US Edition 
Osama bin Laden wanted to change al-Qaeda's name for marketing reasons
Osama bin Laden lamented that al-Qaeda was suffering from a marketing problem and wanted to change the organisation's name because the West was winning the public relations fight.
It’s the ultimate marketing quandary.
Your international terror outfit is losing its propaganda fight with the West, killing too many Muslims and suffering a public relations nightmare.
What do you do?
If you are Osama bin Laden, opponent of all things American and all things modern, then it seems you choose a strategy straight from the 21st century marketing executive’s playbook: Rebrand rather than reform.
In a memo recovered from his compound in Abbottabad, the al-Qaeda leader was considering renaming his organisation to better connect with Muslims around the world.
The problem with the name al-Qaeda, he wrote, was that it lacked a religious element that would remind Muslims around the world that they were in a holy war with America.
But while his strategy suggested an innovative executive brainstorming solutions, the memo suggests he could have done with the help of an image consultant with a flair for words.
The best he could manage was a series of cumbersome new monikers such as Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, or Jama’at I’Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida - Restoration of the Caliphate Group.
Details of the letter were described by senior US officials on condition of anonymity because the materials are sensitive.
The documents portray bin Laden as a terrorist chief executive, struggling to sell holy war for a company in crisis following in the footsteps of arch-enemies like Blackwater, which became Xe after a run of bad headlines.
As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group’s full name, al-Qaeda al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become shortened to simply al-Qaeda.
Lopping off the word “jihad,” bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to “claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.”
The document adds weight to growing claims that al-Qaeda was under pressure as young Muslims in the Middle East turned to new democracy movements, rather than bin Laden’s terror network.
In a speech on Wednesday to announce the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Barack Obama said: “Bin Laden expressed concern that al-Qaeda had been unable to effectively replace senior terrorists that had been killed and that al-Qaeda has failed in its effort to portray America as a nation at war with Islam, thereby draining more widespread support.”