Deadly Zika virus could force Tata to rebrand new car

The new Tata Zica picked a cute name at a bad time.

It’s a bad time to be called Zica – even if it’s a car we are talking about and not the deadly virus that’s gone global.

Zica is a new hatchback from Indian carmaker Tata’s stable, while the mosquito-borne virus that has gone global is called Zika. But who cares about spelling when they both sound the same?

Such is the panic over the similarity that Tata is reviewing the name –  even though its origins are innocuous enough. Zica is short for “zippy car.” But no amount of shouting that from the rooftops can help now, it seems.

“The decision to name our car happened many months back when we could not have foreseen any of the recent events. In view of the recent developments, we are now evaluating the situation,” Minari Shah, Tata’s head of corporate communications, was quoted as saying in the Guardian.

Rebranding is often undertaken by corporates for better impact, and Tech in Asia has written about several such startups.

For instance, Hutbitat, a big data real estate search engine for Australian properties, rebranded to Homekoala after realising that people had trouble understanding the original name and remembering it thereafter.

Sometimes when a business expands into new markets or domains, a company’s original name may begin to feel ill-suited.

Startups like Near and Inshorts were called AdNear and News in Shorts before they shed the first words in their names. Few may remember that real estate portal CommonFloor, which was recently acquired by online classifieds site Quikr, was once called Apna Ilaka (“Our Neighborhood” in Hindi). Rebranding obviously worked well in these cases and the new names stuck.

But the Tata Zica seems to have been caught off guard by the virus.

Launching soon

The Zica is to be exhibited to the public for the first time at Auto Expo 2016 in New Delhi later this week. The car is expected to be launched soon after.

With prominent character lines on the sides and creases around the body, it has been called sporty and one of the better-looking Tata cars. The Zica’s entry-level model is expected to be priced below US$5,800.