CHICAGO—As recently reported in GlobeSt.com, the international real estate firm formerly known as Jones Lang LaSalle has decided to brand itself simply as JLL. And Charles Doyle, the firm's chief marketing officer, now tells GlobeSt.com that the rise of social media on the Internet and the spread of JLL throughout the globe, especially into nations where English is not the dominant tongue, made such a change necessary.

“It's been a decision we haven't taken lightly or made quickly,” he says, but with so many consumers and businesses now accessing real estate information from their mobile devices, JLL wanted to shrink its name and reduce visual clutter on these now-ubiquitous small screens.

“The space you get to express yourself on is very small,” he adds, a challenge JLL had to confront when it created its first apps on iTunes about two years ago. “The mobile world was sort of imposing itself on us.”

Company officials had already begun to consider the old name a bit out of date for a global business. Although the firm has roots that go back centuries, it was officially formed in the 1990s by the merger of the British firm Jones Lang Wootten and the American firm LaSalle Partners.

“Since then we've acquired about 50 companies in 75 countries,” says Doyle. And some of the company's new employees, clients and partners found the old name a bit difficult to properly pronounce. For example, the company ran into trouble in Asia, where speakers of Mandarin Chinese struggled to come up with Chinese characters that represented the company.

“Fortunately, JLL was already in wide use,” he adds, “and we already had disciplined brand management. We did a survey about how journalists wrote about the company,” and found that the use of the name JLL had long been commonplace. This should make the shift “more of a managed evolution.”

JLL made a special effort to test the new designation with speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and some others. It was not an absolutely perfect fit with all of the dozens of languages that JLL does business in, Doyle admits, “but they all came back and said they prefer the shorter name.”

And JLL will continue to press the rebranding effort into new directions. Although it has not been awarded yet, company officials would like to use the domain name .jll instead of jll.com, hopefully getting all those mobile device users even more accustomed to the JLL label.

But the company will keep the old label on personal business cards for a period of time, and on contracts and invoices it will retain Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. as a legal name. “For a while, the two names will have to coexist,” Doyle says.

Instant Insights /

Mobile Devices Spurred JLL Name Change

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