Harvester to Change Name to Navistar International

When it sold its money-losing agricultural equipment operations to Tenneco in 1984, International Harvester also agreed to give up its rights to the Harvester brand name, one of the oldest and most hallowed names in American industry. The company, reduced by its recent financial crisis to making trucks and engines, was thus forced to come up with a new name for the 1980s.

But Harvester Chairman Donald Lennox saw the name-change requirement as an opportunity to give the company a new image as well, and he decided to give the struggling firm an identity that would be completely unrelated to its origins in heavy industry. He wanted the new name to reflect the fact that the company is undergoing a radical restructuring and is hopefully poised to diversify into new fields. So Lennox called in a consulting firm to develop a new, computer-generated name.

The result: Navistar International.

The new name, announced at a press conference Tuesday, must still be approved by shareholders in February. The company’s heavy-duty trucks will still go under the International brand but will also carry a diamond-shaped logo representing the new corporate identity. After it receives shareholder approval for the new name next month, Harvester’s stock trading symbol will also change, from “HR” to “NAV.”