Under the title,  “It Takes a Community … to Build a Brand” Ellefson wrote about the proper ways to refer to the product. And that’s by always putting the words “Microsoft Dynamics” in front of letters such as GP, NAV, SL, AX and CRM and not referring to them as Great Plains, Navision, Solomon and Axapta. I think the problem is that the letters, coupled with the words Microsoft Dynamics, don’t serve to identify the products when compared to their counterparts and that’s the reason the old names hang on – the new ones haven’t worked well. (This obviously does not apply to the CRM element in the product line.) The problem remains that Great Plains was the only midmarket financial package that achieved widespread recognition and I’ve always felt that the change to Dynamics plus letters early in the 2000s obscured the others. Good brand names are usually simple and that trail of Microsoft Dynamics plus letters isn’t simple. Imagine if General Motors had taken is historical (some now dead) brands and insisted on General Motors Oldsmobile, General Motors Plymouth and General Motors Chevrolet. That would have left us with like “Not your father’s General Motors Oldsmobile” and  “Today’s General Motors Chevy Trucks”. Catchy, huh?