Arose by any other name

By now you've probably heard about Willis Group Holdings Ltd., the world's third-largest insurance firm, acquiring the naming rights to the Sears Tower as part of a tenancy deal that includes 140,000 square feet of space within the building. Odds are, unless you work for Willis Group, you think this is dumb.

Willis Group is well within its rights to purchase naming rights, of course. And it's easy to see why the building's owners would be happy to make a little money off the name for a change, given that Sears hasn't occupied office space in the building since 1992. But does Willis really think that people are going to drop the old name and start calling it the Willis Tower just because they say so? Because we aren't.

It's the same reason why naming rights for Wrigley Field aren't really as valuable as you might think. Who is going to stop calling it Wrigley Field? Plenty of people still call US Cellular Field "Comiskey," and that park doesn't have half the cachet that Wrigley does. Aon rather famously acquired the naming rights for what was once the Standard Oil Building (and then the Amoco Building) in 1999, but despite the Aon Center's height, there are really two skyscrapers in Chicago that people pay much attention to - the Sears and the Hancock. They're the two that stand out from the skyline, they have the antennae, etc. No one is going to start calling them something else. If someone bought the naming rights to the Eiffel Tower, would anyone stop calling it that? What if the naming rights were bought to the Golden Gate Bridge? These aren't things that people are going to change on.

When I was at Northwestern, the students still called the dining halls "SAGA" even though that company hadn't been the food provider in a decade or so. For all I know, they still do. And you're talking about a student body that more or less completely turns over every four years. No one who lives in this city now is going to stop calling it the Sears Tower any time soon. If I were Willis, I would have asked if I could pay a little less and not bother with the naming rights. On the other hand, maybe they're thinking long-term; by 2050 maybe the new name will have caught on.