Mondelez? Puh-leeze.

Has a crafty committee, once again, created a camel?

Mondelez: If you’re a Kraft shareholder you still have time to stop that word, Mahn-duh-leez, from becoming the new parent company name for fav brands like Nabisco, Cadbury and Oreo. Later this May, Kraft Foods will ask its owners’ permission to change its name to Mondelez International.

There are slews of consultants and observers already calling it a dunderheaded idea, and chattering about all the branding rules being broken: a name with no equity, no apparent meaning, difficult even to pronounce…

And then you hear how they actually picked it: through a global employees’ suggestion box. And not only that, they actually combined two entries to pick that winner: ‘Monde’ meaning the world, and ‘delez’ being a version of delish.

No, really.

But hey, who knows. Who knows whether chop-sawing the brand of Kraft (using plans drawn up by a committee) will work, rather than failing as spectacularly as expected. Stranger things have happened.

Branding rules are rules for good reason. But rules can be broken for good reason. And rule-breakers often create success stories.

Besides, as long as the Oreos taste the same, who really cares about the nonsense word on the corner of the package?

The C4:

1. Kraft Foods plans to ask its shareholders’ permission to rebrand the parent company of Oreo, Nabisco, Trident and Tang as “Mondelez International.”
2. That’s trading away a trademark that’s worth billions and known round the world. It’s replacing it with a word that no one has ever heard before, and that you need to be coached to pronounce correctly.
3. But who knows. If they’re smart with their marketing and they keep delivering top products maybe the Mondelezians will have the last laugh.
4. A company’s name is always the lynchpin of its branding. It pays to know what works and what doesn’t in naming a company, and when it’s OK to break the rules (next C4 Blast teaches just that!).