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Third Street Promenade. It’s a good name. Clear. Simple. Direct. It tells you what it is and where it is.

But its days may be numbered.

The Promenade is 20 years old. It attracts 10 million people a year, or nearly 275,000 people a day, according to Bayside District officials. That’s about three times the total population of Santa Monica, and more than enough to ensure gridlock in much of Santa Monica.

But Bayside officials are not happy.   They want more, though it isn’t clear where they would put it.

Bayside District Corporation is a non-profit, public benefit corporation that was created by the City to manage  downtown Santa Monica.

In its  drive for more, it has ordered  “an image makeover that will shape how the popular strip is perceived over the next quarter century,” according to a recent story in Surf  Santa Monica.

The “branding strategy” will be   developed by a marketing firm, Shook Kelley, which “specializes in “placemaking”and “perception design.”

“Places have to be about change,” Kevin Kelley, an architect, said. “They constantly have to be doing something different.”

Kelley believes that visitors should have a “threshold experience” on arrival, know that they are in

“a special space,” and be “transformed” by their visit.

According to the story, Kelley is also interested in how “capitalism and community can meet…making the Promenade… an ideal testing ground….

“Much of the research Shook Kelley will conduct will be studying how people behave in the environment called the Promenade. To do this, the company will bring in its cultural anthropologist.

“’You have to keep them coming back,’ ‘Kelley said, ‘and that’s where branding comes in.

“’There’s probably nothing more important than branding, the soul of an entity is really its brand’.”

The only significant changes in the  Promenade since its opening have been the disappearance of most unique, local and/or independent businesses, the extraordinary escalation of rents, the rules targeting homeless people, and the addition of an ice skating rink two blocks away for the holidays.

Still, contrary to Kelley’s thesis, the Promenade, which is dominated by the sane chain stores that dominate Westside  Pavilion, Century City and the Grove, its principal competitors, regularly attracts nearly 300,000 people a day.

Dumb luck? The Promenade’s proximity to  the beach? An X factor? Perhaps the cultural anthropologist can tell us.

Kelley’s “image makeover” will presumably include the vital “threshold experience” and constant “changes” that have yet to be  described.

Kelley’s belief in the power and efficacy  of constant change is impressive. But Santa Monica is the capital of unintended consequences, and so this new chapter  in the life of Third Street should be the best show in town.