Why companies come up withgood names, bad names,and terrible names.

Now What ShallWe CaU This

Widget:By Theodore Kinni

George Eastman's dry-emulsion film simplified andpopularized the art of photography. In 1888, he reg-istered the trademark Kodak to identify his film and

the cameras that used it, and began advertising their ease ofuse: "You press the hutton, we do the rest." By dint of hisprodigious hrand-building genius, the Eastman Co. soon laidclaim to the leading position in a field of more than fiftycompetitors.

Today, the film that created a corporate giant is totteringtoward buggy-whip status, but the name Eastman chose stillhas legs. In 2006, even in the midst of the turmoil causedby the digital revolution, the Kodak brand ranked seventiethin the world in value, with an estimated worth of $4.4 billion,according to the annual Interbrand Corp./BusinesslVeek brandsurvey. Not a bad return on a manufactured word.

Over a century ago, Eastman approached the namingprocess in much the same way that many of today's brandand trade namers recommend—playfully. According tocompany lore, he conjured it during a game of anagramswith his mother. He started with a letter. "The letter K hasbeen a favorite with me—it seems a strong, incisive sort ofletter," he said. "It became a question of trying out a greatnumber of combinations of letters that made words start-ing and ending with K."

It sounds rather arbitrary, but Eastman had other reasonsfor settling on Kodak. "This is not a foreign name or word;it was constructed by me to serve a definite purpose," he ex-plained on registering his trademark in Great Britain. "It hasthe following merits as a trade-mark word: First. It is short.Second. It is not capable of mispronunciation. Third. It doesnot resemble anything in the art and cannot be associatedwith anything in the art."

Simple, right? Eind an original name, register it, and getto work building your own billion-dollar brand. If only thingswere that easy today.

"Hitting the Trifecta"Eastman had one big advantage in the name game: He

didn't have to contend with millions of already-establishedand legally protected names. In fact, the first U.S. trademarkwasn't issued until 1870, and shortly afterward, the law thatmade that possible was struck down as unconstitutional. Itwasn't until 1881 that a new, improved law was passed. Today,on the other hand, more than a quarter-million trademarkapplications are filed annually at tbe U.S. Patent and Trade-mark Office. Last year, the second-busiest for applications inU.S. history (after a banner year at the height of the e-com-merce boom in 2000), the USPTO reported that it received

THEODORE KINNI has authored and ghosmrinen ten business books, including, most recently, No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy'and Leadership From General Douglas MacArthur. He reviewed Alpha Male Syndrome in the Sept/Oct 2006 issue.

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Too Clever?Sometimes a name catches on so well that it begins representing its entire

product cotegory, causing companies to complain about brand-name erosion.Yet efforts to prevent such genericization usually fail. Below are some brand

names that have become synonymous with their product categories.

275,790 applications, bringing the active, pending, and deadtrademarks on file to more than four million.

"By historic standards, it is almost more difficult than everto get a trademark," says Glenn Gundersen, partner in chargeof the trademark/copyright practice at Dechert LLP andauthor of the international law firm's annual Tremb in Trade-niiirks report. "Part of the factor is that people can go andfile for a mark that they are considering using, and mayhe'^o percent of those applications fall away without the appli-cant ever using it. But as long as somebody has an applicationpending, it's a potential roadblock."

Now, take those pre-existing names and add the myriadnames required for the endless stream of new products, serv-ices, systems, and businesses created in the United States eachyear. Then multiply that sum by the globalization factor. Afterall, if you want to sell your w idget around the w orld, you musteither find a name that is compelling and legally unencum-bered in the ten or fift\' or however many different countriesin which you pian to market it, or you must come up with anumber of different, but still great, country-specific namesfor the same widget. And, hy the way, you must also contendwith ail of the businesses around the world that are tryingto come up with their own great names.

"This bombardment of names creates a high hurdle foractually christening new products and services, or names fornew companies," says Glen Rock, N.J.-based brand consult-ant Steve Rivkin, co-author of The Making of a Name. "A new

name has to hit the trifecta: It has to be avaiiabie, it has to bedistinctive, and it has to be memorable."

In the Name of MoneyOver the past couple of decades, the growing odds of hit-

ting this trifecta have transformed the name game into anendeavor that typically requires specialized assistance. In re-sponse, global brand-management consultants, such as Lan-dor Associates and Interbrand Corp., began to prominentlyfeature naming on their menu of services. And specializedboutiques sprang up as well, often sporting offbeat monikersdesigned to leave no doubt ahout their creative capacity, suchas Igor International and A Hundred Monkeys.

As you might guess, the price of conjuring a good namehas risen along with the job's complexity and the field's pro-fessionalization. "I am guessing the minimum \'ou are goingto pay one of these established firms will be approximately$25,000," says Alex Frankel, author of Wordcraft and founderof Quiddity, a naming firm that opened and closed with thedotcoms. "I saw that Zune, Microsoft's version of the iPod—and notice that I have to use Apple's iPod to even tell youwhat Zune is—cost $200,000 to name." Indeed, last No-vember, Dow Jones reported that Lexicon Branding, whichnamed the Zune, as well as the BlackBerry, Intel's Pentium,and GM's OnStar, charges about $150,000 for a name.

Is it worth that kind of money to come up with a name?The jury is still out in the case of Microsoft's Zune. If you

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see the name as simpiy tune with a "z," you might concludethat its cost was excessive. If, however, you see the name asa product of expert knowledge and comprehensive researchthat can help differentiate Microsoft's offering among con-sumers and lure them from Apple—and that the name canbecome a verb ("I just ziinal you the new U2 single")—andthat is capable of supporting what Robert Bach, president ofMicrosoft's entertainment and devices division, characterizedas an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, then$200,000 sounds like a drop in the bucket.

If You Don't Have AnythingNice to Say . . .

No one is suggesting that a great name can make a sub-standard product or company great. Ask Intel, which madeimplicit promises of state-of-the-art performance with the"Pentium" name, ln 1994, to preserve its brand, the com-pany was forced to undertake a $475 million recall of chipsbecause of a bug that the vast majority of its customers wouldnever encounter. Google, as another example, became partof our vocabulary not because it's a great word but becausethe company built a great search engine. If the company'ssearch algorithm hadn't been so amazingly comprehensive,Google would be another also-ran in the search business,just like Snap and Direct Hit and Infoseek.

A bad name, on the other hand, can hurt or even kill aproduct or company. Back in 1996, Reebok created a women'srunning shoe and named it Incubus. No one knows whatpossessed Reebok to ignore the dictionary during the nam-ing process, but the company failed to discern tbe word'sdefinition until the first day it advertised the shoe. "Weapologize," announced chagrined PR director Dave Fogel-son. "Certainly, it is very inappropriate." He told Reutersthat the company bad to come up with 1,500 new namesannually and thought it bad a winner—one tbat no otbercompany bad thougbt to trademark. "Obviously it becamevery apparent to us yesterday wby nobody else was usingthe name," Fogelson said. Reebok recalled 53,000 pairs ofthe shoes inadvertently named after a mythical demon thatseduces sleeping women.

"In some cases, a name can clobber a product just gettingout of tbe box because it is so grossly inappropriate," Rivkinsays. "Tbere are some names that are outright hideous. TbeBritish shoemaker Umbro named a brand of sboes Zyklon,the name of tbe poison gas tbat the Nazis used at Ausch-witz. You put Zyklon into Google or any search engine, andI guarantee eight of tbe first ten bits that you get will sayHolocaust, Nazi. How could anybody not bave done tbat?"After the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested and the media

picked up the story in 2002, Umbro apologized and renamedtbe shoe.

Not all naming gaffes are so egregious. More often, theyjust make it a little bit tougher to attract customers and sellyour product. I can't pass a KIA dealership without think-ing "killed in action," surely not a connection tbat the Koreancarmaker ever intended. It's just one example of the trans-lation problems that run rampant in the global name gamethese days.

Rivkin ran into another translation snafu while leading anaming workshop in Kuala Lumpur. He was describing bowMitsubishi was selling tbe same SUV in various regionsunder different names—Montero in the United States, Sho-gun in the United Kingdom, and Pajero in Asia and Austraiia,when a group of Latin Americans in tbe back of tbe roombegan laughing. They refused to say why but suggested tbatbe look up pajero in a Spanish dictionary. It turns out thattbe word, wben used as slang, means a masturbator. "Mit-subishi just didn't think about the Spanish audience appar-ently," says Rivkin, wbo asked tbe company about its choiceof name but received no reply. {On the company website,Mitsubishi claims to bave derived tbe name from the SouthAmerican feline Felispajeros.)

The obvious point is that the name of your product orcompany sbould be working for you, not against you. Choos-ing a name thoughtlessly or witbout expert assistance makesit more likely that you will end up with tbe latter result.

What's in a Name?Herein lies tbe rub, to misquote Sbakespeare. It's easy

to point out a great name and construct a highly rational ar-gument for wby it's great . . . in bindsigbt. I initially thoughtBlackBerry was a silly name. Tbe name didn't intrigue meenough to bother to figure out wbat tbis new gadget was—until it was selling like botcakes. But now I realize that itstiny keys are like a blackberry's seeds, tbat tbe name evokestbe coobiess of Apple's products and, by extension, tbe Beatles'Apple Corps, ajid tbat, in some odd way, it's natural, organic,and friendly. O^ course BlackBerry is a great namel

Alex Frankel calls Viagra—witb all tbat vitality, not to men-tion the power of Niagara Falls—anotber great name. "Tbename allows tbe company to own a large share of tbe marketby being tbe first tbing tbat people tbink about (wben it comesto treating impotence] and emerging as a generic name fortbe product," be says. "By creating a great name at tbe out-set, you pave a pathway for success. A name like Viagra wouldmove from one person's moutb to tbe next and just spread likewildfire. It belps to build market share quickly."

But did it really matter wbat tbe first pill to cure maleimpotence was named? Wouldn't it have been the subject

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A Red by Any Other Name

Ra2zmata2z. Manatee. InchWorm. These are just a

sampling of Crayola's newercolors. Whatever happened tored. blue, and yellow? They'restill there, af course, but overthe years, they've been joinedby Jazzberry Jam and a rain-bow of other ambiguous hues.But why would Crayola comeout with names that don'tdescribe their crayon colors?Because when it comes tousing color—and flavor—tonome products, the moreimaginative and non-descrip-tive the nome. the likelierconsumers ore to prefer theproduct. And we're not justtalking crayans.

From Ben & Jerry's ChubbyHubby ice cream to Cator-ade's Riptide Rush sports drinkto nail-polish monufocturerHard Candy's shade af TrailerTrash, vague color and flavor

names proliferate in the mar-ketplace. "1 was curious aboutall these weird names," soysElizabeth Miller, assistant pro-fessor of marketing at BostonCollege, "and wanted to findout how they were offectingpeople's purchosing andpreferences." When Miller,along with Wharton market-ing professor Barbara Kahn,conducted a study on the ef-fect of color and flavor nomeson consumer choice, they dis-covered that consumers areincreasingly drown to offbeatnames that give little informo-tion about a flavor or productcolor.

For example, when Millerand Kahn held an experimentwith jellybeans, they foundthat people were more apt tochoose moody blue, Floridored, and monster green thanthe mare typical and descrip-

tive blueberry blue, cherryred, and watermelon greennames. In a secand experi-ment, participonts wereasked to order sweaters outof o catalog without seeingthe actual colars. Again,Miller and Kahn found that,rather than choose sweaterswith descriptive colors likedark red and light brown,people were more apt to picksweoters labeled antique redand lucky brown. On top ofthot, individuals were likelierto order greater quantities ofthe ambiguously namedsweaters.

"People ore always tryingto figure out why a morketerchose a name," Miller ex-plains. At the some time, sheodds, "they know thot mar-keters exist to try ond sell aproduct, so people figurethat there must be some pos-

itive reason why a marketerchase an unusuol name."Though they moy not under-stond that reason, on ambigu-ous name tends to piquetheir curiosity. Therefore, whylabel a product yellow orlemon yellow or even rain-slicker yellow when you cancall it porty yellow?

But before you start at-taching strange color andflavor names to your prod-ucts. Miller is quick to pointout that such naming strate-gies don't always succeed."Unusual color and flavornames work best for hedonicproduct categories, like fash-ion and food goods," shecoutions. But they wouldn'twork in other product cate-gories. Razzmatazz HealthInsurance or Inch WarmSovings and Loan, anyone?

—VADIM LIBERMAN

of a googol of late-night talk-show-host jokes no matterwhat its name? After all, there are plenty of bad names thatturn out good.

Lnst t'nil, Nintendo announced that its new game platformwould be named Wii. "Wii sounds like 'we,' which empha-sizes this console is for everyone," the company painstak-ingly explained. "Wii can easily be remembered by peoplearound the world, no matter what language they speak. Nocontusion. No need to abbreviate. Just Wii. Wii has a dis-tinctive *ii' spelling that symbolizes both the unique con-trollers and the image of people playing it."

Everyone hated the name, and Nintendo faced a firestormof criticism. "Think of all the objections," says Steve Man-ning of San Francisco-based Igor International. "Not only is

it slang for urination, but Nintendo also had this problemwhere they were perceived by gamers as skewing to a youngeraudience, while the company was really trying to elevate theproduct to an older audience, a segment that they haven'tbeen able to tap into. That was a huge controversy."

But tbe controversy turned out to be a PR bonanza forNintendo. HTien Manning wrote a blog post suggestingthat the name was so bad that Nintendo must be "punking"its customers and would announce the real name wben theproduct shipped, his readership jumped six-fold to thirtythousand page views. "Nintendo didn't have to put a dimebehind it," says Manning. "All they had to do was say thenew name is Wii and it just lit up the Internet, and the pressas well, because everybody came out and said, 'What a crappy

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name.' Every single member of their target audience knewthat name within twent>'-four hours and were never goingto forget it." Nintendo sold 1.14 million units of the gameconsole in Japan by January 7, 2007, more than twice as manyunits as Sony's new console, which was on store shelves threeweeks before M ii.

The bottom line: The vagaries of naming are legion.

Getting Good MarksOther than the fact that great names are easy to identify

after they've become hits, what can be said for sure aboutcrafting winners? For starters, context is everything. First,there is the product or company itself to be considered. Thus,while Incubus is a great name for an alternative rock band,naming a sneaker after an evil spirit that attacks your intendedcustomers in their beds was clearly not so great.

There is also the competitive environment to consider."Take the SUV category, where everything is positionedexactly the same; the great outdoors," iManning says. "There

are probably a hundred names that are Mountaineer or Ex-plorer or Navigator or Rainier or Tahoe or Sonoma or what-ever. And the question becomes: Wiiat is the equity in beingthe ioist SUV that is saying exactly the same thing to exactlythe same audience in exactly the same way? Frankly, I think inthe SUA' category-, the best name is still the Suburban. It's theonly different name, and it's the only one that is brutally hon-est. We are not really driving up the mountain in these trucks."

Next, great names launch with great marketing strategiesor, at the very least, should flow from some sort ot prede-fined strategy. For instance, luxury carmakers such as BMW^and Mercedes and Infiniti concentrate all of their market-ing might on promoting their corporate names. Their cars,named with letters and numbers, such as BMW's 3 Series,5 Series, etc., all derive benefit from the value ofthe largerbrand. (That doesn't mean that they don't take their modelnames seriously. Infiniti reportedly paid San Francisco-basedNameLab $75,000 for two letters—the J and the Q that wouldlead—not follow, mind you—their model numbers. The car-

When Pudding BecomesSatin Chocolate Pudding

Historically, it's beentough to accurately

quantify the impact thata product or companyname has on customers.But recent scientific studieshave begun to lend cre-dence to the idea thatnames can deliver profitsin and of themselves.

In 2001, Cornell profes-sor Brian Wansink and twocolleagues published theresults of a study thatfound that cafeteria pa-trans Cin this case, mostlyuniversity professors andother education profes-sionals!) buy more, eatmare, and come back formore when menu itemssuch as chocolate puddingare renamed, say. SatinChocolote Pudding. Theresearchers found thotdescriptive labels, includingGrandmo's Zucchini Cookiesand Tender Chicken Par-

mesan, increased salesby 27 percent, enhoncedpost-trial evaluations ofquality, value, and restau-rant-related attitudes,and bolstered customers'intentions to return to thecafeteria.

In 2006, another re-search team, this one fromMunich's Ludwig-Maximil-ians University, announcedthat it hod discovered thatwhen people hear or seepopular brands, the partsof their brains linked toself-identity and rewardlight up. Well-knownbrands—regardless of theproduct—activated partsof the brain associatedwith positive emotionalprocessing; less familiaror unknown brands acti-voted parts of the brainassociated with negativeemotional response,

—T.K.

In the Name of Killing Time

Naming projects can easilybecome sinkholes of lost

time and resources. Just askGreg Pruett, who spent twentyyears involved in a series ofrenaming initiatives ot PacificGas & Electric Corp. beforejoining the American GasAssociation as vice presidentof communications.

"It started all the way backin 1987," Pruett recalls. "PG&Ehad had the same identitysince 1905—identified by a 'P,'a 'G,' the word 'and' with atilted underscore under it, andthe letter 'E,* all in brown ondlight beige with a light beigebackdrop. At the time, the

chairmon and CEO deter-mined that he wanted to lookot whether or not we shouldchonge the nome of the com-pony, change its visuol identity.reposition the way the com-pany was visually presented tocustomers, investors, etc." Atthe end of that effort, thecompany did chonge its visuolidentity—but not Its name.

In 1995. the name initiativeresurfaced as the company di-versified into other businesses."We retained a consultant andagain spent a great deal ofmoney on a study." Pruett con-tinues. "The consultant cameforward with mony names.

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maker has since moved on to G, M, and F.)Experts cnll this ;i "naming architecture," and having one

creates a sort of brand consistency that customers come torecognize. "This is something that I appreciate as a con-sumer," Frankel says. "If sub-brands are all scattered, it'sharder as a customer to know what is going on." Thus, Appleis following the iPod with the iPhone.

Finally, think about the ry-pe of name you want. There arebasically three categories of names: descriptive, as in Close-Up toothpa.ste and Sears' Weedwacker; invented, such as cor-porate names Lucent and Integris; and evocative, such as Appleand Monday, the new name PricewaterhouseCoopers choseiust before IBM acquired the consultancy and put a quick endto that flight of fancy. Alost naming experts tend to favor andbe especiall}' good at coming up with one of these types, soresearch naming companies before you choose one, becausemismatches are often a colossal waste of time and money.

"Spend some amount of time and get comfortable withthe people who run the firm and who are going to be work-

ing on the assignment for you," Rivkin says. "Otherwise,you are likely to have a huge disconnect—the classic exam-ple being somebody who has done nothing but dotcomkind of entity names who is now trying to work for a tradi-tional industrial hea\y-machiner\' company. One is not right,one is not wrong, but they may not be destined to work welltogether."

Of course, if you end up with one ofthe winners, it'sworth all the effort. Names iike Absolut vodka and DieHardcar batteries and Hefty trash bags all captured substantialshares of competiti^'e markets, in no small part due to theirnames. "Evaluate your own vocabulary in a sense and seehow many brand names you are using on a daily basis," sug-gests Frankel. "Everytime somebody goes to the wireless-retailer store and says, 'Give me a BlackBerry,' even if thereare other makers, it helps Research in Motion," the item'slesser-known manufacturer. "Five years ago, Google was nota verb, and now it's everyw here. That verb usage was part ofthe Google success storj'." (tt

many identity treatments. Andat the end of the day, I stillremember how the chairmanpicked up the binder, whichwas pretty considerable, likea New York White Pages, andsaid, 'I like our current name.I see no reason to change it.Thank you,' He dropped thebinder on the boardroom tableand walked out of the room,and that was the end of that."

That chairman was gone by19<?7, when the Idea of a newname surfaced once more."We had a new chairman andCEO who was very much of alike mind to the previous one—that this is a big waste of

money," Pruett says. "But hecommissioned me to take alook at how we branded thenon-utility business units wewere creating." This time, Cal-ifomia's utility regulators threwa monkey wrench in the works.When PC&E decided to extendits brand across all of its busi-nesses, state regulators insistedthat the state's citizens owneda share of that name and de-manded royalties, in additionto other onerous conditions.Two more years flew by.

"Finally. I think the chairmangot sick and tired of hearingme gripe," Pruett says. "He saidto me, 'OK, I am going to

authorize you to go out andhire somebody to take a lookat recasting the identity ofthe parent company,' And helooked me in the eye and said,'And 1 don't want anybody tocome in here and start talkingto me about branding. I don'twant to hear the word brand-ing. Do you understand?'"

Surprisingly, it worked. "Weidentified a name for the newcompany, we identified aticker symbol and reserved it,we had this name translatedinto fourteen languages, andit just came through with flyingcolors," Pruett remembers. "Wewere all set to launch. Then

the California energy crisisunfolded before our very eyes,which drove PG&E and, ulti-mately, the non-utility unitsinto bankruptcy and forcedthe company to divest itself ofthe nan-utility units. So therewas no point in chonging thename then."

The total cost of theseexercises In frustration? Over$12 million, according to Pru-ett. The lesson for companiesconsidering name changes?"Right at the very start, beforeyou do anything, including hir-ing a consultant," he instructs,"get uniformity of agreementinternally." —T.K.

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