Renaming from Gulliver to IDOM, and expanding into mobility (2016)

Freeing the company from the name of a single business

The heart of this decision goes beyond swapping one sign — the corporate name — for another. A company that had raced to a record-fast listing on the single business of used-car buying deliberately dropped from its corporate name the very word that symbolized that success: Gulliver. What President Yusuke Hatori chose was not to let the whole company be bound to the name of its single strongest business. As the business branched into new-car dealerships, overseas ventures and subscriptions, it can be read as a choice to abstract the name of the vessel one notch and prepare for the next round of diversification.

The price of taking a strong brand out of the corporate name, though, is not small. What consumers touch day to day is still Gulliver, and it takes time for IDOM to put down broad roots; some questioned the obscurity of a coined word. Even so, the decision to free the corporate name from a single business was also a statement of how far this company intended to widen its trade. Keeping its origin as a buying specialist on the storefront brand, while raising as a company a name that means to keep challenging — the 2016 renaming was a choice that folded that duality into a single name.