Home electronics retailer Best Buy has pulled out all the stops in a winning effort to edge out Ikea for honors as this year’s most annoying retail experience. Yes, the Apple stores have over promised and way under delivered, and Ikea is so badly run that only the insane return, but Best Buy is an aggressively bad experience.

Yesterday Best Buy made four separate attempts to get my address and phone number. I went in to buy a satellite radio and a DVD player. They refused to sell me the Sirius receiver without me coughing up my verifiable home phone number, so no sale. They then offered me a 59-dollar warrantee on the DVD player, which of course required my address and phone number, so again, no sale. Next was my free subscription to some magazine, which of course would have meant an address and phone number. Finally, the clerk pointed out that my receipt contained a survey that if filled out with my address and phone number would enter me in drawing for a 500-dollar Best Buy shopping spree.

Get Sirius, fellas, that’s a lot of personal information to give out just to get the best buy on a
Religion Free DVD Player.

Igor recently named a new audio company. The job required a name that would help them own the idea of sound, carry some excitement, and imply a bit of the ol’ European / Germanic hi-tech audio expertise brand equity.

There was only one name that could capture all three of these ideas and that name is Zounds. From the Zounds website:

Zounds was founded by Sam Thomasson, who has a hearing impaired daughter. When he would hug his daughter as a young girl, her hearing aids would squeal, causing pain to her. For years, he promised himself and his daughter that he would develop a hearing aid that would address these and other related hearing aid issues. Zounds’ breakthrough technology is the fulfillment of a father’s promise to his daughter, and intends to be a wonderful gift to others globally with hearing impairments.

Here are a few other notable occurrences of Zounds:

• From William Shakespeare, King John, act II, scene 1, line 466:
  

  “Zounds! I was never so bethumpd with words since I first call’d my brothers father dad!”

• On an episode of the 1960s Batman TV show in which an evil character named the Puzzler kept giving clues in the form of Shakespearean quotations, one of which was “Zounds”:
  

  Batman: Obviously! That’s the puzzle. “Z” is the most enigmatic letter in the alphabet, old chum. Think of the words that begin with “Z”: zigzag, zither, zodiac…

  Robin: Zounds!

  Batman: Exactly! “Zounds” is a Shakespearean interjection of wonder or surprise.

• Used as an interjection by the character Ned Flanders on the Simpsons (Lisa’s Wedding scene, aired 1995):
  

  Ned: Zounds, I did thee mightily smitily!

• Again on the Simpsons (1999) in a quote by the minor character Professor John Fink:
  

  “Zounds, someone took our gazebo.”

In one of the stranger cosmic coincidences, “Zounds, someone took our gazebo” was the tagline we had independently created for our client.

Igor’s 75 page guide to naming a company or product is free. It’s written in plain English and should help keep you from spending boatloads of money on naming consultants such as us.