(January 30) – “Dean Witter appears to be dead after all,” writes Patrick McGeehan in today’s New York Times.

“Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Company is planning to drop the Dean Witter name from its brand after spending most of the 1990’s keeping alive Dean Witter’s image with grainy ads that featured an actor posing as the firm’s founder, who had died in 1969. Philip J. Purcell, the chairman and chief executive of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, told employees yesterday about the proposed change.”

“A spokeswoman for the firm, Judith Hitchen, said the firm had been considering the change for several months and it was unconnected to the abrupt resignation last week of John J. Mack, the president of Morgan Stanley. Mr. Mack accepted the No. 2 job when the Morgan Stanley investment bank merged four years ago with Dean Witter Discover & Company, which Mr. Purcell ran.”

“At the time, the coupling of an elite investment bank and a brokerage firm that had put branches in Sears department stores, struck some as odd. Wags on Wall Street termed the combination: white shoes and white socks.”

“To avoid increasing the tension between executives from the two sides of the firm, its managers decided not to choose between the two brand names. Instead, they ran them together and named the firm Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Discover & Company.”

“That mouthful was shortened a year later by dropping Discover, the name of the firm’s credit card business, from the corporate name. Since then, the firm has put the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter brand on almost all of its other operations. When it introduced credit cards in England, it used the Morgan Stanley Dean Witter brand instead of Discover.”

“Now for reasons that Ms. Hitchens said the firm’s executives were not prepared to divulge, Dean Witter may go the way of E. F. Hutton. The Morgan Stanley name certainly is better known abroad, where the firm is getting much of its growth, but James Gregory, who studies corporate branding, said Morgan Stanley might be making a mistake.”

” ‘Dean Witter appears to be the stronger brand by a significant margin,’ said Mr. Gregory, the chief executive of Corporate Branding L.L.C., a Stamford, Conn., company that surveys corporate executives about their impressions of 800 big corporations.”