Story in brief:
With global aspirations, Bell Atlantic was overdue for a name change... and thought about it in 1997 when they acquired NYNEX, but backed off. In 2000, acquisition of GTE provided another opportunity.

Strategically, renaming was a no-brainer. That doesn't make it easy. Three agencies were engaged and 8000 names looked at before Verizon, from a 1997 list, cleared.

Credits:
C.E.O. - As co-CEOs, Charles R. Lee and Ivan Seidenberg share the credit.
Naming - Lippincott & Margulies, Landor and DeSola Group were all involved.
Identity design -Landor Associates designed the red V and black wordmark. DeSola Group designed the red Z and the implementation.

First Impressions:
Although many people love to hate the name, it is technically functional, effective and personally I find it appealing.

The logo is a different matter. Because the V and Z compete for both attention and esthetic influence, the mark itself is cluttered; it tends to degrade rather than enhance anything it appears on. A lesser concern: consistency is problematic, in both shape and color. In horizontal spaces, the V moves to the left, resulting in a different shape and relationship. Red and black look great on a white field (like the trucks) but in reverse, the mark collapses: the white forms 'pop' while the red ones recede, leaving us with 'veri on.' For reverse applications, the all-white version works better.

The mark has been further prostituted by use of the V in advertising as merely a checkmark, robbing it of more imaginative significance (and distorting its shape in the process.)

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