Naming In The News

Renaming the World Wide Web

Strategic Name Development Awards Naming Scholarship

MINNEAPOLIS--To encourage college students to explore the creative strategy involved in both product naming and company naming, Strategic Name Development, a brand name consultancy based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, offered the first America’s Next Top Namer Scholarship for $2,500 in 2010.

To qualify, undergraduate students majoring in Linguistics, English, Marketing or Mass Communications were asked to develop name candidates and rationale for the re-branding of the World Wide Web.

More than 207 candidates from 76 schools responded to the challenge, including applicants from the University of Chicago, Purdue, Arizona State, and DeVry along with the Universities of Florida, Minnesota, California, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Montana.

The winner, Stephanie M. Batters of the University of Rhode Island, rose to the challenge with sonorous and colorful brand name candidates for the Internet that are distinctive in their own right:

• Digitcity – short for digital city.
  • Likens the internet to a giant modern metropolis where search engines act as roadmaps and each building or home that you pass on the street is it’s own website
• Continuus – One, simple three-syllable word that conveys:
  • Connected together
  • Continuous and uninterrupted
  • Us suggests the collective power and social impact that the internet has had on bringing us together

“I am thrilled to have been awarded the America’s Next Top Namer Scholarship by Strategic Name Development,” said Stephanie. “I found it both fun and challenging to create alternative names for the internet. Plus the scholarship award is a much needed benefit for my college finances.”

“We were very pleased with the vision, imagination and reasoning that many of the applicants displayed, especially Stephanie,” said William Lozito, president of Strategic Name Development. “This is something that we take great pleasure in doing everyday and being able to share that with all the talented applicants only makes it that much more enjoyable.”

Strategic Name Development

Strategic Name Development, Inc., a brand naming consultancy, has expertise in global product naming, company naming, tagline development, and brand architecture. We utilize our global capabilities while combining linguistics, creativity, and brand name research to build global brand names that are instantly recognizable, memorable, trademarkable, and strategically sound. We augment our naming expertise with our global proprietary Name DNA Validation^® research methodology, which compares name candidates to each other and against our proprietary normative database. For more information on Strategic Name Development or the America’s Next Top Namer Scholarship, contact Stephanie Beckendorf at 952-830-4100 or email info@namedevelopment.com

This press release was published courtesy of BusinessWire.