What’s Up With That? #80: Video killed the RadioShack

My long-ago former employer RadioShack (to illustrate how long ago it was that I worked for them, the name was still two discrete words back then) is rebranding itself as “The Shack.”

Aside from the potential conflicts with other businesses (the Joe’s Crab Shack restaurant chain comes immediately to mind) and celebrities (namely, a certain NBA center who recently joined the Cleveland Cavaliers), this seems like a silly idea to me. I get the fact that “radio” is an old-school communications medium that few in the iPod generation listen to anymore, but the whole notion of a company giving itself a pithy, street-sounding nickname is ridiculous.

Knowing, however, the lemming mentality of American corporations, I find myself wondering whether — if RadioShack… I mean… The Shack’s experiment proves successful — we’ll be seeing any of the following:

  • The Soft
  • The Buy
  • The Gamble
  • The Bucks
  • The Mart
  • The Get
  • The Motors
  • The Cola
  • The Cast

I’d come up with a few more, but I need to visit The Room.

Explore posts in the same categories: Aimless Riffing, Ripped From the Headlines, What's Up With That?, Wonderful World of Advertising

2 Comments on “What’s Up With That? #80: Video killed the RadioShack”

  1. Alan Says:

    “Radio Shack… You’ve got answers, we’ve got blank stares.”

  2. SwanShadow Says:

    Alan: I must have waited on you. 😉


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


%d bloggers like this: