Name Awards

Lots of faces smiling at Facebook

So an old naming project warmup exercise was to ask your audience:

• Why is it called Rhode Island if it is not an island?
• Why is it called junk food, when it is not junk and not food?

To which today we can add:

• Why is it called Facebook when it is not a book of faces?

Regardless, Facebook deserves their mega success as they go public this week. My only concern is if they have become the platform of choice for many businesses in place of websites. A clean, simple, almost boring name without any hot logo is the story at Facebook… but not really.. because it is a book of everyone’s personal stories and pictures.

Talking of which – did an interesting sign/name catch your eye? Why not post it on Brighter Naming’s Facebook page with a brief comment and help us build the biggest Fun Name Signs album in the world?

Splish, Splash, Splunk

When a company named Splunk goes public on the stock exchange, you have to admire them for their spunk and of course, wonder what they do. As it turns out, they are a backroom IT tools company for exploring super big corporate datasets.

This has been a growing problem for some time now, and it appears Splunk has moved to the head of the pack in addressing these problems. Google and others have had some half hearted attempts before, but now it shows that a real concentrated set of special tools are needed.

But why such a friendly name as Splunk?  Almost sounds like summer and the pool. On the other hand, why not? Short, sweet and simple it cuts through the noise, is very memorable, and even has a good story behind it. How do I know? Because they tell the story on their website – smart as they are. See sidebar here and enjoy, even though their graphics logo is as plain as sawdust.

Travelocity is a great name with an even better character

Travelocity is a great example of three in one naming, as I call it. The name has 3 clearly obvious roots, all of which pertain to the core message and business:  Travel, Velocity and City. More than that, it is very much a coined name, but the English roots are so obvious it will not immediately scare off all those stuck-in-the-muds who don’t like coined names for anything. As a result, Travelocity also has the power of an easily protectable trademark worldwide.

While their three star logo is a little bland, it too is a registered trademark. And it sure is hard to come up with any unique icon nowadays for a travel firm.

But their little roaming gnome character is sheer genius. Talk about putting a face on a service. One you don’t have to pay royalties too. One so popular it has its own online shop. One that plays its own starring role in a popular TV series: In at least one episode of each season of The Amazing Race competitors have to find a gnome and take it along to the next stop.

What better way to market and promote your service? What a clever way to do product placement right in a major series when you are an invisible service company that has no product! Yes, we hear the leg winners getting prizes compliments of Travelocity. But our heart reacts to the little gnome and makes us believe we will have support with us wherever we travel the world – a very, very important factor for most of us discount shoppers.

Travelocity  is thus awarded our top 3 star gold award for naming and branding.

ICANN a lot smarter than US FTC

The more I think about ICANN and how they are implementing the new top level domain names, the more I realize how smart and thorough their procedures are for the betterment of the internet worldwide. So I hereby anoint them with a name award for the month, even though they won’t reveal until the end of the month how many applications they have received for new domains.

Meanwhile the US Federal Trade Commission that was brought into the debate by the US Ad Council, now is only crying that it will make it harder for them to catch the bad guys. Well isn’t that the case everyday that the internet grows?

And I don’t notice the French, German or Russian, not to mention the Asian and Arabic Ad Councils, complaining because they might finally be able to properly handle the correct names of their valid companies with the proper spellings.. even if they use more than the English character set alphabet.

As for the often-touted, but even stupider idea, that it will cost the big brands a lot of money to claim all their domains, who are you really crying for?  Coca Cola could probably afford the $5,000 or so. Or they might just do what most companies are doing right now – ignore all the other domains.

For example, does your company use a telephone? Do your execs travel? Are there professional consultants in your company? Do you have an office in Barcelona? Do you have a US presence? Do you have job vacancies? Do you supply a lot of information to your clients? Why then have you not yet claimed your .tel, .travel, .pro, .cat, .us, .jobs and .info domain names already? Of course, you probably have the .xxx domain to stop your execs getting caught with their pants down!  All of these have been out for a while and most will take years to catch on. So the real action for new domains is going to be in foreign lands and might just be a big yawn stateside.

Everyones going Wavii.. well not quite yet, except early movers

What do you think of this name style? It allowed us to create a short sweet name that is original and unique. Now we see more about what the client is using Wavii for, it seems to fit even better. You too can follow waves of information by becoming one of their beta users at www.wavii.com.

Earlier this week they got a great Wave from Google’s Marissa Mayer as reported on The Brand Channel. Endorsements don’t come much better than that.

Miserware breaks barrier with Granola product and name

When I am reading about a computer science professor and discover he has found a way for software to be much smarter at power management, I am not surprised. The fact he calls his company Miserware I think is a natural and applicable name and move on. Then I discover he calls the PC version Granola and I am pulled up fast. Did I hear right?

A break through free software program that is saving the world a lot of electricity and it is called Granola? I can hear the jingle now: “Granola isn’t just for breakfast anymore.” But since a very reputable magazine, BusinessWeek, first alerted me to this name and called it a brandname, I believed it to be real. And once I looked it up on miserware.com which flipped me over to grano.la (yes a website using the Laos country domain, not LA city.. at least not yet) the plot grew deeper. I am sure there is a play on the name somehow, perhaps from granularity. While I am just guessing here I do think that is more likely than someone looking at his breakfast dish or lunch box and going Aha!

And since Businessweek called it a brandname, I had to check and see if it was a registered trademark. Well this turned into a quick lesson on how hard it can be to look up certain names on the USPTO.gov website if you don’t know what you are doing. The first trademark search box I got to, I typed in granola of course.. and got 3076 hits to be precise! Wow. Backup.. let us rather narrow search to a name or partial name in the software category (9) and see what happens. I find an expired trademark for Granola Disk, and nothing else.

Oh well, with such an unusual name and prolific download rate, I suppose no one is going to copy your unique product name, so why pay the small trademark registration fee? Certainly in the food category it is a generic word and therefore not trademarkable, but in software it is unique and I really wanted to properly credit it with the Circle R brand – ®.

P.S. Also a great example of how a product name logo does not have to be boring.

Humor and Wall Street Journal endorsement

Thanks to the Wall Street Journal for this little bit of sunshine in the middle of all their dire news earlier this week. Sure is nice to see a change of style from them.

Is this tongue-in-cheek cartoon an unofficial endorsement from the financial media powerhouse that name changes actually are effective?

Others have claimed to have branded milk with their Got Milk campaign, to which I respond they only raised the awareness of milk. I defy you to recite what brand of milk you prefer. But when it comes to sports drinks and bottled water, the brand wars rage with passion. Isn’t it amazing what strong feelings we have for some flavored waters thanks to the miracle of marketing?

Keurig is a Tasteless Coffee Name

Top of my Christmas wish list is a new coffee machine. The simpler the better, but I like my coffee hot and not lukewarm. And I usually need my first, and sometimes only cup, fast. Plus I have been reading about Nestle entering the one cup market in the USA, a market where they barely have a foothold even though they dominate some other countries with their one cup solutions.

So when I see coffee ads while I am watching online video, my cognitive recognition skills kick in. First time or two I saw the Keurig ads I watched them carefully but couldn’t remember the brand. Then I watched more carefully and wrote it down. Today as I sit to write this I discover I can’t find Keuric’s website, but luckily Google helps me out and corrects my spelling (and thanks McAfee for not letting me surf to the infected keuric.com site).

If a professional brand meister of many years standing, when consciously trying, cannot remember your name, then I think you have a problem. Not only is the name difficult to say and remember for English speakers, it just provides us with no associations or meanings. No wonder they have to spend so much money on marketing. What a shame. And they probably have a good product too. Now they need a cure for Keurig.

Silicon Valley Mixer – the one and only

It almost seems strange to talk about a Silicon Valley Mixer, given that there are so many each week in the valley. In fact, Workit.com has become a great business service just keeping track of what is going on in the greater San Francisco Bay Area each week. And so when Derinda Gaumond (founder of Workit) invites you to the 8th Annual Silicon Valley Mixer you know this is the original and best one. Apart from being a great meeting and networking event by itself, it is also the annual kickoff to all the other Xmas functions.

Silicon Valley Code Camp has been and gone. The programmers are back on their keyboards. Now the business and marketing people can safely show their heads at this function.  Come network at the Mixer hosted by the best tech networker in the Bay Area.

Disclosure: My company is a sponsor and exhibitor again this year. Meet me there. If you visit their site you can see me in the picture… just off center in rumpled black leather jacket but smooth wavy white hair:)

Not all great names are short and sweet

I have recently had a chance to discuss what makes a good name with a number of writers, in addition to my usual discussions with clients, and an interesting fact comes to life: Not all great names are short and sweet.  We have a top 10 list of ideal factors for your new company, product or brand name, and these points are mirrored more or less on many other linguists and branding lists.

But what about National Geographic? Or The Smithsonian Institute? Or Architectural Digest? Or Wikipedia? For most of these you couldn’t find a better name. And even though many people struggle to spell encyclopaedia, I can’t imagine there is a better name for Wikipedia, even though most people don’t know what a Wiki is or what the Hawaiian word means. Hint: Look it up in Wikipedia – one of the most trusted sources on the internet.

So we must conclude that for every rule about a great name, there is an exception. And, as usual, nothing matters if the boss doesn’t like the name anyway.

UPDATE: Since we no longer spell encyclopedia as encyclopaedia, care needs to be taken with the root tail here, as it is also often used for pediatric or even pedophile names. If it wasn’t better know, Wikipedia could be a list of pedophiles or a list of kid’s problems.