Before Truist was announced, BB&T-SunTrust regularly made the point that it was to be “A merger of equals”. So the first step would be to look for commonality between the names Branch Banking and Trust / Sun Trust. Then their lawyers would have told them they can’t trademark Trust, but if they added a single letter and constructed a name that wasn’t being used in finance, then legal would sign off on it. Hence Truist. That’s it, a day’s work, allowing for half a day of procrastination. But not even Interband can charge hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for a half day’s work. So PowerPoints with gratuitous charts, de rigueur venns, arrows and bullets and triangles, bankerly stock photos, and inspirationally obfuscating consultant-speak were constructed. In the interest of due diligence, a full exploration and billable hours, alternative names were presented. Focused gropes ensued. Countless interviews of stakeholders were conducted, the results of which had no impact on the name, as the name was destined to be a variation on Trust before the process even began. Why? It’s the easiest sell to the internal audiences at the two banks:

“Both banks have Trust in their names, as do countless other banks, so we know it’s a banky word. And Trust is positive. And TRUiST preserves all of the letters, in order, of Trust. And it’s only one letter away from Trust”.

Sold, to the only audience this name needed to appeal to get paid, the internal audience.

I don’t have inside information that backs up my above account, just 22 years of experience in naming.  But this is what happened, you can take it to the bank.

From the book “Shoot the Puppy: A Survival Guide to the Curious Jargon of Modern Life“, by linguist Tony Thorne, Head of the Language Centre at Kings College London:

Vanillacide  

I first heard this bizword when I shared a microphone recently with a Californian, Steve Manning. The occasion was a BBC radio discussion of the ongoing craze for re-branding companies, something Steve, boss of the US naming agency, Igor (as in the doctor’s assistant in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein), is an expert on.
Vanillacide is an updated version of the old notions of death-by-committee, or the death-of-a-thousand-cuts by which new and creative proposals are diluted and diluted until they become universally acceptable – and wholly unoriginal.
Agencies like Igor pitch new names to companies looking for a change of image. In Steve’s own words, ‘The best way to get 100 people to sign off on a name is to come up with something that has no meaning and offends no one – the surest pathway to vanillacide.’
This example of what used to be called a ‘portmanteau word’, known to linguists as a ‘blend’, is formed by bolting together the suffix of ‘suicide’ (if you think of it as self-destruction) or ‘homicide’ (if you think it’s a crime) and the slang use of ‘vanilla’ meaning insipid, conformist or harmless, which probably began with the gay and feminist movements in the late 1970s.
It’s not only progressives such as Steve Manning who perceive a general tendency in global corporate capitalism towards a deadening uniformity. Insider ironists now refer to ‘blanding’ and ‘blandwidth’. Timid, over-systematised decision-makers are accused scornfully of ‘blanding out’.
Doubts about conformism coincide with growing doubts about the value of using focus groups to test new names, products or services. There is, however, a trick for getting round the play-safe herd instinct displayed by committees or focus groups: it’s sometimes referred to as ‘wild-carding’ and consists of giving your client a list containing your favoured suggestions, plus at least a couple of ultra-radical, even crazy solutions.
In rejecting the most extreme, they are likely to ‘compromise’ on something that is still fairly daring. It might not work for everyone, but the Californian corrective to vanillacide is to junk consensus-seeking and embrace go-with-the-gut antimethodology, or, to use another trendy biz-term, ‘corporate voodoo’.