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.

Better Business Bureau is a great blocking name

I have recently had the Better Business Bureau chasing our company from two different field offices. This happens every few years as our name seems to surface on both their lists. Anyway, we finally broke down and paid them the requisite fees to say we were a member in good standing – mostly so we could use their logo and avoid one other small hurdle for some people doing business with us.

Which got me to thinking about their name. What if I wanted to compete with them and start a separate business certification service? Could we then be Best Business Bureau? Not likely.. sounds awkward and may even trigger a law suit as being “confusingly similar”. So this is a name that has both first mover advantage and is also a good blocking move.

But if you run into a situation like this, do not despair. The trick is to just go a completely different way. In fact, in many areas now a better certification is to be a Diamond Certified Business.

If you name it Skinny I assume it is good.

After some recent road travels I was frustrated at how hard it is to get sugar free or low sugar snack products at all the conveniency stops along the way. That is until I discovered Skinny Cow. For all I know the real reason for the low calorie count is the size of the chocolate bars. Never mind. Sometimes we just need a small taste of chocolate. And we are going to eat the whole bar of course, so why not make it small in the first place.

Plus we have all heard enough insults about someone being a fat cow, so why not give it a friendly, functional name like Skinny Cow. Then dress it up with a friendly cow with a small waist being confirmed by the tape measure, and you finally have a product that can cut through much of the noise of the traditional sugary brands in the candy aisle.  Thank you Nestle.

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?

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:)

Was Apple the most expensive name to preserve California?

In the rush to eulogize Steve Jobs, some articles are not portraying the correct origins of the Apple name, nor are they pointing out the massive legal mistake they made that cost the company millions.

The company was NOT named after the Beatles record company. I believe this is the true story: Steve Jobs simply told his fledgling team one day in the Bay Area that they needed a new name for the company. And in frustration with their lack of suggestions, he said if they didn’t come up with a name by five o’clock, he was going to name it Apple. And so it came to be.

But later as they grew and registered their trademark around the world, Apple Computers Inc (as they used to be) signed a bilateral agreement with Apple Records Ltd (of the Beatles) that Apple Computers would never make music and Apple Records, in turn, would never make computers. This was all fine and good until Apple unveiled the Mac line of computers, with their built-in sound and music capabilities. Luckily by then the Mac was selling well and the company was very wealthy, because when Apple Records sued them, the case eventually ended up in British High Court and Apple Computers lost to the tune of approximately $46 million! I still remember the positive spin they put on it for their shareholders: they had been expecting to have to pay more, and secondly, they were insured.

Well the insurance company refused to pay up and it went to court. And Apple Computers lost again, so it cost them about $10 million more when all the legal costs were added up. For a grand total of about $56 million – to legally keep their own name! WOW. Let this be an expensive lesson for all company founders who would like to name their company without checking trademarks properly.

PS As for the logo, which used to have kiddy candy stripes on it I don’t think there was a bite taken out of the Apple because of some connection to Adam and Eve. I heard (but may be wrong) that it was done to make it clearer that the logo really was in the shape of an Apple, and nothing else.