07.15.08
Posted in Branding, Rotten Names, Name Origins at 10:37 am by Athol
Some elegant and educated words just do not fit for product lines. Especially mass
market consumer product lines. Naming your car the Phaeton has surely doomed its fate to some extent or other, especially in the US.
Wikipedia explains the origins as “The name Phaeton derives from Phaëton, the son of Phoebes and Helios in Greek mythology — and also a type of horse drawn carriage. So intellectually speaking, very smart. But try spelling it or saying it. Ouch.
I therefore award this name two bombs. One for spelling and one for pronunciation. Not to mention how it definitely does not sound like it belongs in the friendly family name collection of VW.
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07.03.08
Posted in Branding, Language Fun, Rotten Names, International at 10:25 am by Athol
Quixtar is currently running a broad awareness campaign to associate themselves with their real Amway Brand. But many people (including me) thought that Amway somehow became Quixtar to get rid of some of the negative brand baggage of the old Amway name, especially when they went online. So then the question that begged to be answered was if you were going to tar yourself with a brush of a different color, why not keep it very separate and distinct?
Turns out that Quixtar actually was a separate e-initiative originally kept at arms length from Amway - presumably while they learned and saw how it affected their independent business operators and their traditional MLM marketing programs. Of course, it took off like a rocket and has now been fully embraced (if I read their official releases properly), so they want to fold it back in and next year call everything Amway Global. A strange, slow- change strategy that makes my head spin… why advertise who you are now if soon you won’t be?
Could it be that a big agency is calling the shots, and they make more money if it is dragged out to the max? Or does it take the IT guys that long to do the integration?
But in the meantime, those clever names where there is a play on the English language often backfire, especially for the foreigners, the young and the half educated. Especially when you let your graphics designer break the word so it does look like Quix Tar. Don’t blame me if some people miss the implied Star sound.
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06.14.08
Posted in Branding, Rotten Names, International at 8:57 am by Athol
After their disaster with the name Phaeton, you would think VW had learned more than to just go out to a German Auto magazine for a new name. Even though the name was supposedly submitted by a reader - and they now say it is from Tiger and Iguana. With Latin America as a key market (as well as a number of factory sites) for them, you would have thought they would pay more heed to the Latino connotations.
Oh well, I am sure the trademark lawyers like it, and with their branding dollars they can do what they like. After all, they have had Rabbits and Foxes and Beetles, why not an Iguana from Tijuana?
PS Since Tig is a friendly nickname for the diminutive of Tiger, this name may actually fit a little better than at first glance.
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05.14.08
Posted in Language Fun, Rotten Names at 3:08 pm by Athol
There is plenty of places for successful abstract names in branding. But to have an abstract name that you can barely pronounce and worse, is very, very difficult to read in most fonts and almost anyone’s handwriting, that is really stupid.
No wonder EBay is suing Craigslist! Their own classified offering might even work if it just had a name intelligible to western ears, especially one with as much recognition as Craigslist (even though Craig himself didn’t want this name to stay on the door…. luckily wiser heads prevailed).
So we know that Ebay copied the classified ad idea from Craigslist, and the dots in the logo from Google, but we are not sure from which monkey-speak they copied the name. (We do not intentionally mean to offend Japanese character names here… just this name is not for the Japanese market). But they ended up with a very difficult name to type and read, let alone relate to.
Why couldn’t they just copy themselves and call me to sell them the domain KeenBay.com? At least you can read and spell and say it.. even on a quickly scribbled note.
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04.21.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 9:13 pm by Athol
Yahoo recently announced they are offering voice search capabilities so that users of Blackberry devices (and similar) can speak their requests and get an email reply via Yahoo’s mobile oneSearch engine. Unlike the competing ChaCha where humans answer the requests, do the search and send the results, everything for Yahoo is handled automatically via technology from a company called vlingo. That is right.. another bunch of techies trying to be clever and spelling their name without a capital letter. Good luck.. it will drive editors nuts.. and so they will be in foul mood when writing about you. And what are they to do if a sentence starts with the name?
Did your mother give you a name with a lower case? Of course not. Names are proper nouns. They should always start with a capital letter. Make the logo lowercase - if you must - or if you are paying Landor a lot to design your new look. But keep your name in lower case at your own risk. Cisco tried it years ago.. and they perhaps had more justification than others since this name was the back end slice of San Francisco. But then they grew up.
Imagine trying to read an analyst’s report on companies to watch, even later a Wall Street analyst’s, and your name doesn’t get flagged or indexed since it was passed over by man and machine all for the want of an uppercase letter.
Vlingo probably has great technology or Yahoo would not have hooked up with them. Their name potentially is very powerful and appropriate, but only when people know it is a name and not some common word.
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03.25.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 9:27 am by Athol
The stupidest question I get asked, usually by bright, naive would-be company founders, is should they consider the search engine rankings of a name or words first, then find the company name, or find the name first. And last week it came up a number of times, so I fear this silly virus is spreading.
So let me put it to rest here and now, and as politely as possible say: If you consider search engines first, you are flat out stupid. Consider the facts:
- Whatever clever, catchy web name you come up with for your product line, it is still only one of many web search terms.
- Whatever name you come up with, I can put it in the title or keywords of my web pages and score as high as you (or better).
- Whatever name yo come up with, I can make a webpage with that same key phrase and score as hight as you (or better).
- Whatever name you come up with, if it is a popular search term, it is probably generic so you cannot trademark it.
- Whatever name you come up with, it is almost impossible to get consumer or business brand awareness, since humans are so brand-centric.
- Whatever name you come up with that is popular with search engines, will also be popular as a general search term and you will be home alone, lost on the internet.
- Consider where you would go to buy a CD, a computer, a pair of shoes online. Really..you wouldn’t go to cd.com, computer.com or shoes.com (respectively) so why would your clients go to the generic for your industry.
If you want to sell scientific text books online, you could own the domain scientifictextboooks.com (it is for sale, and they are only asking $1,400). But how could you make this a brand? And how would you compete against the big brands? So please, first type this term in a search engine and see who else comes up. Even Target stores comes up early in this search, and that is far from their core business. Plus what happens if you really find your audience are searching for technical books instead?
Enough said. Go get a great unique short brand name that you can own and protect. Then do your search engine marketing properly.
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02.21.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 11:14 am by Athol
For my regular readers, you may recall that back in June last year I forecast Blu-Ray would win the DVD wars. After all, a real brand name usually beats out initials.. especially if it is lots of initials without a megadollars branding campaign behind it.
As often happens, the only 3 worthy initials to use with initial names are R.I.P.
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01.11.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 10:41 am by Athol
Ever noticed how certain sounds or roots have very specific connotations, even when there is no specific linguistic reasoning behind them? Of course, this is usually because of association with some other better known word or name. While it is not a generally true statement, a lot of “ster” ending names stir up trouble.
It all started with the association with mobster I believe. At times, Teamster also had many bad overtones. So when Napster came along it just seemed like crookery to me from the start.. especially because it is almost Nabster. And then came Grokster. An awful name with awful connotations for modern electronic mobster shanningans.
So be careful if your new name ends in “ster” even if you are trying to imply you are a group of people trying to achieve something.
And if you are stupid enough to pay millions for a highly tainted brand name like Napster and try to make it legit - good luck to you. What are you buying? Sure the name awareness of many people.. but people that are aware it stands for free or stolen goods. It is a lot easier to introduce a new name to the proper cash paying public than to change the minds of hoards .. especially when they have satisfied their darkest desires on the old offerings. Unless of course your whole management team are all techies and don’t get consumer marketing.
We do notice that the cat nabber logo endures.. even though they are trying to make him a little friendlier, even though the design is very similar to the old 
devil face.
On a more positive note, perhaps Friendster will break the cycle here… although they sure have had their ups and downs and really only make money from their adult alternative lifestyle sites - which was surely not the original business plan.
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12.15.07
Posted in Rotten Names at 11:49 am by Athol
This week’s name award goes not to a name, but to David Pogue, a great
columnist of the NY Times who recently posted a good article on the garbage coming out of automatic name generators.
More importantly, he called out the companies like Doostang, Wufoo, Bliin, Thoof, Bebo, Meebo, Meemo, Kudit, Raketu, Etelos, Iyogi, Oyogi, Qoop, Fark, Kijiji, Zixxo and Zoogmo that are launching their Web 2.0 sites with these names. We couldn’t but agree more with him that the future of such companies is probably non-existent - unless they will only be dealing with aliens from outer space.
I guess that means they could work as gaming sites. But for the rest of the world, creativity is not ended. There is an endless supply of names that are a lot easier for humans to understand, use and embrace, even if they are not in the dictionary. But they are made up by humans with much smarter brains and resources.
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10.23.07
Posted in Rotten Names at 10:19 am by Athol
If ever there was a product Microsoft copied off Apple that really was a me too, it is the Zune. Not to worry, new and improved versions are coming Nov 13th with more gigabytes! Yawn. Have you seen the boring new print ads? Double yawn.
I predict this product will zune be gone from the market, long before the zunni’s are gone from the middle east. (I have commented before in my name critic column about the problems with this name.)
In the meantime, for something musical that really is cool - and different from
Apple’s offerings - check out the new Pacemaker.
Fun name, fun product. It’ll make your musical heart sing.
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