August 2007 Archives: Name Wire: The Product Naming Blog

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August 31, 2007

Brand Naming v. Brand Extensions: Survival of the Funniest?

As a naming consultant, developing product names for brand extensions is a topic that I've written about before... and it's a strategy that is often necessary for a brand to continue growing.

The recent news that Guinness is diversifying into red beer with the launch of their new Guinness Red drink is a perfect example of this kind of brand extension.

For 250 years, Guinness has meant black and white. It's a black beer with a white froth. Now, parent company Diageo is pushing the brand in directions never been before... offering us Guinness bread and even your own froth maker called a "surger."

Some drinkers are not impressed... the World of Beer grumbles, "Guinness is stout, plain and simple. Not some Kilkenny knock off, not a weird looking creation which, judging by the photo published online at The Sun, boasts tomato juice as an ingredient, but stout. The black stuff. Period." Yet, other beer bloggers can hardly wait for the weekend to try it.

What's up? Extending a brand name, no matter how old and powerful and well loved it is, is something marketers feel compelled to do.

Even Guinness can't rest on its laurels... it has to offer extensions to customers or be swept away in a tide of microbrews and light beers into the ever smaller space of a niche brand name.

TD Clark's excellent article on the subject talks about how newer brands, like Crocs shoes, are already creating new brand names out of old ones. The Crocs brand is now offering apparel consumers "Crosslite rt" or "relaxed technology" shoes. This is aggressive brand naming at its finest, given the relative newness of the Crocs brand name.

Similarly, Mars is offering us a Starburst Drink... you remember Starburst fruit chews, right? By the way, this is an awful line extension, I think, and is doomed to fail. And current TV is using brand extension strategies to "expand its web presence and increase its marketing efforts."

Technorati Tags: Guinness, Diageo, World of Beer, TDClark, Crocs, Mars, StarburstDrink, Brand Naming, BrandExtensions.

August 30, 2007

Company Naming: Hulu Quits Clowning Around

When NewsCorp and NBC decided on a joint venture, Google started calling it "Clown Co," and TechCrunch wisely urged them to get a real name, fast.

It hasn't been fast, but the venture does finally have a name: Hulu.

CEO Jason Kilar's explanation of the name is that "Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we're building."

Those are all true statements about the name, which is probably a coinage, but we thought we'd dig a little deeper.

One of the comments on yesterdays TechCrunch post bashes the name pretty hard: "Worst domain name for a company with more than $100 million dollars behind it. Closest mental association is the Hawaiian term hula. And anything Hawaiian has an 'out there' connotation."

I doubt that Jason Calacanis over at Mahalo would appreciate the opinion that Hawaiian = "out there," even if the statement is geographically true. Isn't hula fun? Certainly going to Hawaii is fun.

The closest real word to "Hulu," however, is actually Azeri (that's the language of Azerbaijan).

When written in Latin script (the alternative is Arabic), the Azeri word for "peach" is hülü. And while it might be a bit dated, peachy is definitely a positive term.

Technorati Tags: Newscorp, NBC, TechCrunch, Hulu, Mahalo.

Has Nokia Laid an Egg with Ovi Product Naming?

Nokia has just announced a new product name that will cover a range of Internet services called Ovi, which means door in Finnish.

This moves Nokia's focus away from mobile devices to Internet products, music and online gaming, which pretty much puts it head-to-head with Apple and the product naming legend iPhone.

Nokia's answer to iTunes will be the Nokia Music Store; and gamers get N-Gage, a name I wrote about yesterday. There will also be Nokia Maps, which I suppose will go head to head with Google Maps.

All Oy-Vey jokes aside, the Ovi name is almost as uninspiring as Loudeye, the service that Nokia bought and re-treaded to make Ovi.

I like the fact that Nokia is trading on its Finnish heritage... it works for the brand name Nokia. Ovi, however, is a little strange to those of us who have been brought up speaking languages heavily influenced by Greek and Latin (that's most of us in Europe, North America and the rest of the English speaking world).

As a name consultant, the first words that come to mind when I hear Ovi are eggs and ovaries. That's no coincidence, because ovi, ovum and ovo are the Greek and Latin prefixes meaning egg.

You can travel to Italy to visit the ruins of the Castrum Ovi, or the Fortress of the Egg if you like. Maybe they should do a product launch there?

Fact is, the prefix ovi is really very well ingrained into the English language as having something to do with eggs and pregnancy.

And that may not be so great for Nokia.

On top of that, in Ohio, OVI stands for "Operating a vehicle while impaired."

Enough said.

Technorati Tags: Nokia, Ovi, Apple, iTunes, Nokia Music Store, N-Gage, Nokia Maps, Google Maps, Castrum Ovi, Fortress of the Egg, Product Naming.

August 29, 2007

Frenemies in Product Naming

The word of the week is frenemy: the kind of friend who can hurt you one day and be your best friend the next. Om Malik says bluntly, that "everyone is a frenemy," especially in the online world, where YouTube and MySpace are perfect examples of frenemies; or Google and eBay for that matter.

In the world of product and brand naming, a tried and trusted name can be a frenemy.

Take, for example, the Jaguar brand name. Jag knows that it is a brand that seems to appeal to an older demographic. The problem is that newer drivers really don't understand the brand and tend to see it as kind of old fashioned. The Jag name is being a frenemy to the company... and the company's solution is to drop it and put a "leaper badge" in its place.

In Europe, the Ford Fiesta brand name is a frenemy. Ford wants to amp up the car but knows that consumers understand Fiesta to be a reliable bare bones vehicle. Everything about the Fiesta brand name means cheap and dependable, and Ford wants the car to be more than that.

But doing away with the brand name means throwing away years of brand equity, while keeping it means being hamstrung by consumer's perceptions of the Fiesta name.

There's no question that the N-Gage brand name is a true frenemy to Nokia, who is using it to introduce a new gaming platform following the dismal performance of the original N-Gage initiative.

No matter how great the new products are, consumers are going to associate it with the first generation of duds thanks to its product name.

Closer to home, the name of the new market research agency created by Stan Rapp is going to be "Enguage," a name that is sure to be its creator's worst frenemy, notes The Browser, not least because it sounds like the ill fated Engage.

Maybe having a name change at all is the real frenemy here: Enguage had already bought out the well-named Direct Impact, a corporate name that would have been just fine.

What to do? The Godfather once said, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." Maybe you should totally dump your frenemies.

Technorati Tags: frenemy, Om Malik, Jaguar, Ford, Fiesta, N-Gage, Enguage, Direct Impact, The Godfather, Product Naming.

August 28, 2007

Company Naming Trends: Bubble Trouble

What do the names "LifeLogger," "Cluztr," "Videoegg," "Opinity," and "Razz" have in common?

Their logos.

Earlier this month, Trevor Elliott at the Eachday blog collected the logos of dozens of companies, most of which fall into the appropriately nebulous category of Web 2.0.

What all the logos have in common is a speech bubble, and what better symbol could there be for the age of conversation?

John Moore at Brand Autopsy described it as "the real Web 2.0 bubble."

Just as many hip emerging companies use numbers and punctuation marks to replace letters, these companies are using the speech bubble to extend the alphabet.

The name "Razz" doesn't tell you much about what the company does, but if you put a speech bubble around it, then it's clear that it's something to do with talking.

Elliott takes the "enough already!" approach, believing that the speech-bubble logo has been overused along with the lowercase "i" prefix. It certainly does seem to have reached a saturation point, and there's a good argument to be made that using it shows a lack of imagination.

People know what it means. So I doubt we've seen the last of it by any stretch.

Who knows? It could start showing up on keyboards as an extra character, and the US Patent and Trademark Office might have to create a new code just for that shape.

Technorati Tags: Lifelogger, Cluztr, Videoegg, Opinity, Razz, TrevorElliott, John Moore, Brand Autopsy, Eachday Blog.

Company Naming Changes: Much Ado About Nothing?

When it comes to company name changes, it seems to me that it's Much Ado About Nothing.

By that, I mean the changes from an outsider looking in seem very subtle and make you wonder: Why do they even make those changes?

For instance some recent examples are:

Aura Gold, Inc. to Aura Minerals Inc.
Rocket City Automotive Group, Inc to Rocket City Enterprises, Inc.
Computer Associates International, Inc. to CA, Inc.
Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC and back again
New 360 to Point.360

For more about company naming changes in the Much Ado About Nothing category, please check out our proprietary Company Naming Changes research.

For more on company naming changes, check out other chapters of our proprietary research:

Technorati Tags: Company Naming Changes, Aura Gold Inc., Aura Minerals Inc., Rocket City Automotive Group, Rocket City Enterprises, Inc., New 360, Point.360.

August 27, 2007

Will L33t, LoLcats Be the Next Company and Brand Naming Trends?

The Wall Street Journal has been tracking the evolution of Leetspeak, a subject I have blogged about before and remain very interested in.

The Internet is radically affecting our language, and leetspeak (or l33t 5p34k) is adding new words to our lexicon daily.

The word of the day? Pwn, as in "I pwn you," or "I own you" or "I have beaten you." Pwn is an easy typo from "own" but has taken a life of its own, as has teh, a typo for "the."

Even letters have a myriad of representations: The Wall Street Journal points out that the letter A can be "leeted" into "4, /\, @ , /-\, ^, and aye," while "lol" the old standby for "laugh out loud" is turning into "lawl."

Now, Jarret Cale has an Internet video series called "Pure Pwnage" (how's THAT for insider product naming?). And we can even view l33t cartoons.

I keep tabs on this because sooner or later these types of language changes seep into product naming and brand naming. It's one of the funnier parts of being a naming consultant. Linguists may be cringing but at least one academic says that Shakespeare would be all over this.

But just as I was congratulating myself for being so up to date on my l33t, I was exposed to LOLcats, the new, new Internet fad.

Just as l33t is seeping into brand naming, knowledge of LoLcats is becoming a requirement for people trapped behind a computer all day (that's all of us). The mother site of this trend is I Can has a Cheezburger? and explains the use of an "image macro."

The brilliance of the humor is its simplicity: a digital picture of a cat and some garbled cat language on top. The site gets over 500 submissions a day. Now, "LOL" is almost regular talk. But tracking the strange language of LOLcats is the real challenge, not to mention the sub genre featuring walruses called lolrus and another unnamed genre featuring elephants.

You might want to take the test "Which Lolcat are you?" before you read on...

One essay on the subject of this language, entitled Cats Can Has Grammar, has been read over a million times and introduces us to the term "kitty pidgin" and the fact that it's possible to get cat-speak wrong (the cartoon on the essay, with the gag line "I has idiosyncratic conjugation," is priceless).

If you want to really get into it, take a look at the post by David McRaney on Zero Sum Mind entitled "1337 Katz0rz." You'll figure it out.

Technorati Tags: The Wall Street Journal, Leetspeak, Jarret Cale, LOLcats, David McRaney, Company Naming, Brand Naming.

August 25, 2007

Paint Color Naming Not a Game

paint cans Product naming for a paint company is one of the more challenging assignments for a naming consultant. Or, as Michael Marturello says, it's "nothing to sneeze at."

He learned about the myriad of naming issues that one encounters given the thousands — millions — of possible colors out there, wondering in his excellent column what color "canary green" should be (yellow? green?). Turns out it's a greenish yellow. Go figure.

He jokingly suggests a paint called "sneeze green," which sounds a little crazy until you realize there really are product names out there like "pickling spice" and "twisted knot" and "marsh misery."

Spare a thought for Crayola, who has to think up colors that are both useful and child friendly. You can play a color game on their site if you are so inclined. Just don't make the same mistakes they have made in the past by creating famously politically incorrect names like "Indian Red" and "flesh" (which is pink, but not always). They still have "Fuzzy Wuzzy Brown," which in some circles is considered racist.

Paint companies have an assortment of names on offer. Check out the Sherwin-Williams site for an "online color visualizer" or swing over to Behr Paint and Wood Stain and "Paint Your Place".

But if you really want an idea of how hard it is to match color naming schemes to the actual colors, go on and play the online paint game from the Dulux range.

I dare you to tell me what color "Labrador Sands" is. Or "Party Surprise."

Technorati Tags: Paint, Color, Color Names, Crayola, Sherwin Williams, Behr

Posted by William Lozito at 11:11 AM

Posted to Household Goods | Product Naming
Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 24, 2007

CBS Sportsline Brand Name Finally Benched; CBSsports.com a No Hitter

CBS Sportsline name has been replaced by CBSSports.com.

Bad move, guys.

The Sportsline company name goes back to 1994 and was finally acquired by CBS in 2004. The name hung on until now because, apparently, CBS was worried about "harming its fantasy football operations."

CBS' association with the Sportsline brand name came about when "CBS launched head first into the dot-com craze and ramped up its online efforts." Killing it, allows CBS to (finally) implement a unified brand name strategy by simplifying its branding across all platforms.

Well, sort of.

I would say that the CBSSports.com name should be shortened to CBS Sports. Adding the dot com is redundant.

We get it. I like sports. I like watching sports. I know there's an ESPN.com.

When I think of brand names, I just think ESPN. And www.cbssports.com is prone to errors in typing. I'd put even odds that half the fans don't type the extra "s" and decide to just switch over to www.espn.com after getting the error message.

I have been carefully (exhaustively) tracking company naming changes over the past few years and can say with some finality that company naming is all about congruence, as is brand naming for that matter.

A tremendous amount of name changes occur in the US. In fact, every hour of every business day in the U.S., a company changes its name. Companies that present a single, congruent, easy to remember company or brand name are the ones who are doing it right; ESPN, Apple, Google.

Seems like the NFL got the message, too: Joel Price points out that the NFL.com logo has been sent to the showers on the new NFL website. Seems that he, like the rest of us, likes the "NFL shield without the .com hanging off the side." Joel also argued to drop the .com off the Chargers logo as well because it "didn't seem necessary."

CBS Sports is a legendary brand name, but in this case I think they've fumbled the ball.

Technorati Tags: CBS, Sportsline, CBSsports.com, ESPN, ESPN.com, Company Naming, Brand Naming, NFL, Apple, Google.

August 23, 2007

Ingredient Naming Lives On

First it was bifidus regularis in Dannon's Activia yogurt. Now it's Optibalance™ in Yoplait's new Yo-Plus™ yogurt.

The power of a fancy ingredient name to help sell a new product, particularly when that product advertises health benefits, has obviously not diminished at all in the past year.

As Yoplait's press release indicates, women these days are concerned with their digestive health, perhaps because the typical American diet contains so many things not conducive to their health.

And, of course, there's something appealing about the idea of getting what you need out of the food you eat instead of having to take something extra for that "occasional irregularity" the commercials used to talk about.

Yoplait takes a slightly different approach to naming its special-ingredient yogurt versus Dannon, which concentrated on the product's effect.

Yo-Plus focuses instead on the product's ingredients: yogurt plus special additives. The "food-plus" approach has been a popular way to appeal to shoppers since Vitamin D milk and "enriched" white bread were introduced.

My only concern is that if other manufacturers create their own "digestive" dairy products, people will get entirely the wrong idea about the purpose of Go-Gurt!

Technorati Tags: Dannon, Yoplait, DannonActivia, Yoplait Yo-Plus, Go-Gurt, Brand Naming.

Company Naming Changes: Choosing a Winning Name

"Often, the choice of a name spells out the destiny of a company or a brand," says Keren Argaman of The Globes, Israel's leading business journal.

I couldn't agree more.

In our proprietary 2006 Company Naming Changes report, we analyzed the major reasons for a company name change... there were nine of them. A company that goes so far as to actually change its name is moving in a new direction, sending a signal out to its stakeholders that its identity has changed and the world should take note.

But choosing a new name can be risky, and the possible meanings associated with each name should be well researched, including semantics, pronunciation, cultural context, and the colloquial language of the location.

For instance, Korean Kia importers became concerned sales would be affected by the resemblance between the brand name Kia and the word Ki, which means vomit in Hebrew. They decided to change the name so that it would be pronounced as Kaya.

During my interview with The Globes, I indicated to the reporter that there are many other instances of naming faux pas.

Technorati Tags: Keren Argaman, The Globes, Company Naming Changes, Strategic Name Development, Kia, Kia Motors.

August 22, 2007

To (dot) Mobi or Not to Mobi, That is the Brand Naming Question

The dot mobi dilemma is an ongoing challenge in the world of naming and branding, not to mention tagline development.

Dot-Mobi The dot Mobi blog tells us that sex.mobi is about to go on sale and that big brand names like Zagat.mobi and AAA.mobi have joined the club... not to mention Weather.mobi.

They are poised to break 700,000 dot Mobi names soon and Network Solutions even conveniently has a BuildMyMobi.com site to help developers help people promote their product names in this new arena.

And yet, and yet.

Dot mobi domains are not registering very well in India.

That's a bad thing because although so many people in the developing world use mobile phones to access the Internet, registering a dot Mobi name costs much more than simply redirecting users to a wireless dot com.

Also, the guys at GoMo News have a real bone to pick with the dot Mobi gang, calling them "arrogant." Ouch.

Teething problems aside, dot Mobi will have its role to play in the future of the Mobile Web, a future that was brought that much nearer with the smashing success of the iPhone.

But frankly, it is really hard to say where a dot mobi domain name fits into a product-naming scheme and even in a company's technology naming strategy.

Right now, the best I can say is that having a dot mobi naming strategy should be part of a naming service strategy... sometimes.

Technorati Tags: dotMobi, GoMo news, Skooba iPhone, Company Naming, Branding, Tagline Development.

August 21, 2007

Company Naming Changes - Terms of Endearment

Our proprietary Company Naming Changes research has found that company naming... and by extension brand naming... is getting more user friendly and endearing.

The trend has continued into 2007, with bloggers decrying Sprint's Xohm Wi-Fi brand name as difficult to remember and not a serious brand name.

Today, brand names have to be promotion friendly and link easily to the business's domain name. This is nothing new: look at Famous Amos.

Pharmaceutical companies are getting the message by putting their brand names on major TV shows and naming them like sports cars to attract an aging and medical savvy consumer base in the USA.

User-friendly naming for 2006 included Inter-Bank's change to TomatoBank, which is a move geared towards appealing to tomato growers and a generation of consumers happy to use computers named after an apple. One blogger says of the bank, "I walked in expecting a great pita and left with a great rate."

Similarly, Washington Mutual changed its name to WaMu partly because customers had been using that nickname to refer to the bank for years anyway.

In our proprietary Company Naming Changes report we also look at "companies that missed the memo" and actually became less user friendly, as when Equitex went to Hydrogen Power International, Inc. and the Center for Business Research went to The Center for Competitiveness and Prosperity Research.

Sometimes too much of a good thing is a bad thing, guys.

Technorati Tags: Sprint, Xohm WiFi, Famous Amos, InterBank, TomatoBank, Washington Mutual, WaMu, Company Naming Changes, Strategic Name Development.

August 20, 2007

Company Naming Change Trends - The More Brands the Merrier

When a company expands its horizons, more often than not a merger or acquisition is the cause.

Last Thursday's post mentioned Rocky Shoes and Boots, Inc. literally getting "too big for its boots," changing its name to Rocky Brands, Inc. upon acquiring Michelin Footwear and Zumfoot.

CollectiveBrands1 More recently, Payless ShoeSource followed suit completing its acquisition of The Stride Rite Corporation and re-naming itself Collective Brands, Inc. as a result of the $900 million transaction to become the largest non-athletic footwear company in the Western Hemisphere.

"The new company name was chosen to communicate that together - collectively - these three units and their combined expertise and powerful brand portfolio create a stronger, expanded enterprise well positioned to serve a broadening base of global consumers."

Our proprietary Company Naming Changes research reveals that over a third of company name changes (34%) are initiated for this reason we like to refer to as "Dog Eat Dog." This trend continues to ring true in 2007.

If the shoe fits...

Technorati Tags: Company Naming, Michelin Footwear, Payless ShoeSource, Dog Eat Dog, Name Change, Rocky Brands, Zumfoot, Brand Names.

Product Line Extensions - The Awful and the Brilliant

When I saw an ad for Crisco Extra Virgin Olive Oil, I cringed.

I couldn't think of a more inappropriate or awful product line extension.

The Crisco brand connotes:

Deep frying
Fat
Grease
Clogged arteries
Everything else that extra virgin olive oil is not

What were the people at P&G thinking? I'm convinced that someone at P&G let this out the door when deep down they knew better.

For more on inappropriate line extensions, check out Laura Ries' blog on Hellman's Mayonnaise versus Kraft's Miracle Whip.

Now for a brilliant line extension.

What could be more natural than a rum from Tommy Bahama?

Tommy Bahama by virtue of its name says warm, relaxed and a casual environment
The leading rum brand, Bacardi, is produced in the Bahamas
Additionally, what could be more natural than wearing Tommy Bahama clothing while sipping rum in the Bahamas or the Caribbean, the birthplace of rum dating back to the 17th century?

Crisco Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Awful.

Tommy Bahama Rum. Brilliant.

Technorati Tags: Product Line Extensions, Crisco, Crisco Olive Oil, Tommy Bahama, Tommy Bahama Rum, P & G, Bacardi, Brand Names.

August 18, 2007

Perfume Product Naming For the Ages?

Chanel no. 5 Perfume brand naming seems to have been all the news this past week, not least because model Jordan has her own scent named Stunning.

That news comes on the heels that Angelina Jolie has lost her fight to prevent her daughter's name, Shiloh, from being a perfume brand. In this case I think the perfumer has a perfect right to use the name, which means "his gift" in Hebrew. That's a perfume brand name waiting to happen, Angelina.

The New York Times ran a great article that has stuck with me about a store in Manhattan that sells bespoke perfumes that appeal to men who are tired of smelling like coconut. The author states that "You can go through life for only so long smelling like a dessert topping."

According to the article, the perfume industry is kind of set in its ways, with two of the set beliefs being that

Men will never buy scents with the word "rose" in the name
It's impossible to open a store in Tokyo "because the Japanese don't like smells."

You guessed it. The store, Le Labo, is breaking both rules quite successfully, with a store set to open in Tokyo soon with a new product name for men called "Rose 31".

This is all interesting but I have to wonder, as a forum poster does, if we are ever going to have another classic perfume like "Chanel No. 5" that will stand the test of time.

View the Nicole Kidman Chanel No. 5 commercial:

Technorati Tags: Perfume, Fragrance, Chanel, Stunning, Shiloh

Posted by William Lozito at 4:40 PM

Posted to Brand Naming | Health and Beauty
Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 17, 2007

A Name We Have No Name For

Reuters has just announced that a Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@." As pronounced in Chinese, the symbol sounds like ai ta, which means "love him."

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