Alfa Romeo changes ‘illegal’ Milano name to ‘Junior’ for new SUV

Less than a week ago, a new Alfa Romeo was born with its name linked to Milan, the city where the company was founded in June 1910. It’s an important new model for the Italian brand, the first one with a fully electric powertrain, but the Italian government had to spoil it by declaring the use of the name ‘Milano’ as illegal.

Against the law!
Why? Because of some law that was enacted to prevent ‘misleading’ associations with the country (even Italian-sounding names). In the case of this new SUV, the fact that it is not going to be made in Italy but in Poland means it cannot be called Milano. Industry Minister Adolfo Urso, angered by the decision not to make the car in the country, stated that ‘a car called Milano cannot be produced in Poland. This is against the law!’.

Why it’s made in Poland
It’s actually the first time that an Alfa Romeo is not primarily made in Italy but Stellantis (which Alfa Romeo is part of) has their reasons. Making the SUV at their Polish factory (originally set up by Fiat) will be cheaper than making it in Italy. The savings are important to ensure that the pricing will be competitive and being a business and not a government, that’s obviously more important to them than patriotism.

But a law is a law and while Alfa Romeo believed that the name meets all legal requirements, it is not going to waste time battling the government on the matter. “There are issues much more important than the name of a new car. Alfa Romeo has decided to change it from Milano to Junior in the spirit of promoting mutual understanding,” a statement said.

It’s more than just changing a name as, at this late stage when the new model is ready to enter the market, the badges would have been made along with catalogues and manuals, all with the Milano name. These will have to be discarded and time will have to be spent changing the name to Junior in all digital media and communications.

Added publicity for new model
Of course, the smart marketing people will see this as being a ‘bonus’ in the launch as an expected dose of attention has been gained. And those discarded items with the ‘illegal’ name could well become collectors’ items too.

“The Alfa Romeo team would like to thank the public for the positive feedback, the Italian dealer network for their support, journalists for the enormous media attention given to the new car and the Italian government for the free publicity brought on by this debate,” the company says.

Alfa Romeo had chosen ‘Milano’ as the name for its new model to pay tribute to the city where its story began. In fact, it had even asked the public for their opinion on the name and received positive response. It was not the first time the public was consulted; in 1966, ‘Duetto’ was also chosen by the public for the Spider 1600.

“We are perfectly aware that this moment will remain engraved in the history of the brand. It’s a great responsibility but, at the same time, it’s an exciting moment. The choice of the name Junior is completely natural, as it is strongly linked to the history of the brand and has been among our favourites and among the public’s favourites since the beginning,” said Jean-Philippe Imparato, CEO of Alfa Romeo.

“As a team, we are choosing once again to share our passion for the brand and make the product and our customers the priority. We decided to change the name, even though we know that we are not required to do so, because we want to preserve the positive emotion that our products have always generated and avoid any type of controversy. The attention to our new sports compact that we’ve received the past few days is quite exciting as we had an unprecedented number of visits to the online configurator, even causing the website to crash for a couple hours,” he added.

‘Junior’ also has a history
Coming up with a new name quickly was not that difficult as there was already a list of favourites from the public’s suggestions, and one of the popular names was Junior. It’s a name that has been used before in the 1960s so it is in keeping with the brand’s history.

Following the success of the Giulia and its Giulia Sprint GT coupe version, the goal for Alfa Romeo was to attract a new, younger audience for an exclusive car without excessive purchase and running costs.

This led to the GT 1300 Junior being launched in September 1966. Despite the absence of the name Giulia (initially), it became the leader of a new Alfa Romeo generation. Similar versions of the Spider range would also be identified with the Junior. With sales of over 92,000 units, the GT 1300 Junior soon became the overall bestseller in the line-up and a true status symbol of its time.

It happened to Volvo too
This isn’t the first time that a carmaker has been forced to change its new model’s name – and at the very last moment too. In 1995, Volvo had planned to name a new compact model ‘S4’ for the sedan version and F4 for the stationwagon (the ‘F’ referring to ‘family’).

However, while all the preparations for the launch went ahead with everything (press materials, posters, keychains, etc) using S4 and F4, there were serious discussions between companies. Audi also had a S4 so that had to be dropped but more amusing was that Ferrari objected to F4, believing that buyers would confuse the new Volvo with their F40 (which had already ended production in 1992 anyway)! It never became a big issue (unlike when Volkswagen went to court to stop Suzuki using GTI) and Volvo quickly decided to switch to S40 and V40 (‘V’ for versatility).

And Mercedes-Benz too
Mercedes-Benz was also forced to change its intended name for a new model at almost the last moment. This was in 1997 when it was ready to launch the first generation of what was known as the ‘M-Class’. The carmaker was going to badge it as ‘M-320’ which was in line with its model designation style then.

When BMW heard about this, it wrote to Mercedes-Benz to express its unhappiness with the use of ‘M’. In BMW’s view, ‘M’ (which it today calls the ‘most powerful letter in the world’) was closely associated with its high-performance models and there would be confusion if Mercedes-Benz used a similar type of designation for its new SUV.

As a compromise, it was agreed that the new SUV range could be referred to as ‘M-Class’ but the model badge would be ‘ML-320’. Of course, in 2006, Mercedes-Benz decided to stop using the ‘M’ designator (which was believed to have referred to multi-purpose) and came out with an entirely new model designation scheme that changed ‘ML’ to ‘GLE’.

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