GM Kills Chevy Name

The Twitterverse was aflutter this morning over a New York Times story about an internal memo at Chevrolet stating that the company would stop referring to the brand by the nickname “Chevy.” That set off a firestorm of #Fail notices — basically internet jargon for, “How stupid is that?”

Of course, as is often the case with these things, the online outrage seemed to be misplaced. The memo was meant for global communications internally, not for actual consumer-facing communications here in the U.S. It seems in some of the 130 countries outside North America, the name Chevy is unknown and it confuses GM employees overseas.

The company wasn’t going to alter its website — with multiple uses of “Chevy” — or official Twitter accounts like @ChevyVolt.

At least that’s what we thought.
Even after an official statement from GM on the matter, we were unclear on where the company actually stood on the use of the term. Was it just internal communications, or would consumers no longer see Chevy on brochures and elsewhere?

We exchanged tweets with a few of GM’s communications pros, and one of them, Joe LaMuraglia, confirmed that the company would use the name Chevrolet instead of Chevy in official advertising, promotions and other uses going forward, but current placements of the name Chevy would remain.

The one thing the hysteria proved is that Chevy still has some die-hard fans online. Hopefully, Chevrolet will, too.