The New York Times reports the stunning news that General Motors has mandated that everyone associated with its Chevrolet division stop using the term “Chevy” and always say “Chevrolet.”

This should not just be the subject of a bit of fun, though the Times certainly does have a good time with the news. It notes all the places on GM sites that use the offending term, points out the famous racecar driver who will have to change his website to take “chevy” out of the name and even reminds us that Don McLean would have to amend “American Pie” so that he’d drive his Chevrolet to the levee to find that the levee was dry.

Beyond its sheer goofiness, the decision points to a problem that causes many companies to fail when they try to innovate: They can’t get out of their own heads and think like their customers.

In the case of Chevy (oops, Chevrolet), customers have given GM a great gift. They like the brand so much that they gave it an endearing nickname that summons up all sorts of rugged images that should help GM sell cars. But GM apparently has more formal plans for the Chevrolet name and is going to try to take customers in directions they don’t want to go.

Coca-Cola made the same sort of mistake 25 years ago when executives got tired of ads showing that Pepsi beat Coke in taste tests. Customers didn’t much care. Just because Coke customers preferred the sweeter Pepsi in one-off tests didn’t mean they were going to drop Coke from their day-to-day routines. But Coke executives cared. So they launched the biggest product reformulation in history–only to back away from it three months later, when it became clear that customers preferred the original formulation to the one that was designed to be even sweeter than Pepsi.

One can only hope that GM will be as fortunate as Coca-Cola, which saw a surge in demand when it gave up on New Coke. Maybe when GM drops its ill-advised Chevrolet-not-Chevy plan, it, too, will find that loyal customers rally around the brand and buy cars to drive to the levee and lots of other places, too.