On spending money for a name
Perhaps of some historical interest, regarding payments to PR agencies: I was at SD-Scicon when EDS bought it. The staff were gathered in a meeting to be told that some large sum of money had been paid to a PR agency to assess the competing merits of various possible names for the company. Said PR agency declared that the best mix of reputation and market presence (my apologies for the jargon) was "EDS-Scicon". And thus were we named.
So far, so irrelevant. But almost exactly a year later, we had an almost identical meeting to tell us that the exact same exercise had this time produced the answer that we should be called...
...EDS.
Beyond satire!