By Krystal Hur
Every time he hears about a U.S. company distancing itself from DEI, David Markley winces.
Markley runs a car-parts manufacturing firm in Ohio named Design Engineering Inc.
Yes, he sighs, that's D-E-I.
"You're reading these headlines: 'DEI is wrong,' 'Terrified of the aftermath of DEI,'" said Markley. "It's disheartening when somebody's, like, bashing your baby."
History and pop culture are riddled with examples of the misfortune of sharing a name with a political or societal lightning rod -- or worse. A "Seinfeld" episode revolved around Elaine's efforts to get her boyfriend to change a name he shared with a serial killer. In the movie "Office Space," a character named Michael Bolton struggles with the association with the musician.
The phenomenon routinely crops up in the business world, too. After some consumers mistakenly linked Corona beer to the deadly coronavirus that was then sweeping the globe, beverage giant Constellation Brands felt compelled to issue a public statement in February 2020 insisting its customers weren't confused and were still buying lots of Corona. Delta Air Lines similarly distanced itself from the highly contagious Covid variant of the same name. "We just call it the variant," Delta CEO Ed Bastian told The Wall Street Journal at the time.
The 2024 presidential election put a spotlight on the diversity, equity and inclusion policies that had emerged in recent years as a staple for corporate human-resources departments. Since his return to the White House, President Trump has made eradicating DEI and other so-called "woke" policies a focus.
Trump's targets have extended well beyond diversity initiatives, so companies with DEI in their names aren't the only ones caught in the anti-woke web.
Just ask the folks at the former Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies. The think tank dropped "Gulf of Mexico" from its name after Trump proclaimed in an executive order that the inlet was, henceforth, the Gulf of America.
Nominal ties to Trump's friends can hurt, too.
Some students and alumni from Elon University in North Carolina have lamented on social media that they avoid wearing school gear that has just "Elon" emblazoned on it, afraid that others will mistake them as fans of Elon Musk. The Tesla chief executive's role in the Trump administration has drawn criticism from some Americans.
Markley tries to remind himself that the backlash isn't really against his business. Nevertheless, it stings. One customer recently joked to Markley that he should consider hiring a new public relations firm due to DEI's souring reputation.
This isn't even the first time the company's name has caused confusion. Markley says his business, which sells heat and sound-control equipment primarily to the hot-rod racing industry, used to field phone calls from people asking for Dale Earnhardt Inc., the former race team.
"We finally got over that hump," said Markley. "Then the new DEI came. It's just like, oh, God, not again."
Ricardo Gomez first sensed the coming storm last year, when his restaurant-supply company, DEI Equipment, received a scathing, one-star online review accusing diversity mandates of hurting the U.S. military industrial complex. An employee of Gomez's messaged the reviewer to explain their business sells cookware and cutlery, not advice on human-resource policies. A month and three unanswered emails later, the reviewer's post quietly disappeared from the site.
Gomez says he has no regrets about how he named the company more than 20 years ago. He got the idea from the Latin word "dei," which can mean divine. He recently added that origin story to his website, but still worries prospective customers will see his company's name and assume that it sells diversity ideology instead of restaurant supplies.
"I'm a minority that owns a business -- it's not that I'm against it," said Gomez. "We're very, very careful about doing anything that will offend anybody from either side."
The backlash against DEI -- an umbrella term for policies designed to create more opportunities for minorities and their businesses -- accelerated after the Supreme Court's 2023 decision to overturn affirmative action. The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to quash the use of race in hiring and other decisions.
Some of the nation's largest companies, including Walmart and BlackRock, raced in the opening months of the new administration to demonstrate they were dismantling many of the DEI policies they had wholeheartedly endorsed a few years earlier. Some of those reversals have sparked consumer backlash -- social-media users have staged "economic blackouts" in which they've urged people not to buy from companies such as McDonald's and Target.
Not everyone is backtracking. The Associated Press sued White House officials in February, alleging they took away the publication's access to presidential events following its refusal to change the AP style guidance to acknowledge the Gulf of America.
Others are leaving fraught naming choices to their users.
MapQuest, once the go-to source for driving instructions before navigation systems became popular, recently introduced a tool on its website that allows visitors to specify how they'd like the gulf to appear on a map.
"MapQuest is NOT renaming the Gulf of Mexico," the company wrote on the social-media platform, X. "Not because of politics but because we haven't updated our maps in like 15 years and don't remember how to do it."
Write to Krystal Hur at krystal.hur@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 19, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)
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