Does Changing Brand Names Fix Bad Publicity?
Cowboys herding cats. Fred Astaire dancing with vacuums. Office workers getting tackled by a hefty linebacker… FROM THE SAN DIEGO TRIBUNE One name, but the two are not the same I Corporate monikers can cause mix-ups Bruce V. Bigelow STAFF WRITER Jim Cable was wearing a shirt embroidered with his company’s logo at his daughter’s first-grade open house last year when another dad angrily confronted him. This was around the time San Diego’s Peregrine Systems first disclosed “accounting irregularities” that triggered a sell¬off in the software company’s stock. Now in bankruptcy reorganization, the publicly traded software developer has been at the center of a corporate accounting scandal for more than a year. But Cable is the chief executive of Peregrine Semiconductor — a privately held maker of wireless semiconductors with no ties to Peregrine Systems. The testy encounter, Cable said, “was along the lines of, ‘I made an investment in you guys and now I lost everything because of you.’ “
