January 8, 2014

Naming Your Business? Consider These 3 Points First

By Jodi Helmer

It's one of the first and most significant decisions a startup needs to make. Pick the wrong name--one that doesn't resonate with customers, is difficult to pronounce or spell or is too close to another business's name--and it could have major detrimental effects on your brand, SEO and bottom line.

Steve Manning is founder and CEO of Igor, a Sausalito, Calif.-based naming and branding agency, and the creative force behind monikers like Aria Las Vegas, truTV, Boogie Board and Gogo inflight internet. He sat down with us to discuss the game of the name.

Why is the right name so important?
The right name differentiates a startup from its competitors, helps build the brand and sparks an emotional connection with customers.

Even though the right name can help a startup stand out, 90 percent of businesses choose names that sound the same as their competitors. Look at airlines: Most choose names with a geographic reference--American, Southwest, Northwest, Alaska Airlines--and it's hard to distinguish one from another. It's hard to tell the world you're starting something new when your name gives the impression that you're just like everyone else.

You can spend a lot of money on ads to tell people how your company is different, or you can paint "Virgin" on the side of a plane. That name sends the message that the airline is different; the name makes it stand out.

What are some points to consider?
Generic names aren't interesting or engaging or emotional. No one wants to spend an entire flight talking to someone from Strategic Name Development, but a seatmate with a business named Igor is memorable. A good name has layers of meaning and association, evokes emotion and is easy to pronounce. You could choose a made-up name like Oreo or Snapple that is memorable, and because it's fun to say, people repeat it, or an evocative name like Virgin or Apple that creates emotion and imagery to help position the product.

What mistakes do startups make when choosing a name?
It's a mistake to be quirky for the sake of it. When startups choose names like kwkly or qwerly, all they are thinking about is whether the name is unique, without regard for how it looks to the world. Your name has to be different for a good reason. And we need to be able to spell it. A name that is hard to spell will make it impossible for customers to find you. They'll be online thinking, How do you spell qwerly?

There is also a misguided focus on tossing out good names because of their dictionary definitions. But no one cares about the official definition; a name should demonstrate what your business is all about. The Chrysler Crossfire is a great example. Despite the fact that it doesn't have a positive dictionary definition, it works because it sounds like a car that James Bond and Jason Bourne would drive. You're not naming a company; you're naming its positioning.

The Brand Naming Process

About Igor Naming Agencies

     

November 30, 1999

The Name Game

Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation, where $75,000 buys you a suffix and competing shops slur each other over the virtues of Agilent and Avilant.

By Ruth Shalit

When Hewlett-Packard decided last year to spin off its instrumentation and measurement division into a separate company, executives at the computer hardware giant did everything they could to smooth the transition. Shareholders had to be notified. A top-flight management team hired. The trades brought on board. But such housekeeping duties were a minor matter compared to the vast existential task that loomed -- a five-phase, cross-unit "identity project," intended to unearth a suitably momentous name for the $8 billion enterprise. The name had to be a grand, monstrous, powerful thing -- broad-shouldered yet luscious, tempered by oaky bass notes of maturity, courage, character -- like a 1961 Cheval Blanc. "This was similar to the Lucent process," says David Redhill, global executive director for Landor Associates, the identity firm hired last year to supervise the project. "We needed a tremendous name that really was magisterial and compelling, and had a certain amount of stature right away."

As with Lucent, Redhill and his team approached the problem with ingenious thoroughness, devising a naming module that would eventually cost the client more than $1 million and involve up to 40 Landor executives around the globe. The first step was to interview key executives at the massive new entity, then known only by its code name of NewCo. "We wanted to know what the company needed to be; what it was aiming to be," says Redhill. "The aim was not to manipulate them, but really to draw out of them exactly how they visualized people feeling about their brand."

The exercise got off to an unpromising start. NewCo executives volunteered that they wanted the company to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring. "We've done this process with hundreds of companies," Redhill says wearily. "They all say, 'We want to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring.'" And therein, it seemed, lay the problem. Though top NewCo executives had avowed their intention to be different, to change the paradigm, to think outside the nine dots, "the qualities they were aiming to project were in fact common currency," Redhill sighs.

Fortunately, the Landor identity crew had come prepared for exactly this possibility. "We did mood boards," Redhill says. "We did random visual associations, attached to sequential words. And so, when they said, 'We want to be strong,' we would show them a picture of an ocean wave breaking. And we'd ask: 'Do you want to be strong like a force of nature?' Then we'd show them a picture of a metal chain link fence. And we'd ask, 'Do you want to be strong like a chain? Strong but breakable?'" The final slide was a close-up of a human face. "We said, 'Perhaps you want to be strong like human nature -- indomitable and immutable.' And they said, 'Yes, that's us. That's exactly how we imagine people feeling about our brand.'"

After four months of this sort of intensive brand therapy, the group settled upon the only name capable of conveying such protean emotions -- "Agilent." They took the name into focus groups, where, to their great delight, it was received with admiration, approval and total open-mouthed attention. "I've never seen anything like it," says Amy Becker, who works alongside Redhill in Landor's verbal branding and naming group. "This was a pretty rarefied crowd. We're not talking about the mass-consumer, chips-eating sort of person. This was a very particular sort of business-to-business decision maker. A hard group to impress. And they were just delighted." The name was also a hit among the NewCo rank and file. "It's funny, because 'Agilent' isn't even a real word," muses Redhill. "So it's pretty hard to get positive and negative impressions with any real basis in experience. But I'm pleased to say that when we unveiled the name last month at an all-company meeting, a thousand employees stood up and gave the name a standing ovation. And we thought, 'We have a good thing here.'"

But did they? Among Landor's rival name-slingers around the Bay Area, the choice of Agilent was immediately greeted with snorts of derision. "The most namby-pamby, phonetically weak, light-in-its-shoes name in the entire history of naming," declared Rick Bragdon, president of the naming firm Idiom. "It's like a parody of a Landor name. It's insipid. It's ineptly rendered ... It ought to be taken out back and shot."

Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys [now Managing Director of Igor], a San Francisco naming firm, was also appalled. "What a crummy name," he says. "It sounds like a committee name. 'Who's your competition?' 'Lucent.' 'Well, we want to play off Lucent -- only we're agile. I mean, if you wanted a name like that, I could come up with that kind of name in about four seconds."

Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank in New York, tries to be more charitable in his assessment. "Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yes, I did hear about the Agilent mess," he says. A long sigh escapes his lips. "Perhaps it would be best if Landor just closed up shop," he says quietly. "I don't want to trash them too badly. It's just that their last four, five naming projects have been total disasters."

Landor, for its part, is quick to defend its handiwork. "To our critics, I can only say, vive la difference, vive the competition and vive individual entrepreneurialism," says Redhill, in his gentle, grandfatherly voice. "We have the utmost confidence in our model." To drive home that point, Redhill put me in touch with Darius Somary, the research director who had confirmed to an empirical certainty the allure of names like Agilent. "From a quantitative standpoint, it's a very appealing name," Somary told me. "On all the scalar measures of distinctiveness and appropriateness, it tested right off the charts."

Welcome to big-league corporate naming, a Pynchonesque netherworld of dueling morphemes, identity buckets and full-scale linguistic sabotage. What was once a diverting sideline for mild-mannered grad students has become an increasingly lucrative and increasingly cutthroat profession, as blue-chip consulting firms schedule raids on college English departments and linguistics nerds scramble to shift their focus from the syntax of negation in the Anatolian languages to the murkier precincts of corporate identity.

The professional back-stabbing is a bit puzzling, given that professional naming, above all, is supposed to be fun. The literature of the namers brims with references to "joy," "play" and to the capacity for childlike wonderment. This image of naming gurus as paragons of corporate delight would be more believable, however, if the namers didn't spend so much time tearing each other to shreds. "You should call up Ira Bachrach of NameLab," breathes one namer. "He doesn't even have meetings with clients. It's just taking a bunch of morphemes and phonemes, and crunching them through the computer. Unbelievable." Another whispers honeyed words of ill counsel about Enterprise IG. "Their names are nothing more than a bunch of concatenized prefixes and suffixes -- totally soulless," he insinuates. "I'd love to see you blow this wide open."

In the extreme sport that is modern corporate nomenclature, trust is in short supply, and paranoia reigns. "I used to work by writing names on individual pieces of paper and sticking them up on the wall," says Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys [now Managing Director of Igor]. "I don't do that anymore." The reason? "People were walking around the room with cameras, taking pictures of my names," Manning says blearily. "It got a little creepy. I mean, this is Silicon Valley. People move around a lot ... If they liked one of my names, they might be drawn to register it as a URL. And that would be very bad. Because, you know, I own those names."

What can explain this tense, sour mood? Part of the reason is increased competition. While the corporate-identity racket used to be dominated by a few big players -- Landor, Interbrand, Enterprise IG -- the market is now glutted with professional namers, all scrounging for the same clients. In addition to Lexicon, Idiom and Metaphor, the discriminating brand managers may now choose between NameLab, NameBase, Name/It, NameTrade, Namestormers and TrueNames. Each of the firms has its own jealously guarded methodology, a signature "naming module" that distinguishes it from its competitors. Enterprise IG has its proprietary NameMaker program, good for generating thousands of names by computer. Landor uses a double-barrelled approach; deploying both its "Brand Alignment Process" and a "BrandAsset Valuator." Others find that their module must be described in more than a few words. "We have a wonderful approach," says Rick Bragdon of Idiom. "We use an imaginative series of turbo-charged naming exercises, including Blind Man's Brilliance, Imagineering, Synonym Explosion and Leap of Faith ... We find that when clients are playing, literally playing creative games, they create names that come from a place of joy, a place of fun. A place that allows them to transcend the drudgery of naming, and come up with names that are fresh and different." Bragdon's most recent naming project? "I-Motors," he says sheepishly.

But a cutthroat marketplace isn't the only reason for the jaundiced mood. Among ad agencies and corporate marketing departments, and even at the naming companies themselves, there is a grim consensus that, despite all the frantic bonding and interfacing, despite the morpheme-munching computer modules, names today are worse than ever. "I tend to steer clients away from hiring naming companies," says Marc Babej, a brand planner at Kirshenbaum, Bond & Partners, a New York ad agency. "As naming has become professionalized, it's led to a certain norming standard. The names have come to sound more and more alike." Babej explains what he means by this. "You can imagine how, at one time, Livent might have sounded new and hot," he says. "Well, but now we have Lucent. And we have Aquent and Avilant and Agilent and Levilant and Naviant and Telegent. What's next, Coolent? What you have here is clients being taken for a ride."

Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank in New York, speculates that someday, historians will look back on the late '90s as a low point in the annals of naming. "There were periods in history of terrible architecture," he says. "But this architecture was actually presented to popes and kings and lords. And they actually went out, and lived in this type of housing! Why, then, should we be surprised that corporations are going out and spending 5, 10, 15, 20 million dollars promoting these dumb names? And then going out and changing them to names that are even dumber?"

Javed elaborates: "As I see it, there is a real malpractice issue," he says. "If you've just developed a great stereo system, I can see paying $1 million for a great name -- Sony. But what if you hire the same company for another naming project? And the names they come back with are Bony, Cony, Dony, Zony? At what point do you say, forget it, this is not worth $1 million? This is not even worth $5."

At no point, responds Landor. "We don't have an issue at all" with sound-alike names, Redhill tells me. "Think of the names Larry and Mary," he says soothingly. "They have the same suffix. But the meaning is completely different!" So, too, he says, with Landor creations Livent, Lucent and Agilent. Other top naming firms, aware that their names have come to resemble each other, have taken to attaching lagniappes of meaning to individual letters. Think of it as a couture touch, the syntactical equivalent of scalloped stitching on an inside hem. Michele Lally, global marketing director for Reuters-Dow Jones Interactive, recently renamed Factiva, is grateful to her naming company, Interbrand, for helping her stand out in a world of Factevas and Actevas. She has sought refuge in, as she puts it, "the semiotics of the letter i." "Have you seen our letterhead?" she asks. "We do the i as a biacron. An i with a circle on top. Or 'the bubble,' as we call it internally." Lally herself is bubbling over with enthusiasm for the bubble. "The brand circle denotes infinite possibilities," she says. "We very much hope that bubble, that icon, will come to symbolize business information in airport lounges worldwide."

Ron Kapella, head of Enterprise IG, seems to be pursuing a similar tack with Naviant, an online data-mining company. Eager to distinguish his brainchild from its sound-alike cousins Agilent and Navigent, he, too, has honed in on the letter i. "Notice that the letter i is exactly in the middle of the word," he says. "Notice also that it has a circle over it. An i with a circle over it is the international symbol for information. It's a visual symbol we've created. Consumers will come to associate it with endless inspiration, endless possibility."

Unless, that is, they associate it with googly eyed teenage girls who dot their i's with hearts and smiley faces. And indeed, among some companies, a backlash against the naming companies has taken hold. For some, the fact that they came up with their names all by themselves, without recourse to professional help, has become a point of pride. "I love our name," Jeff Mallett, president and CEO of Yahoo, recently told an industry newsletter. "It's fun, irreverent and consumer-focused. And it wasn't conjured up by Landor, or some huge naming agency."

It's this sort of chutzpah that makes the namers at Landor see red. "The Internet is filled with arrogance," says Amy Becker coldly. "You might have a provocative, fun name. But do you have the basis for a lasting brand? We still don't know how compelling a brand Yahoo will be 10 years from now. I sense a real missed opportunity."

"Let's put it this way," says Redhill. "Over the years, we have created and sustained many of the world's most durable brands. We make a lot more hits than companies who think up their own symbols and names. I'm not suggesting that a company couldn't get it right with a stroke of insight or genius or luck. But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby. But wouldn't you ask your friends and family for suggestions and recommendations? Perhaps they would open your eyes to a name you'd never considered."

Redhill is not alone in warning against the dangers of dilettantism in naming. Other namers are quick to deplore the proliferation of amateurs -- naming arrivistes who don't know the difference between denotative and connotative meaning, and who hilariously confuse brand equity with brand awareness. "A typical naming process costs about $75,000," says Ron Kapella of Enterprise IG. "Now, that might sound like a lot of money. But naming is very difficult and challenging. There are rules to follow. Rules of linguistics. Rules of trademark. Rules of international corporate nomenclature ... It's not just a process of pizza and beer around the table."

In hushed tones, Naseem Javed of ABC Namebank talks of the seamy underbelly of naming -- of squalid, Dickensian naming mills operating late into the night. "I've heard of those outfits," he says. "They've piled up thousands, zillions of names, which they'll sell for a buck each. For $1,000, they'll give you a thousand names. But look at the names! It's garbage in and garbage out." His voice lowers ominously. "Names like 'Oasis,' 'Advanta,' 'Advantia,' 'Advantia Plus.' Clients don't realize how many times those names have been recycled and recycled. Then, all of a sudden, it's Friday afternoon, and the press release has to go out on Monday." Apparently unaware of Redhill's description of the arduous process, culminating in an outburst of mass euphoria, that generated the name of Hewlett-Packard's new division, he speculates, "That's how you end up with a name like Agilent."

The naming pros love to trade stories of shortsighted CEOs who attempt to go it alone before finally turning to them in humble desperation. "Our system really is a quite powerful system to make new words out of English," says Ira Bachrach of NameLab. "We comprehend how identity structure works. We're creating natural language solutions from a morphemic core ... When clients try to do it themselves, out of word fragments, they end up throwing their hands up in disgust. Luckily for us," he adds, laughing uproariously.

Bachrach recently completed a renaming project for MacTemps, a specialized talent agency that provides print production experts who are proficient on Macintosh computers. Bachrach didn't much care for the name. "It didn't function well," he says. "It didn't suggest a brand." Bachrach thought he could help. "What MacTemps needed," he says, "was a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him."

Bachrach and his team of constructional linguists rose to the occasion. They presented MacTemps executives with their recommendation -- Aquent. Aquent? "It doesn't mean anything," Bachrach cheerfully explains. "But if it did mean something, it would mean, 'Not a Follower.'"

Bachrach elaborates. "This is a company that advocates for independent professionals," he says. "They have asequential career paths ... 'A,' as in 'not,' comes from ancient Greek. 'Quent' comes from the Latin 'sequor,' meaning, 'to follow.' These are people who are striking out on their own, charting their own course."

At MacTemps -- Aquent -- the name change went into effect last month. Befuddled employees are struggling to get with the program. "Let's see if I'm explaining this correctly," says Nunzio Domellici, an Aquent vice president. "The root of 'sequential' is 'quent.' 'Quent' itself is not a Latin word. But if it were a Latin word, it would mean, 'follower.' Or 'not a follower.' They share the same root." Domellici pauses. "Anyway, it's not something we stress when we pick up the phone."

You could be forgiven for thinking that a functional, descriptive name such as MacTemps, for all its pedestrian clunkiness, might be preferable to a name like Aquent, which to the casual observer evokes something vaguely liquid, perhaps a mouthwash, and whose meaning only becomes clear, if then, when parsed by a listener who is profoundly familiar with the morphemic structure of Latin and ancient Greek. But to the new pros of nomenclature, such quibbles are irrelevant. To hear Bachrach tell it, he couldn't care less whether company executives actually like the name he has bestowed upon them. "We're not really interested in what the client wants," he says. "What we do reflects what the client needs. We have our own analytic system for looking at what the structure of a name should be, and actually, tend to ignore the client's wishes."

Bachrach is joined in this view by many of his naming compatriots. Some go so far as to say that it's actually better if the client doesn't like the name. "We actually prefer that clients don't fall in love with the name," says Rick Bragdon of Idiom. "If they fall in love with the name, it's a good sign there's something wrong with the name."

"By establishing criteria, and by developing names against those criteria, we've taken the arbitrariness out of the process," says Ron Kapella of Enterprise IG. "And so, when a client says, 'I don't like it,' I say, 'It doesn't matter whether you like it or not. The question is: Does it meet the criteria?'" In addition to Naviant, Kapella's brag book includes Navistar and Tempstar, Telegy and Telegent, Verbex and Azurex, Nortel and Meritel.

Despite all the complaints about unlicensed amateurs, the true threat to great naming may come not from the slapdash fumblings of anarchic freelancers, but from something close to the opposite. In their zeal to professionalize and standardize what used to be a goofy, freewheeling, fly-by-night enterprise, the naming conglomerates tend to produce names that are reflective not of the client's corporate culture, but of their own. The result: a slew of names that are sterile, antiseptic, talcum-powder bland.

To find the soul of the Agilent generation, you need look no further than Darius Somary, a bright, eager research director at Landor. Somary is a firm believer in the need to subject all names to the rigors of quantitative and volumetric research. "The advantage we see in quantitative research in name testing is that it yields definite statistical results," he tells me. "It's easier to pick a winner."

But language, of course, is not digital, but organic. It comes from that wet, sticky place that we call our brain. How, I ask Somary, can Landor quantify an emotional response to a word? Easy, he says. "We set up phone interviews in which the interviewer has a very clear script to follow. And she can't really interact outside of that script. The questions are quite straightforward. She might say something like, 'On a scale of one to 10, how strongly does the name 'Agilent' communicate the following attributes: 'high quality,' 'very strong customer focus,' 'adapted to my needs,' 'truly cares about its customers.'

"Then we look at the results," Somary tells me. "We chart it all out. We make name graphs. And we go back to the client, and we say, 'Here's our winner.'"

Lu Cordova, president of TixToGo.com, is among the CEOs who roll their eyes at this sort of hubris. "Let's face it," she says. "We know who's in these big naming companies. We went to college with some of them. They say they're experts at this and experts at that. But they're really just our peers. They don't have any special mystical powers."

Cordova learned this the hard way earlier this year, when she sought out a new name for TixToGo, a popular online booking, ticketing and reservations service. After several months of probing and crunching, the naming firm she'd hired came back with a strong recommendation: YourThing.com. "The first 10 people we mentioned it to all said, 'It sounds like your, um, thingy," Cordova says drily. "So we said, whoops, OK, that one's gone."

Finished with the naming companies, TixToGo decided instead to sponsor a contest. Last month, the company picked a winner, David Nader, from over 128,000 entrants. In return for his winning submission, "Acteva," Nader received the keys to a Porsche Boxter. The shy young software engineer was thrilled -- and so was Cordova. "We love the name," she says. "And we're especially delighted it came from a civilian. The [naming companies] are unbelievable. I had one guy from a naming firm ask me me how I expected to get a name from a non-expert. He literally said, 'I charge $150,000 just to sneeze.' His whole attitude was, 'How could you go to them when you have me?' The snobbery, the credentialism was incredible."

Cordova casts her decision to snub the namers in populist terms. "We bet on America, and the bet paid off," she says. "We spread awareness. We grabbed a lot of creative names ... The whole thing was tons of fun. What a vindication of the American population -- to show that they could do it."

For those corporate souls not brave enough to put their brand in the hands of the American citizenry, another option is to turn to a renegade naming firm. A Hundred Monkeys, headed by Danny Altman and Steve Manning [now Managing Director of Igor], is leading the fight against terminal blandness in corporate naming. "We don't do names like Agilent," Manning tells me. "And so we have to pass on a lot of big contracts. We'd name a car for GM for free, if they'd just let us do something cool. Something with some emotional connectivity. It'd be such a fucking public service."

"No one names a car Mustang or Thunderbird or Monte Carlo anymore," Altman chimes in. "Instead, you have Acura. Alero. Xterra. Integra. All thoroughly researched committee decisions. All emotionally empty ... By the time they've been laundered, and pressed and packaged there's nothing left."

Altman and Manning, whose clients include Nickelodeon, Apple and Matchbox toys, are contemptuous of their morpheme-crunching rivals. "It's like using a computer program to write a song," Manning says. "You can do it, but why? Why go there? Why do that?" They regard their names as organic, throbbing beings, deserving of courtesy and respect. "I think all the time about the names that didn't make it," Altman says mournfully. "I think about what those names would have been like had they lived."

"It's like the names are our foster children," Altman says eagerly. "We have to give them up to someone. But we want to make sure they go to a good home. And that they're going to be used in a good way."

Some would say they love their names a little too much. "It's like [the names] are these little creative pearls, and they're casting them before us swine," says one advertising executive who has worked with the pair. The executive puts down the phone. "Lorraine," he yells, "what were some of those names that A Hundred Monkeys kept trying to shove down our throats? Oh yes. Jamcracker. Calabash. Wallop. Kitamba, which is apparently some kind of Hindu cloth. Totally inappropriate for our client."

"Who told you about Jamcracker?" Manning asks. "If you printed that, there would be legal issues. No one's taken that name yet! That name is our intellectual property." Later, however, Manning relents and allows me to publish the name. "There's actually been an issue with Jamcracker," he admits.

It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."

But while the Monkeys' methods aren't universally popular, some people can't get enough. Satisfied clients describe their experience as akin to the religious epiphany that follows an agonizing exile in the desert. "It's not all fun and games with the Monkeys," says Robin Bahr, marketing director for MedicaLogic, a health-care Web site. "At the end, you see the light. But early on, when the primordial soup is still being stirred, there's a lot of contention. There's fear and trepidation."

"They just kept digging and digging," says Gary Siefert, the company's director of Internet services. "There's a Walter Payton confidence about what they do. They were actively, if not aggressively, challenging our business model and our thinking. They were asking questions and more questions. Until they got to the essence of what we do. It was like digging into a huge watermelon on a summer day, just breaking it down, piece by piece. They kept drawing us back and back, from the playground of our inner child to the reality of our business model. It was an almost mystical experience."

Bahr and Siefert are thrilled with their Monkey-furnished name -- "98point6." "It's perfect," says Bahr. "It's just what we wanted. No Latin roots. No suffixes of any kind. I mean, these guys are good."

The monkeys don't come cheap. "We charge $65,000 per name," says Altman. "But we work with you for a month. And for that month, we are basically yours. It's actually a much lower price point than many of our competitors."

He's right. What's more, at A Hundred Monkeys, $65,000 will buy you an entire word. Some rival firms charge more than that for a mere suffix.

Consider Luxon Cara's $70,000 "identity program" for US Air. The airline "wanted to be repositioned and perceived as a major U.S. airline," says John Hudson, Luxon Cara's president. "And so we researched this. We checked it out globally. We basically lived with them for nine months to a year. It was one of the most exciting things we ever did."

Tom Lagow, US Air's executive vice president of marketing, says it was exciting for him, too. "They did an extensive amount of research," he says. "A hundred to 150 hours of interviewing. And I'll tell you, I was very impressed. They peeled the onion back to the point where they were able to define what business we were in. They determined that we were in the business of proficiency. And that, very unfortunately, that message of proficiency was not conveyed by the name US Air."

What was the new name? I asked. And when would it be unveiled? I was guessing Skystar, Glident, Proficienta. "Oh, it's already been unveiled," Lagow explains. I was perplexed. "But isn't US Air still US Air?" I asked. "I was just in an airport the other day, and I could have sworn ..."

"No, no," Lagow says. "It's been changed to US Airways."

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's all we needed!" he said eagerly. "What we found was that airlines that end in 'Air' tend to be thought of not as major. What we found is that if you stretch the name a little bit -- don't throw it out, just stretch it a little bit -- you create the perception of a larger, more substantial airline. Strategically and structurally, we are now oriented toward the international."

The renaming, which was announced in April 1997, was worth every penny, says Lagow. "We've heard comments from around the industry that it's one of the best identity programs ever done," he says.

If $70,000 seems like a hefty price for a word fragment, consider the chutzpah of Ira Bachrach. Several years ago, he charged Infiniti $75,000 for a single letter. Or, to be fair, two letters.

"We wanted to express the idea that [Infiniti] was a philosophically different kind of car," Bachrach explains. Proclaiming E, S, Z or X to be yesterday's news, Bachrach recommended that the company adopt different letters for its model identifiers. "I told them to use letters that weren't conventional," he says, "that were, in fact, aggressively unconventional."

Bachrach decided he was sweet on "q" and "j." "Utterly unused letters," he says. "Aggressively novel letters which didn't necessarily parse to luxury and performance. These were marketing guys with courage."

One model became the Infiniti J30, another the Q45. "I know it doesn't sound like much," Bachrach admits. "But I'm prouder of that than anything I've ever done in the model business. It was a marvelously condensed way to convey something that would have taken millions of dollars in advertising to convey." Instead, they scraped by with a mere $37,500 per letter. Lucky Infiniti.

In the end, however, attempting to quantify the benefits of a naming project may be just as small-minded as, well, attempting to quantify the benefits of a name. For the lucky client who truly clicks with his or her namer, the collateral benefits go far beyond nomenclature. There are new words to learn. Fun games to play. And, in the case of the Monkeys, unimpeachable warmth and love. "We got so much more than a name," says Robin Bahr of 98point6. "I mean, I got a name for my daughter. One of our senior executives identified strongly with 'Mescalanza.' No one calls him Jim anymore. His name is Mescalanza." Meanwhile, she says, "our senior manager for Internet development just fell in love with the name 'Jamcracker.' And so today, the Harvey meeting is known as the Jamcracker meeting. There are 300 people at this company who identify Jamcracker with Harvey."

Bahr claps her hands over her mouth. "Oh my God," she says. "I forgot. I shouldn't be mentioning these names to a reporter. Technically, we don't have ownership of those names. Jamcracker is still the Monkeys' property."

Bahr stops for a moment, as if listening to herself. Then she bursts out laughing. "Listen," she says. "I take it back. You write whatever you want to write. If someone out there wants to name their company Jamcracker, God bless them. And good luck to them."

http://dir.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/index.html?sid=474305

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The better your name, the less you have to spend on marketing & advertising.

We believe powerful names are built on powerful positioning strategies.

The key is to find a fresh way into the hearts and minds of your customers, redefine and own the conversation in your space, and engage people on as many levels as possible. The best names represent the process of boiling these ideas down into a word or two.

   

Throughout our process, we make sure everyone involved is given the insight and understanding necessary to embrace the most effective name for the job. Without an intimate knowledge of how and why names work, the best names are vulnerable to knee-jerk dismissal:

"Starbucks? Sounds like a TV game show where celebrities compete for cash."

"Starbucks? Are we selling gift certificates to the planetarium?

"Starbucks? That would be great if we were renaming the Chippendale dancers."

It's easy to find reasons to say no to a name. The trick is knowing when to say yes.

     

Our Brand Naming Process

     

The Outline

Positioning – The more specific and nuanced your positioning is, the more effective the name will be. All great names work in concert with the positioning of the brand they speak for.

Competitive Analysis – The next step is a thorough competitive analysis, in which we quantify the tone, strength and messaging of competitive names. This is essential for refining brand positioning. It tells you exactly where you need to be in order to dominate the competitive landscape.

Name Development – Name development begins by applying the positioning strategy and competitive analysis results to determine all of the things your new name needs to do for your marketing, branding and advertising efforts.

Trademark – We prescreen all names for worldwide trademark availability before presenting them to you. This ensures a process that exclusively produces names you can legally use.

Breathing Life Into the Names – At the point where you've selected three to five leading name contenders, we present each of them with a range of taglines and contextual positioning support. This is key to helping everyone involved understand the relative strengths and versatility of each name under consideration.

The five deliverables outlined above provide a solid foundation, but on their own they don't deliver extraordinary results.

Extraordinary names come from a process that's insightful and exceptionally executed.

The Insightful, Exceptional Execution

Want To Create A Powerful Brand Name? Beware The Literalist.

     
   

The Name Game: Play it right

By Jennifer Meyers
The Globe and Mail
May 30, 2011

What’s in a company name? Just about everything.

Just ask Brian Shepard, chief executive officer of of Tenzing Managed IT Services.

Mr. Shepard first launched his Kelowna, B.C.–based information company in 1998 with the moniker Canada Web Hosting Inc. But as the company gained traction in the marketplace, and the firm’s service offerings evolved, Mr. Shepard recognized that the name carried some significant limitations.

“First, having Canada in the name was too restrictive and suggested that we were focused on Canada, which wasn’t accurate at all,” Mr. Shepard says.

Even more of a disadvantage was the fact that Web hosting no longer accurately reflected what the company did.

“Our business had evolved, and there was so much more to it. We had shifted our focus from shared hosting services to managed hosting services and we felt that it was time to think about a name change,” he says.

Management spent time brainstorming internally and, while they came close a couple of times, ultimately they couldn’t come up with a name that adequately fit the company’s vision. Plus, the potential names they did come up with did not have the accompanying URLs available.

So in 2009, the company sought the help of a naming consultancy. “They came up with the Tenzing name, and we fell in love with it,” Mr. Shepard says.

The name is a nod to Sardar Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa guide who accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary to the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

“He worked largely in the background providing guidance and doing all the heavy lifting, which is a reflection of what we do,” Mr. Shepard says.

Not all entrepreneurs think so long and hard about naming their business, but they should.

After all, your firm's name can boost brand equity, create valuable public relations and marketing momentum and ultimately drive sales. The potential return on investment from choosing an appropriate name should compel any entrepreneur to devote time and effort to getting it right, experts say.

“Your name is the first and most visible representation of your brand. While getting it wrong won’t necessarily be the downfall of your business, it will make your marketing efforts that much harder,” says Jay Jurisich, founder and creative director of Igor International, a corporate naming specialist with offices in Toronto and San Francisco.

“Your name is a marketing weapon,” agrees Naseem Javed, chief executive officer of ABC Namebank International, a corporate image and naming consultancy with offices in Toronto and New York that takes credit for coming up with such names such as Telus, Celestica and Vincor.

Indeed, many entrepreneurs fail to recognize that choosing a business name isn’t about themselves, it’s about the end user. If it doesn’t click with your customers, then it’s a wasted opportunity, he says.

All to often entrepreneurs have preconceived notions about what a name should be, based on what’s already used in their industry, Mr. Jurisich says. Or they think the product is so good, it will sell itself. “Well, no. You have to remove those filters and think ways outside of those boundaries,” he says.

Contrary to popular opinion, says Mr. Javed, naming your firm is not a creative exercise. “It’s a serious, tedious, non-emotional process.”

Where to start? First you need to determine your brand positioning. Ask yourself what makes you unique in the marketplace and what message you want to convey, Mr. Jurisich suggests.

“If you tell me you’re cutting-edge and your products are revolutionary and you have a name like Acme XYZ, your visible face is contradicting your message.”

Keep your name short and simple and easy to spell, Mr. Javed advises. You want your clients and customers to not only remember your moniker, but be able to easily look it up, online for example, and refer you to others.

While descriptive terms can be useful, you also don’t want to pigeonhole your business. Mr. Shepard recalls that all too often when client’s referred Canada Web Hosting to other firms, the response would be, “but we’re not looking for Web hosting.”

Another typical faux pas for entrepreneurs is naming the firm after themselves, a practice both Mr. Jurisich and Mr. Javed abhor – unless it supports your brand position; think fashion designers.

Your family name won’t distinguish you from a sea of others or inform customers of what it is you do. In the long run, in fact, it may align you too closely with the business, which could become a limitation should you ever want to sell, Mr. Javed says.

An available domain name should be a key consideration when choosing a business name, Mr. Javed adds.

Mr. Shepard says that adopting the Tenzing moniker was almost thwarted when he learned the domain name was already taken. In a stroke of good luck, Mr. Shepard contacted the owner and learned that the domain name was no longer being used and he was able to buy it.

Keep in mind that the name or names you’re considering may already be taken and protected under the Trade-mark Act, so it’s a good idea to run your choices through the Canadian Trade-marks Database.

And once you’ve settled on a name, consider trademarking it to protect yourself, Mr. Javed suggests. Many entrepreneurs fail to realize that simply registering a business name provincially doesn’t prevent others from using the name (or something very similar), too.

Trademark applications are processed federally by the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. You can trademark a word, or words, a design or a combination of the two, for 15 years.

You can file a trademark application yourself, but Mr. Jurisich recommends enlisting the help of a trademark lawyer, who can help navigate the steps smoothly and efficiently.

Finding the ideal name isn’t easy, and with more companies launching into the marketplace, it’s becoming harder to get that one name that will help you stand out from the crowd, Mr. Jurisich says.

“So, when you find a name don’t dally, lock it in. If you wait a week, the name might already be gone.”

Special to The Globe and Mail

June 12, 2015

Pun and done: The risks of a witty business name

By Emma Peters

Some people see a wine store named Planet of the Grapes or a restaurant called A Salt and Battery and roll their eyes, or groan, or wince. Others, though, might appreciate the creativity that goes into naming your Vietnamese noodle shop Pho Sure or your bar Tequila Mockingbird.

But even the wittiest business owners have to be careful that their name doesn’t become a pun-hit wonder.

“It’s very hard to remember a pun,” says Steve Manning, CEO and founder of the naming agency Igor International. “They’re amusing at the moment – but then they’re like vapor – they’re gone.”

Some businesses get in trouble when the puns start to sound alike. Think of all the punny names for a hair salon that businesses could (and do have): Hair Today Gone Tomorrow, Million Hairs, Hair Me Out, Hair Force One, Hair Majesty, Hairs Johnny, Mane Attraction, Maneframe, you get the point. Pretty soon, all the punning on the same word starts to blend together.

“You’re using basically the same keywords all mixed up,” says Manning.

Creative-minded business owners might think their names are memorable for being quirky, but if a whole bunch of businesses pun with the same material, consumers won’t be able to distinguish or even remember them in the long term.

Naming a business is a big deal – the wrong name can doom a company even before it gets up and running. That’s why companies like Manning’s charge over $30,000 for their services. And, Manning adds, businesses can and do fail because of lackluster names.

There’s no formula to naming a company, but the general consensus is that a good name is well researched and strikes a balance between being specific and holding wide appeal.

Manning suggests considering certain questions during the naming process: Can this name accomplish anything for your company? Is it able to communicate a message to your target audience? Punny business names, he said, generally neglect these questions rather than answer them.
Manning says the only situation where a pun might work well is for a local business with no competition. If Cycloanalysts is the only bike shop in town, they don’t have to worry about having a name that’s easily confused or forgotten.

That might explain why punny business names are more prevalent on the local level (see hair salons mentioned above). There are only a handful of pun-named national companies - Petsmart, Men’s Wearhouse, Bare Escentuals and Staples chief among them.

Some luxury brands are not averse to taking on a little puniness in their names. One Fine Stay, a more upscale version of Airbnb that launched in 2009, operates in London, Los Angeles, New York and Paris. The company, which admittedly ranks quite low on the pun cringe-worthy scale, has gotten some favorable write-ups in Vogue and the New York Times. There’s also Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, a Chicago-based company that owns over 100 restaurants throughout the country, including the Eiffel Tower restaurant in Las Vegas.  

So what’s a business owner yearning for some humor in their company’s name to do?

“What you’re really looking for is something that works on multiple levels instead of one,” Manning says. “You can’t do it in a sophomoric, juvenile, linear way. You can’t spell it all out for people. You have to let them get it.”

Such as? Well, Smart Mouth, for instance, a dental practice with offices in Texas and Oklahoma, is a good example, says Manning, whose company (of course) helped name it.

November 30, 1999

The Name Game

Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation, where $75,000 buys you a suffix and competing shops slur each other over the virtues of Agilent and Avilant.

By Ruth Shalit

When Hewlett-Packard decided last year to spin off its instrumentation and measurement division into a separate company, executives at the computer hardware giant did everything they could to smooth the transition. Shareholders had to be notified. A top-flight management team hired. The trades brought on board. But such housekeeping duties were a minor matter compared to the vast existential task that loomed -- a five-phase, cross-unit "identity project," intended to unearth a suitably momentous name for the $8 billion enterprise. The name had to be a grand, monstrous, powerful thing -- broad-shouldered yet luscious, tempered by oaky bass notes of maturity, courage, character -- like a 1961 Cheval Blanc. "This was similar to the Lucent process," says David Redhill, global executive director for Landor Associates, the identity firm hired last year to supervise the project. "We needed a tremendous name that really was magisterial and compelling, and had a certain amount of stature right away."

As with Lucent, Redhill and his team approached the problem with ingenious thoroughness, devising a naming module that would eventually cost the client more than $1 million and involve up to 40 Landor executives around the globe. The first step was to interview key executives at the massive new entity, then known only by its code name of NewCo. "We wanted to know what the company needed to be; what it was aiming to be," says Redhill. "The aim was not to manipulate them, but really to draw out of them exactly how they visualized people feeling about their brand."

The exercise got off to an unpromising start. NewCo executives volunteered that they wanted the company to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring. "We've done this process with hundreds of companies," Redhill says wearily. "They all say, 'We want to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring.'" And therein, it seemed, lay the problem. Though top NewCo executives had avowed their intention to be different, to change the paradigm, to think outside the nine dots, "the qualities they were aiming to project were in fact common currency," Redhill sighs.

Fortunately, the Landor identity crew had come prepared for exactly this possibility. "We did mood boards," Redhill says. "We did random visual associations, attached to sequential words. And so, when they said, 'We want to be strong,' we would show them a picture of an ocean wave breaking. And we'd ask: 'Do you want to be strong like a force of nature?' Then we'd show them a picture of a metal chain link fence. And we'd ask, 'Do you want to be strong like a chain? Strong but breakable?'" The final slide was a close-up of a human face. "We said, 'Perhaps you want to be strong like human nature -- indomitable and immutable.' And they said, 'Yes, that's us. That's exactly how we imagine people feeling about our brand.'"

After four months of this sort of intensive brand therapy, the group settled upon the only name capable of conveying such protean emotions -- "Agilent." They took the name into focus groups, where, to their great delight, it was received with admiration, approval and total open-mouthed attention. "I've never seen anything like it," says Amy Becker, who works alongside Redhill in Landor's verbal branding and naming group. "This was a pretty rarefied crowd. We're not talking about the mass-consumer, chips-eating sort of person. This was a very particular sort of business-to-business decision maker. A hard group to impress. And they were just delighted." The name was also a hit among the NewCo rank and file. "It's funny, because 'Agilent' isn't even a real word," muses Redhill. "So it's pretty hard to get positive and negative impressions with any real basis in experience. But I'm pleased to say that when we unveiled the name last month at an all-company meeting, a thousand employees stood up and gave the name a standing ovation. And we thought, 'We have a good thing here.'"

But did they? Among Landor's rival name-slingers around the Bay Area, the choice of Agilent was immediately greeted with snorts of derision. "The most namby-pamby, phonetically weak, light-in-its-shoes name in the entire history of naming," declared Rick Bragdon, president of the naming firm Idiom. "It's like a parody of a Landor name. It's insipid. It's ineptly rendered ... It ought to be taken out back and shot."

Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys [now Managing Director of Igor], a San Francisco naming firm, was also appalled. "What a crummy name," he says. "It sounds like a committee name. 'Who's your competition?' 'Lucent.' 'Well, we want to play off Lucent -- only we're agile. I mean, if you wanted a name like that, I could come up with that kind of name in about four seconds."

Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank in New York, tries to be more charitable in his assessment. "Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yes, I did hear about the Agilent mess," he says. A long sigh escapes his lips. "Perhaps it would be best if Landor just closed up shop," he says quietly. "I don't want to trash them too badly. It's just that their last four, five naming projects have been total disasters."

Landor, for its part, is quick to defend its handiwork. "To our critics, I can only say, vive la difference, vive the competition and vive individual entrepreneurialism," says Redhill, in his gentle, grandfatherly voice. "We have the utmost confidence in our model." To drive home that point, Redhill put me in touch with Darius Somary, the research director who had confirmed to an empirical certainty the allure of names like Agilent. "From a quantitative standpoint, it's a very appealing name," Somary told me. "On all the scalar measures of distinctiveness and appropriateness, it tested right off the charts."

Welcome to big-league corporate naming, a Pynchonesque netherworld of dueling morphemes, identity buckets and full-scale linguistic sabotage. What was once a diverting sideline for mild-mannered grad students has become an increasingly lucrative and increasingly cutthroat profession, as blue-chip consulting firms schedule raids on college English departments and linguistics nerds scramble to shift their focus from the syntax of negation in the Anatolian languages to the murkier precincts of corporate identity.

The professional back-stabbing is a bit puzzling, given that professional naming, above all, is supposed to be fun. The literature of the namers brims with references to "joy," "play" and to the capacity for childlike wonderment. This image of naming gurus as paragons of corporate delight would be more believable, however, if the namers didn't spend so much time tearing each other to shreds. "You should call up Ira Bachrach of NameLab," breathes one namer. "He doesn't even have meetings with clients. It's just taking a bunch of morphemes and phonemes, and crunching them through the computer. Unbelievable." Another whispers honeyed words of ill counsel about Enterprise IG. "Their names are nothing more than a bunch of concatenized prefixes and suffixes -- totally soulless," he insinuates. "I'd love to see you blow this wide open."

In the extreme sport that is modern corporate nomenclature, trust is in short supply, and paranoia reigns. "I used to work by writing names on individual pieces of paper and sticking them up on the wall," says Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys [now Managing Director of Igor]. "I don't do that anymore." The reason? "People were walking around the room with cameras, taking pictures of my names," Manning says blearily. "It got a little creepy. I mean, this is Silicon Valley. People move around a lot ... If they liked one of my names, they might be drawn to register it as a URL. And that would be very bad. Because, you know, I own those names."

What can explain this tense, sour mood? Part of the reason is increased competition. While the corporate-identity racket used to be dominated by a few big players -- Landor, Interbrand, Enterprise IG -- the market is now glutted with professional namers, all scrounging for the same clients. In addition to Lexicon, Idiom and Metaphor, the discriminating brand managers may now choose between NameLab, NameBase, Name/It, NameTrade, Namestormers and TrueNames. Each of the firms has its own jealously guarded methodology, a signature "naming module" that distinguishes it from its competitors. Enterprise IG has its proprietary NameMaker program, good for generating thousands of names by computer. Landor uses a double-barrelled approach; deploying both its "Brand Alignment Process" and a "BrandAsset Valuator." Others find that their module must be described in more than a few words. "We have a wonderful approach," says Rick Bragdon of Idiom. "We use an imaginative series of turbo-charged naming exercises, including Blind Man's Brilliance, Imagineering, Synonym Explosion and Leap of Faith ... We find that when clients are playing, literally playing creative games, they create names that come from a place of joy, a place of fun. A place that allows them to transcend the drudgery of naming, and come up with names that are fresh and different." Bragdon's most recent naming project? "I-Motors," he says sheepishly.

But a cutthroat marketplace isn't the only reason for the jaundiced mood. Among ad agencies and corporate marketing departments, and even at the naming companies themselves, there is a grim consensus that, despite all the frantic bonding and interfacing, despite the morpheme-munching computer modules, names today are worse than ever. "I tend to steer clients away from hiring naming companies," says Marc Babej, a brand planner at Kirshenbaum, Bond & Partners, a New York ad agency. "As naming has become professionalized, it's led to a certain norming standard. The names have come to sound more and more alike." Babej explains what he means by this. "You can imagine how, at one time, Livent might have sounded new and hot," he says. "Well, but now we have Lucent. And we have Aquent and Avilant and Agilent and Levilant and Naviant and Telegent. What's next, Coolent? What you have here is clients being taken for a ride."

Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank in New York, speculates that someday, historians will look back on the late '90s as a low point in the annals of naming. "There were periods in history of terrible architecture," he says. "But this architecture was actually presented to popes and kings and lords. And they actually went out, and lived in this type of housing! Why, then, should we be surprised that corporations are going out and spending 5, 10, 15, 20 million dollars promoting these dumb names? And then going out and changing them to names that are even dumber?"

Javed elaborates: "As I see it, there is a real malpractice issue," he says. "If you've just developed a great stereo system, I can see paying $1 million for a great name -- Sony. But what if you hire the same company for another naming project? And the names they come back with are Bony, Cony, Dony, Zony? At what point do you say, forget it, this is not worth $1 million? This is not even worth $5."

At no point, responds Landor. "We don't have an issue at all" with sound-alike names, Redhill tells me. "Think of the names Larry and Mary," he says soothingly. "They have the same suffix. But the meaning is completely different!" So, too, he says, with Landor creations Livent, Lucent and Agilent. Other top naming firms, aware that their names have come to resemble each other, have taken to attaching lagniappes of meaning to individual letters. Think of it as a couture touch, the syntactical equivalent of scalloped stitching on an inside hem. Michele Lally, global marketing director for Reuters-Dow Jones Interactive, recently renamed Factiva, is grateful to her naming company, Interbrand, for helping her stand out in a world of Factevas and Actevas. She has sought refuge in, as she puts it, "the semiotics of the letter i." "Have you seen our letterhead?" she asks. "We do the i as a biacron. An i with a circle on top. Or 'the bubble,' as we call it internally." Lally herself is bubbling over with enthusiasm for the bubble. "The brand circle denotes infinite possibilities," she says. "We very much hope that bubble, that icon, will come to symbolize business information in airport lounges worldwide."

Ron Kapella, head of Enterprise IG, seems to be pursuing a similar tack with Naviant, an online data-mining company. Eager to distinguish his brainchild from its sound-alike cousins Agilent and Navigent, he, too, has honed in on the letter i. "Notice that the letter i is exactly in the middle of the word," he says. "Notice also that it has a circle over it. An i with a circle over it is the international symbol for information. It's a visual symbol we've created. Consumers will come to associate it with endless inspiration, endless possibility."

Unless, that is, they associate it with googly eyed teenage girls who dot their i's with hearts and smiley faces. And indeed, among some companies, a backlash against the naming companies has taken hold. For some, the fact that they came up with their names all by themselves, without recourse to professional help, has become a point of pride. "I love our name," Jeff Mallett, president and CEO of Yahoo, recently told an industry newsletter. "It's fun, irreverent and consumer-focused. And it wasn't conjured up by Landor, or some huge naming agency."

It's this sort of chutzpah that makes the namers at Landor see red. "The Internet is filled with arrogance," says Amy Becker coldly. "You might have a provocative, fun name. But do you have the basis for a lasting brand? We still don't know how compelling a brand Yahoo will be 10 years from now. I sense a real missed opportunity."

"Let's put it this way," says Redhill. "Over the years, we have created and sustained many of the world's most durable brands. We make a lot more hits than companies who think up their own symbols and names. I'm not suggesting that a company couldn't get it right with a stroke of insight or genius or luck. But if it's your own brand, how can you possibly be objective? I mean, would you name your own baby?" Redhill thinks for a minute, then backpedals. "I mean, of course you would name your own baby. But wouldn't you ask your friends and family for suggestions and recommendations? Perhaps they would open your eyes to a name you'd never considered."

Redhill is not alone in warning against the dangers of dilettantism in naming. Other namers are quick to deplore the proliferation of amateurs -- naming arrivistes who don't know the difference between denotative and connotative meaning, and who hilariously confuse brand equity with brand awareness. "A typical naming process costs about $75,000," says Ron Kapella of Enterprise IG. "Now, that might sound like a lot of money. But naming is very difficult and challenging. There are rules to follow. Rules of linguistics. Rules of trademark. Rules of international corporate nomenclature ... It's not just a process of pizza and beer around the table."

In hushed tones, Naseem Javed of ABC Namebank talks of the seamy underbelly of naming -- of squalid, Dickensian naming mills operating late into the night. "I've heard of those outfits," he says. "They've piled up thousands, zillions of names, which they'll sell for a buck each. For $1,000, they'll give you a thousand names. But look at the names! It's garbage in and garbage out." His voice lowers ominously. "Names like 'Oasis,' 'Advanta,' 'Advantia,' 'Advantia Plus.' Clients don't realize how many times those names have been recycled and recycled. Then, all of a sudden, it's Friday afternoon, and the press release has to go out on Monday." Apparently unaware of Redhill's description of the arduous process, culminating in an outburst of mass euphoria, that generated the name of Hewlett-Packard's new division, he speculates, "That's how you end up with a name like Agilent."

The naming pros love to trade stories of shortsighted CEOs who attempt to go it alone before finally turning to them in humble desperation. "Our system really is a quite powerful system to make new words out of English," says Ira Bachrach of NameLab. "We comprehend how identity structure works. We're creating natural language solutions from a morphemic core ... When clients try to do it themselves, out of word fragments, they end up throwing their hands up in disgust. Luckily for us," he adds, laughing uproariously.

Bachrach recently completed a renaming project for MacTemps, a specialized talent agency that provides print production experts who are proficient on Macintosh computers. Bachrach didn't much care for the name. "It didn't function well," he says. "It didn't suggest a brand." Bachrach thought he could help. "What MacTemps needed," he says, "was a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him."

Bachrach and his team of constructional linguists rose to the occasion. They presented MacTemps executives with their recommendation -- Aquent. Aquent? "It doesn't mean anything," Bachrach cheerfully explains. "But if it did mean something, it would mean, 'Not a Follower.'"

Bachrach elaborates. "This is a company that advocates for independent professionals," he says. "They have asequential career paths ... 'A,' as in 'not,' comes from ancient Greek. 'Quent' comes from the Latin 'sequor,' meaning, 'to follow.' These are people who are striking out on their own, charting their own course."

At MacTemps -- Aquent -- the name change went into effect last month. Befuddled employees are struggling to get with the program. "Let's see if I'm explaining this correctly," says Nunzio Domellici, an Aquent vice president. "The root of 'sequential' is 'quent.' 'Quent' itself is not a Latin word. But if it were a Latin word, it would mean, 'follower.' Or 'not a follower.' They share the same root." Domellici pauses. "Anyway, it's not something we stress when we pick up the phone."

You could be forgiven for thinking that a functional, descriptive name such as MacTemps, for all its pedestrian clunkiness, might be preferable to a name like Aquent, which to the casual observer evokes something vaguely liquid, perhaps a mouthwash, and whose meaning only becomes clear, if then, when parsed by a listener who is profoundly familiar with the morphemic structure of Latin and ancient Greek. But to the new pros of nomenclature, such quibbles are irrelevant. To hear Bachrach tell it, he couldn't care less whether company executives actually like the name he has bestowed upon them. "We're not really interested in what the client wants," he says. "What we do reflects what the client needs. We have our own analytic system for looking at what the structure of a name should be, and actually, tend to ignore the client's wishes."

Bachrach is joined in this view by many of his naming compatriots. Some go so far as to say that it's actually better if the client doesn't like the name. "We actually prefer that clients don't fall in love with the name," says Rick Bragdon of Idiom. "If they fall in love with the name, it's a good sign there's something wrong with the name."

"By establishing criteria, and by developing names against those criteria, we've taken the arbitrariness out of the process," says Ron Kapella of Enterprise IG. "And so, when a client says, 'I don't like it,' I say, 'It doesn't matter whether you like it or not. The question is: Does it meet the criteria?'" In addition to Naviant, Kapella's brag book includes Navistar and Tempstar, Telegy and Telegent, Verbex and Azurex, Nortel and Meritel.

Despite all the complaints about unlicensed amateurs, the true threat to great naming may come not from the slapdash fumblings of anarchic freelancers, but from something close to the opposite. In their zeal to professionalize and standardize what used to be a goofy, freewheeling, fly-by-night enterprise, the naming conglomerates tend to produce names that are reflective not of the client's corporate culture, but of their own. The result: a slew of names that are sterile, antiseptic, talcum-powder bland.

To find the soul of the Agilent generation, you need look no further than Darius Somary, a bright, eager research director at Landor. Somary is a firm believer in the need to subject all names to the rigors of quantitative and volumetric research. "The advantage we see in quantitative research in name testing is that it yields definite statistical results," he tells me. "It's easier to pick a winner."

But language, of course, is not digital, but organic. It comes from that wet, sticky place that we call our brain. How, I ask Somary, can Landor quantify an emotional response to a word? Easy, he says. "We set up phone interviews in which the interviewer has a very clear script to follow. And she can't really interact outside of that script. The questions are quite straightforward. She might say something like, 'On a scale of one to 10, how strongly does the name 'Agilent' communicate the following attributes: 'high quality,' 'very strong customer focus,' 'adapted to my needs,' 'truly cares about its customers.'

"Then we look at the results," Somary tells me. "We chart it all out. We make name graphs. And we go back to the client, and we say, 'Here's our winner.'"

Lu Cordova, president of TixToGo.com, is among the CEOs who roll their eyes at this sort of hubris. "Let's face it," she says. "We know who's in these big naming companies. We went to college with some of them. They say they're experts at this and experts at that. But they're really just our peers. They don't have any special mystical powers."

Cordova learned this the hard way earlier this year, when she sought out a new name for TixToGo, a popular online booking, ticketing and reservations service. After several months of probing and crunching, the naming firm she'd hired came back with a strong recommendation: YourThing.com. "The first 10 people we mentioned it to all said, 'It sounds like your, um, thingy," Cordova says drily. "So we said, whoops, OK, that one's gone."

Finished with the naming companies, TixToGo decided instead to sponsor a contest. Last month, the company picked a winner, David Nader, from over 128,000 entrants. In return for his winning submission, "Acteva," Nader received the keys to a Porsche Boxter. The shy young software engineer was thrilled -- and so was Cordova. "We love the name," she says. "And we're especially delighted it came from a civilian. The [naming companies] are unbelievable. I had one guy from a naming firm ask me me how I expected to get a name from a non-expert. He literally said, 'I charge $150,000 just to sneeze.' His whole attitude was, 'How could you go to them when you have me?' The snobbery, the credentialism was incredible."

Cordova casts her decision to snub the namers in populist terms. "We bet on America, and the bet paid off," she says. "We spread awareness. We grabbed a lot of creative names ... The whole thing was tons of fun. What a vindication of the American population -- to show that they could do it."

For those corporate souls not brave enough to put their brand in the hands of the American citizenry, another option is to turn to a renegade naming firm. A Hundred Monkeys, headed by Danny Altman and Steve Manning [now Managing Director of Igor], is leading the fight against terminal blandness in corporate naming. "We don't do names like Agilent," Manning tells me. "And so we have to pass on a lot of big contracts. We'd name a car for GM for free, if they'd just let us do something cool. Something with some emotional connectivity. It'd be such a fucking public service."

"No one names a car Mustang or Thunderbird or Monte Carlo anymore," Altman chimes in. "Instead, you have Acura. Alero. Xterra. Integra. All thoroughly researched committee decisions. All emotionally empty ... By the time they've been laundered, and pressed and packaged there's nothing left."

Altman and Manning, whose clients include Nickelodeon, Apple and Matchbox toys, are contemptuous of their morpheme-crunching rivals. "It's like using a computer program to write a song," Manning says. "You can do it, but why? Why go there? Why do that?" They regard their names as organic, throbbing beings, deserving of courtesy and respect. "I think all the time about the names that didn't make it," Altman says mournfully. "I think about what those names would have been like had they lived."

"It's like the names are our foster children," Altman says eagerly. "We have to give them up to someone. But we want to make sure they go to a good home. And that they're going to be used in a good way."

Some would say they love their names a little too much. "It's like [the names] are these little creative pearls, and they're casting them before us swine," says one advertising executive who has worked with the pair. The executive puts down the phone. "Lorraine," he yells, "what were some of those names that A Hundred Monkeys kept trying to shove down our throats? Oh yes. Jamcracker. Calabash. Wallop. Kitamba, which is apparently some kind of Hindu cloth. Totally inappropriate for our client."

"Who told you about Jamcracker?" Manning asks. "If you printed that, there would be legal issues. No one's taken that name yet! That name is our intellectual property." Later, however, Manning relents and allows me to publish the name. "There's actually been an issue with Jamcracker," he admits.

It seems that when Altman and Manning presented the name Jamcracker to a client recently, the reception was not everything they had hoped for. "I put the name up in front of their creative people," Manning says. "There were a couple of women sitting in. One of them got up and said, 'Oh, that's disgusting.' Another said, 'This is really sick.' I said, 'Excuse me, what are you talking about?' They said, 'We can't explain it, but that name is just creeping us out. We don't know what it is, but could you take it off the wall, please?'" Manning remains mystified by the incident. "There's apparently some strange, uncomfortable meaning attached to it in the minds of some women," he says. "God knows what that could be."

But while the Monkeys' methods aren't universally popular, some people can't get enough. Satisfied clients describe their experience as akin to the religious epiphany that follows an agonizing exile in the desert. "It's not all fun and games with the Monkeys," says Robin Bahr, marketing director for MedicaLogic, a health-care Web site. "At the end, you see the light. But early on, when the primordial soup is still being stirred, there's a lot of contention. There's fear and trepidation."

"They just kept digging and digging," says Gary Siefert, the company's director of Internet services. "There's a Walter Payton confidence about what they do. They were actively, if not aggressively, challenging our business model and our thinking. They were asking questions and more questions. Until they got to the essence of what we do. It was like digging into a huge watermelon on a summer day, just breaking it down, piece by piece. They kept drawing us back and back, from the playground of our inner child to the reality of our business model. It was an almost mystical experience."

Bahr and Siefert are thrilled with their Monkey-furnished name -- "98point6." "It's perfect," says Bahr. "It's just what we wanted. No Latin roots. No suffixes of any kind. I mean, these guys are good."

The monkeys don't come cheap. "We charge $65,000 per name," says Altman. "But we work with you for a month. And for that month, we are basically yours. It's actually a much lower price point than many of our competitors."

He's right. What's more, at A Hundred Monkeys, $65,000 will buy you an entire word. Some rival firms charge more than that for a mere suffix.

Consider Luxon Cara's $70,000 "identity program" for US Air. The airline "wanted to be repositioned and perceived as a major U.S. airline," says John Hudson, Luxon Cara's president. "And so we researched this. We checked it out globally. We basically lived with them for nine months to a year. It was one of the most exciting things we ever did."

Tom Lagow, US Air's executive vice president of marketing, says it was exciting for him, too. "They did an extensive amount of research," he says. "A hundred to 150 hours of interviewing. And I'll tell you, I was very impressed. They peeled the onion back to the point where they were able to define what business we were in. They determined that we were in the business of proficiency. And that, very unfortunately, that message of proficiency was not conveyed by the name US Air."

What was the new name? I asked. And when would it be unveiled? I was guessing Skystar, Glident, Proficienta. "Oh, it's already been unveiled," Lagow explains. I was perplexed. "But isn't US Air still US Air?" I asked. "I was just in an airport the other day, and I could have sworn ..."

"No, no," Lagow says. "It's been changed to US Airways."

"That's it?" I asked.

"That's all we needed!" he said eagerly. "What we found was that airlines that end in 'Air' tend to be thought of not as major. What we found is that if you stretch the name a little bit -- don't throw it out, just stretch it a little bit -- you create the perception of a larger, more substantial airline. Strategically and structurally, we are now oriented toward the international."

The renaming, which was announced in April 1997, was worth every penny, says Lagow. "We've heard comments from around the industry that it's one of the best identity programs ever done," he says.

If $70,000 seems like a hefty price for a word fragment, consider the chutzpah of Ira Bachrach. Several years ago, he charged Infiniti $75,000 for a single letter. Or, to be fair, two letters.

"We wanted to express the idea that [Infiniti] was a philosophically different kind of car," Bachrach explains. Proclaiming E, S, Z or X to be yesterday's news, Bachrach recommended that the company adopt different letters for its model identifiers. "I told them to use letters that weren't conventional," he says, "that were, in fact, aggressively unconventional."

Bachrach decided he was sweet on "q" and "j." "Utterly unused letters," he says. "Aggressively novel letters which didn't necessarily parse to luxury and performance. These were marketing guys with courage."

One model became the Infiniti J30, another the Q45. "I know it doesn't sound like much," Bachrach admits. "But I'm prouder of that than anything I've ever done in the model business. It was a marvelously condensed way to convey something that would have taken millions of dollars in advertising to convey." Instead, they scraped by with a mere $37,500 per letter. Lucky Infiniti.

In the end, however, attempting to quantify the benefits of a naming project may be just as small-minded as, well, attempting to quantify the benefits of a name. For the lucky client who truly clicks with his or her namer, the collateral benefits go far beyond nomenclature. There are new words to learn. Fun games to play. And, in the case of the Monkeys, unimpeachable warmth and love. "We got so much more than a name," says Robin Bahr of 98point6. "I mean, I got a name for my daughter. One of our senior executives identified strongly with 'Mescalanza.' No one calls him Jim anymore. His name is Mescalanza." Meanwhile, she says, "our senior manager for Internet development just fell in love with the name 'Jamcracker.' And so today, the Harvey meeting is known as the Jamcracker meeting. There are 300 people at this company who identify Jamcracker with Harvey."

Bahr claps her hands over her mouth. "Oh my God," she says. "I forgot. I shouldn't be mentioning these names to a reporter. Technically, we don't have ownership of those names. Jamcracker is still the Monkeys' property."

Bahr stops for a moment, as if listening to herself. Then she bursts out laughing. "Listen," she says. "I take it back. You write whatever you want to write. If someone out there wants to name their company Jamcracker, God bless them. And good luck to them."

http://dir.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/index.html?sid=474305