Many of you marketing aficionados are probably aware of Overstock.com’s effort to change the company name to O.co. I have no idea why the change was suggested – much less enacted – but after five months the name change experiment is over.

According to AdAge,

“The online retailer’s president, Jonathon Johnson, said it is stepping back from the O.co name ‘for now,’ though not abandoning it outright. Overstock will still use the O.co name internationally and on mobile efforts, including an iPad app that launches today. And the sign on the “O.co Coliseum,” the home of the Oakland Raiders and the Oakland Athletics, will stay up.

Confused? So were customers. Mr. Johnson said customers responded well to the O.co advertising, but after watching the spots, ‘a good portion’ of those who sought out the website went to O.com, instead of O.co. (O.com is one of the off-the-market single letter domain names still held by ICANN.)

‘We were going too fast and people were confused, which told us we didn’t do a good job,’ Mr. Johnson said. ‘We’re still focused on getting to O.co, just at a slower pace. … We’re not flipping back, we’re just refocusing.’”

Marketing and Ad people tout brand equity as the holy grail of advertising. The idea is a simple one: as a company grows, it builds brand awareness, it wins, retains and pleases customers, their affinity towards the brand increases and over time said company builds brand equity. Based on this equation, I’m not sure why the execs at Overstock.com chose to ditch the brand equity they had built with their brand name to transition to another name. But it was a bad idea.

This brand renaming has been a recent bad trend. We’ve seen this with Netflix, which sought to spin off its DVD business (the heart of its original business) and rename it Qwickster. Netflix fanboys hated this and Netflix quickly (Quicksterishly?) nixed the idea. RadioShack tried it with its The Shack rename and PizzaHut had its own The Hut moment.

Typically when we see an name change like this work, it hinges on moving from a longer name to an acronym. KFC is a good one. DLJ (Donaldson Luffkin Jenrette the private equity firm) is another.

Name changes are tricky things. I’m a big proponent of the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” rule of thumb. Unless there is serious cause to engage in a name change (litigation, consumer confusion with a competitor, etc), do your brand a favor and let your name be. It’s usually not worth the trouble (and the bad press) and it’s a great way to erode the brand equity that your company has spent years earning.

Names are important – but not as important as people knowing who you are and what you do. Focus more on creating great products and services and keeping customers happy and you’ll never be disappointed.