What’s in a name? Often it’s where your enterprise finds its strength and identity. It used to be when you started a company, you put your name on the door and over the factory.
At Ford, DuPont, J.P. Morgan, Johnson and Johnson, and Levi-Strauss, the name of the company was the name of the boss ? and it was his prestige and his reputation that was on the assembly line.
Then it became fashionable for companies to use a kind of corporate shorthand to reflect the collaborative, team-spirited endeavor that made the company more than any one man could represent. Hence we entered the age of IBM, GE, AT&T and 3M.
Then came the tech revolution and Generation X put its mark on everything. Names that were either whimsical or content-free littered the corporate landscape ? hence, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Lycos.
More recently, companies have changed their names to distance themselves from themselves. Altria means nothing at all, but at least it doesn’t conjure up Philip Morris’s cigarette empire and its liability problems. Likewise, Accenture may also be a word whose meaning may not be in any dictionary ? but its saving grace is that it doesn’t remind anyone of Arthur Andersen and its accounting scandal.
Thankfully, though, businesses seem to be moving beyond the fad of choosing names that mean little or nothing. The new trend is to find names that have substance and resonance and are “sticky” with consumers.
A case in point:Business 2.01 recently pointed out that a financial software company named Aucent wanted to change its name. Its founder, Mike Rohan, had come up with the name when he founded the company in 2002, but it turned out not to be very satisfactory. What did the word mean? How do you pronounce it? Having heard it, how would you spell it?
If people can’t spell the name, it’s hard for prospective clients to find it on-line, and it’s harder still to develop good word of mouth among people who don’t know how to say it.
Rohan hired Igor International, a naming firm based in San Francisco, to find a better name. The firm came up with Rivet. The name works in a number of ways. It’s concise and memorable. Plus, it has a series of positive associations and connotations. A rivet is a powerful fastener ? it nails something down. A thought can be riveting ? one you can’t get out of your mind. Best of all, it’s a real word that people understand, know how to spell, and can pronounce easily.
And this is the dominant trend in the search for today’s corporate identity: real words with real meanings. The Internet made content-free names fashionable, and one of the final rejections of its excesses is the push towards finding names for things that reflect at least the spirit of what they really are.
Also, Business 2.0 points out, “purity, clarity, and organicism” characterize the best of the new names. For example, Silk is the name of a soy-milk product. Blackboard makes software for schools. Smartwater makes attention-focusing, enzyme-enhanced beverages.
The names are simple, and the consumer has an immediate hunch what the product isall about. In some ways, this strategy makes marketing easier ? and the simpler and more direct the name, the more likely it is to circulate by word of mouth. Also, in this age of Google, simple names have the additional advantage of serving as memorable key words for searches.
Given the persuasive logic at work here, why wasn’t this trend in place before? Part of it can be explained by the huge increase in applications for trademarks in the 1990s. Companies were frantic to establish legal ownership of names and logos.
In 1985, the Patent and Trademark Office received about 64,000 applications. But in 2000, it processed more than 375,000. In the intervening years, it has become increasingly difficult to find a name that wasn’t already in use by somebody else, even though different companies can trademark the same name as long as the products aren’t in the same field.
So, coming up with a capricious name was a way of bypassing the efforts of other companies. David Aaker, a branding expert, refers to this strategy as “the empty vase approach.” When you own a new word, you can attach any significance you want to it ? since it doesn’t have any on its own. This led to names like Vivendi, Accenture, and many others.
However, after the dot.com bubble burst, the Patent and Trademark Office received fewer applications ? 267,000 in 2003 ? and while coming up with an appropriate corporate name is still daunting, Business 2.0 contends that as “the land grab mentality has subsided, so has the pressure to come up with something ? anything ? that a company can call its own.”
Last September, Aliph launched a headset device that reduced the background noise on cell phone calls. The company called the product Jawbone, which is the slang expression for talking and a name much easier to remember than Aliph. Additionally, the technology involved works by assessing the vibrations of the jawbone and cheek. Aliph’s vice president in charge of product development said, “We knew we would have to be different in every way ? from the design of the device to our name.”
The name turned out to be easy for customers to remember, and Business Week2 named Jawbone one of “the best products of 2004.”
Alex Frankel, a journalist who once ran his own naming business before the dot.com crash, is the author of Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business.3 He points out that change in language, of any kind, is slow and sometimes capricious. Old words get chewed up and made into new words. But as a language guru, he looks at corporate coinage from an aesthetic as well as a commercial point of view. Is the new name pleasing? Does it do its job well?
The book describes the naming of BlackBerry, the messaging device. Of course, blackberry is a real word. However, its impact changes when you “intercap” ? that is, introduce a capital letter midway through the word, as BlackBerry does in capitalizing the b in berry. This is a branding method used by many firms to stretch the meaning or significance of an existing word.
The name BlackBerry also suggests something that grows in clusters, like the actual fruit ? something analogous to networks and something easy to access. The name was an immediate hit.
Frankel also describes the importance and power of naming in other fields. When the concept of “totally gravitational collapsed objects,” defined as collapsed stars with powerful gravitational pull, was introduced, it didn’t cause much excitement in the general public. But by naming them “black holes,” everything changed. “Popular astrophysics has never been the same,” Frankel explains.
Similarly, some terms from the computer world, such as “hot spots” and “FireWire,” offer the qualities of being both concrete and concise. They also have the benefit of being self-rhyming.
Of course, naming a company or product after the founder has not entirely fallen out of favor. The difference now is that there is an ironic aspect to it.
Of course, Michael Dell was straightforward in naming his company Dell, but Ben & Jerry had a more collegial thought in mind when they named their ice cream after themselves.
When Craig Newmark started his habit of e-mailing his friends a list of interesting events in San Francisco, he probably didn’t know how successful and popular it would become. When he decided to turn it into a business, he toyed with the name “s-f events,” but chose craigslist ? perhaps because everyone who used it referred to it that way.
He reasoned, “If I call it that, it’s going to stay personal and quirky”, he told the Associated Press.4 The business has since grown into a Web site that includes job listings, personals, vendor ratings, and other services in big cities across the United States and in England, Ireland and Australia. Because his name is on it, he remains passionately involved in it. “I take it personally when someone tries to do something improper or wrong,” he says.
That sort of thinking also informs Pete Slosberg’s commitment to his businesses. He is the Pete of Pete’s Wicked Ale and the more recent Cocoa Pete’s. When he and his partner started their microbrewery in 1986, they decided that their business needed to be aligned with a real person.
“When we looked out there in the real world, we could see people get behind real people” ? like Ben & Jerry and Debby Fields. “We never thought of another way; it was part of the strategy.” That strategy paid off. Slosberg sold Wicked Pete’s Ale to Gambrinus Company in 1998 for almost $70 million.
There are downsides to naming your business after yourself. Ask Martha Stewart, whose Martha Stewart’s Omnimedia took a nosedive during her prosecution for lying to federal agents. When the integrity of the enterprise is focused on one person, he or she can put thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in jeopardy for ill-advised behavior.
There are also other traps in the naming of products ? some of which aren’t obvious until it’s too late. The Naming Newsletter5 keeps a list of unfortunate mistakes in the naming game. Among the most memorable are:
Reebok had to pull the shoe it called the Incubus when it was pointed out that the dictionary defines an incubus as “an evil spirit believed to descend upon and have sex with women while they sleep.”
Umbro, a British shoemaker, was denounced as being “appallingly insensitive” when it used the name Zyklon for a running shoe. It’s the same name as the lethal gas used in Nazi extermination camps in World War Two.
When Ford launched its Pinto in Brazil, it flopped. Apparently, “pinto” is Brazilian slang for “tiny male genitals.” Ford changed the name to Corcel, which means “horse.”
Estee Lauder wanted to import to Germany a fragrance called Country Mist, until German managers alerted the home office that “mist” is slang for manure.
The lesson from these companies’ mistakes is that managers must check each product name with a native-born person fluent in the language and slang for each country in which they intend to market the product.
From this trend, we expect to see the following five developments:
First, simple, direct names that are real words will dominant the corporate branding landscape for the foreseeable future.
Second, when companies merge, the one with the simpler name will prevail in the marketplace. Chase replaced Bank One. Kmart’s board of directors should take note that 70 percent of the people in a recent poll preferred the name Sears to Kmart.
Third, search engines will continue to have a profound effect on corporate coinage and product identification. If your product or company doesn’t show up in the first page of a Google search, you might be due for a name change.
Fourth, aggressive, suggestive, and marginally offensive names will lose their supposed appeal and effectiveness. The shock value is short-lived and will become increasingly out of style.
Fifth, companies that seek to avoid controversy or notoriety by changing their name will find that customers have a very long memory. People still refer to Philip Morris no matter what its new holding company is called.
References List : 1. Business 2.0, December 2004, “The New Science of Naming,” by Alex Frankel. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Time Warner, Inc. All rights reserved.2. BusinessWeek Online, December 4, 2004, “Photo Essay: The Best Products of 2004.” ⓒ Copyright 2004 by The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved.3. Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business by Alex Frankel is published by Crown Publishing, a division of Random House. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Alex Frankel. All rights reserved.4. Associated Press, October 7, 2004, “Naming Company After Yourself Can Be Good,” by Joyce M. Rosenberg. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved.5. For more insights into the strategies of product naming, visit Rivkin & Associates website at:www.namingnewsletter.com
