair and blue eyes made him a dead ringer for a Barbie doll. Despite his cheesy nickname, La Barbie is said to have murdered his way to the top of a large criminal empire, distributing tons of cocaine in the United States and dropping bodies all over Mexico.

Lots of criminals compete these days for more conventional menacing titles. A most-wanted-list published by the Mexican government includes names like El Lobo (the wolf), El Jabalí (the wild boar), El Rambo (speaks for itself) and Chico Malo (bad boy). Even in the world of international crime, a good name makes a reputation.

Today, reputation – at least the corporate kind – is viewed as a strategic asset that can be leveraged to gain competitive advantage. A safety buffer that can be called upon to protect against negative news. A stock of organizational equity that can be increased by engaging with the stakeholder community. And it all rests on the good name of the brand.

Corporate brand names are chosen then with the best of intentions. When leadership settled on the name Enron, no one’s goal was to pick a name which would come to be synonymous with corporate fraud, abuse and corruption. In fact, up until the scandal broke, Enron enjoyed a reputation for fairness and honesty. And Fortune magazine named Enron ‘America’s Most Innovative Company’ for six consecutive years.

In today’s scandal ridden global markets however, a brand identity, name, and logo has become the company’s public face. And choosing correctly is critical. That’s because while not everyone knows the name of the CEO, people always remember the name of a good brand. Changing that name in order to revitalize the brand, or to distance itself from a bad reputation, or even to make it sound more hip is also not always a good idea.

• Radio Shack attempted to modernize its image and appear more hip by rebranding as ‘The Shack’. Unfortunately the image of shopping in a remote dilapidated cabin did little to save the brand.
• The SciFi Channel in an attempt to create a more specific, text-friendly name, chose ‘SyFy’ which it turns out is a slang word for syphilis. Not exactly what they were aiming for.
• When Andersen Consulting cut ties with Arthur Andersen, they did the worst thing a company could do – they let a marketing consultant choose the new brand name. The result sounds like the quintessential, meaningless, ‘big corporation’ name. It was supposedly inspired by the phrase ‘accent on the future’, but it tells the customer nothing. The change cost Andersen/Accenture an estimated $100 million to execute and was regarded as one of the worst rebrandings in corporate history.

In some instances however, one could argue that a name change would have been in order. French carmaker Citroën had a difficult time conquering the US market, in part because the English translation ‘lemon’ carries the connotation of a new car that turns out to be defective. Mercedes-Benz also entered the Chinese market under the brand name ‘Bensi’ which it turns out in Chinese means ‘rush to die’. Not quite the reputation either company was intending to capitalize on.

Google recently decided to restructure their businesses and adopt the umbrella name of Alphabet. Their argument being that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. The name Google only represents one aspect, albeit very large, of what they are doing. And in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit unconventional to stay relevant. The change seeks to better exemplify and distinguish their areas of innovation, and give them room to do more than just Google.

Up until now, Google has built incredible corporate value around their brand name. Playing with that identity could prove a risky move. It could decrease the overall value of the brand itself and eventually render it irrelevant. Will Alphabet turn out to be the right decision then? Only time will tell. After all, even with careful, well thought-out consideration, mistakes in branding can have damaging effects from which companies sometimes never fully recover.