Name Awards

When the obvious is simple and bounces right along.

Now that we all know the Apple lawyers were laying a false trail (or there is more to come), isn’t it refreshing that the marketing geniuses there kept the new naming architecture clean and simple too. So now we can look forward to iPad, iBooks, etc.

But we expect that of Apple. Historically Polaroid has been a different story though, often falling over all their own wasted ink papers. Not now. The new consumer camera contains their instant print magic as well as being a digital camera. And it has the hip, sweet, simple and obvious name PoGo.

Congratulations. But the fun is only just starting. They have announced a co-branding deal with Lady Gaga of all people. Talk about moving from stuffy to hip and relevant! Will that be the Lady PoGo or the GagoPo or PaGoGa or PoLady…  ?

Oh dear…TabletMac is such a heavy name!

A year from now people will be so used to playing with their TabletMacs they will have forgotten what a heavy a name it has. Shouldn’t that word be reserved for companies taking their medicine? Who the heck came up with it anyway? (Probably Moses and his stone age friends).

Yes Apple, we know you have lots of brand power and marketing reach, but we are not accustomed to seeing such boring heavy names from you. It is time for a new category name, even if you have to cross over something like you did in moving iPod from internet kiosk usage.

This time you have Kindle and Nook giving you a run for your money on the book front too. Of course, we know you plan to become the standard for video reviewing too. So why not Vpad, or Vpod or VMac or PadMac… almost anything is better than the langourous Tablet name.

How far can you, or should you, stretch a brand?

Well it had to happen sooner or later.  But it was a bit disconcerting to have to stop and think so hard about branding right as we were launching our new eBook Brighter SEO: Organic search engine optimization last week. For those of you who don’t know me, I am also the president of Brighter Naming®, and have previously released titles like Brighter Branding and Brighter Names. Not all titles have Brighter in them (eg Spreadsheet Marketing and Emergency Golf) but we do often refer to our full team as the Brighter Team and of course we put out Brighter Proposals, etc. etc.

Problem is, the publishing company for these books is called Foden Press and people ask why not Brighter Press or Brighter Publishing or similar. Yes, we have one product name mini-franchise spread across two different company names. And we are small and only have very limited branding dollars.

And the funny part is, I personally set it all up and even I was stumped by the question. I mean it is not rocket science after all. Then I thought about how I could have been so dumb until I realized that like a lot of brands, I wasn’t remembering that there is history involved here as well. In fact, Foden Press and Spreadsheet Marketing came along at least two or three years before the first Brighter anything, and at the time I didn’t want to register another business so I simply used my last name.  And I had never bothered to go back and fix it – always being too busy to redo the whole image set and marketing that goes with a company name.

Oh no, not another Nexus. One has to wonder.

This week Google announced their own new phone, even though they can’t quite clearly elucidate what this has got to do with their core business.

Never mind, what we want to know is if you make a call on a Nexus One™, will it be routed via a Cisco Nexus® switch, will it work with the Nexus® measuring equipment and the Nexus® satellite radio hardware, will it use and support Nexus® typefonts, does it use a Nexus® plasma flat screen, does it compute like a Nexus® personal computer and connect to the Nexus® automotive measuring instruments, does it support Nexus® audio/video, run the Nexus® fluid dynamics program, is it based on Nexus® IC technology, can you download Nexus® erotic books from Virgin, and is all this supported by the Nexus® software support package?

Aren’t you glad they added the word one to make it unique? Luckily they didn’t pick 2000, because the Nexus 2000® was an old, old dictation machine. Google must be going corporate. So much for their former uniqueness streak.

All Nexus names used here are registered trademarks of their owners – too many to mention, but only a small sample of those fighting over the same name with the US Patent and Trademark office. Nexus one is not yet an approved or registered trademark.

Zynga sings a different tune

The big branding agencies usually say that unless a brand is really broken, don’t change it. In fact, many brands have become better known after a disaster, provided that the situation was properly handled by management. To which I might add, or the problem was real but long ago, and now we can sweep it under the carpet.

Zynga made a lot of its money originally by being the US king of spam. Today they are perhaps still not that well known, but their games are all the best sellers on Facebook. Games like FarmVille, FishVille, PetVille, Mafia Wars, etc.

But how did they get their own interesting name  – that is both short and musical, as well as strong and dynamic? As you may have guessed, it is from the name of the owner’s dog.. hence the logo.

And, according to their website, the dog’s real name was Zinga, which is Swahili for Princess. How come so many people use Swahili as the excuse for any strange African word? They should be more careful. The AfricanLanguages.com online dictionary gives these results for Zinga:

zinga verb

1 roam, wander, rove

2 turn the other way

3 to prostitute