XfinityCopied

In February 2010 Comcast announced that it would rebrand its TV, internet and telephone services as Xfinity. Comcast's own announcement, made around its earnings call, called Xfinity the new brand for its technology platform and products: as the brand launched in each market, products would become Xfinity TV, Xfinity Voice and Xfinity Internet, while the company itself remained Comcast.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the scale of the rollout. The name would first appear in ads around the Winter Olympics in Philadelphia and ten other markets before spreading to Comcast's other franchise areas. Comcast would emphasise Xfinity in advertising and on 24,000 service trucks and thousands of employee uniforms, and the name would eventually appear on the TV guide, websites and customer bills. Customers' email addresses would not change.

Comcast's stated reasoning was about pace. Its announcement said entertainment was shifting from the living room to anytime, anywhere, and that it would keep evolving its products under the Xfinity brand. The Inquirer quoted the company saying the name communicated constant upgrades and innovation, and noted that Cablevision already sold its services under a separate brand, Optimum. A local branding executive told the paper the move amounted to rebundling an improved product.

Reaction was quick and unkind. Days after the announcement InternetNews reported a survey of 511 consumers by the naming firm Strategic Name Development: asked what Xfinity would be a good name for, 38 percent said a gaming console and only 30 percent internet or cable service, while porn site and condoms drew 16 percent each. The firm's president said Comcast was trying to put lipstick on a pig, covering service complaints with a new name. Comcast's operations chief, in a company blog post, described Xfinity as the culmination of years of work on a platform with more than 100 HD channels, around 20,000 on-demand choices and much faster internet.

Nearly two years later the Inquirer checked in. Comcast said the campaign had been a success, with 47 percent more customers willing to consider its products now that they carried the Xfinity name, and it was putting the brand on a new entertainment complex in South Philadelphia, Xfinity Live. Marketing academics were less convinced: one said his graduate class agreed the change made no sense and that the name sounded like Infiniti; another argued that, unlike Verizon's FiOS, Xfinity did not stand for anything and was just a label.

The critics' suspicion, that a fresh name was standing in for better service, never fully went away. But a product brand did give Comcast a fresh start with customers without touching the corporate name investors know.

As architecture, though, the split is clean: one corporate name for investors, one product name for customers.