— AB Media Release

As I wrote in my Notes from Drydock post What’s In a Name there are many ways to name a business, one of which is after the founder. This was the case with AllianceBernstein and Sanford C. Bernstein.

There is often a subsequent time (post-founding) in an organization’s evolution where the original name — either founder-based, descriptive, or otherwise — is no longer optimum, and one strategy is to shorten to initials. Think International Business Machines to IBM, American Telephone and Telegraph Company to AT&T, Recreational Equipment Inc. to REI. And then, AllianceBernstein to AB.

See our next post Hutzpah for one way that played out.