Name Awards

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.

A segway to a great (but not green) company name

Out of the blue today I started thinking about the Segway company and their great marketing of a product and technology that no one needs. And their great marketing starts with a superb name, cool logo and practical tagline.

Only in America could there be so much hype to create demand for a product that was invented simply because they could. After hundreds of years of evolution, the bicycle and tricycle are the epitome of elegance in human powered green transportation. Then Segway arrives and tried to tell us they were going to revolutionize the world – Yes, at their pre launch hype those were the kinds of stories being leaked out. simply because they now had the smarts and technology to help you balance a two wheeled scooter with side by side wheels.

Heck every postman in the country was going to need one. Every sidewalk should be allowed to have them running over grandma’s and crashing on the downhills. After all, they were only $7,000 each. Definitely your rich spoiled kids toy.. popular with adult kids in Silicon Valley so they wouldn’t have to walk to lunch.

But great marketing and a superb name do not make for good business sense. Especially when for less than half the price you can have a similar looking electric tricycle…… practical and sturdy enough for the LAPD and others to use them for street patrol. And we know how to work a tricycle – we learned in kindergarten!

PS All you green eco fans should protest at them claiming to being the leader in personal green transportation… What about the electricity and all the components they use? And they have only made a few thousand at most. Compare that with the millions of bicycles that run on pedal power before you segway to a new paradigm.

Magenn if you can, a new clean technology that works

Well, if you were going to create a company to invent and deploy lighter than air wind turbine generators, what would you call it?  Windy Sky? What if you imagined that these devices could be deployed worldwide, wherever Magellan sailed?  Then maybe you would come up with a unique new name like Magenn.

OK, I can hear you cringing now and saying “I would never name my company with an awkward coined word like that!”. In such a case, I would remind you of all the people who never would of dreamed of naming their company Cisco or Google. But now those are great names, because their shortness and good phonetics, with sticky consonants, are proving to be memorable brand monikers.

I am not smart enough to know if Magenn’s flying wind turbines will really work… but they are fascinating and we wish them well.  And seriously consider them as  a prospect if you are a venture investor. Their embedded tagline does a great job of positioning the technology until such time as they are better known.

Note: We have no connections to this company and have done no business or technology evaluation other than on their company name.

A peaceful smile.. from a law firm!

Yesterday a law firm brought a smile to my face. No, I did not win a judgment. I simply met a new small business law firm  that had the courage to not name themselves in the usual Stuffy, Traditional and Heritage style! Being the namiac that I am, I was impressed the minute I saw Jennifer’s business card (logo scanned here).

Playing in different technology sandboxes is very “in” speak in Silicon Valley. Visiting a law firm called SandGarden Law plays off that plus much more as implied by the whole garden concept. It makes me feel more at peace already.

Lawyers and clients are people too. I am sure you will interact well with this startup when they make you comfortable on first contact. And no, it is not an Asian zen firm.

P.S. And with a name like that, no tagline is needed.

We are marching to Tshwane ??

For eight or nine years they have been arguing about changing the name of Pretoria, administrative capital of South Africa. For many people, Pretoria was not only a symbol of the old white government, it also did not give credence to the former neighboring black, colored or Indian townships. Needless to say emotions run high on all sides of the argument – especially as this has always been a predominantly Afrikaans speaking city by its white citizens. Compare this with its mostly English speaking big business neighbor Johannesburg – only 50 miles down the road.

But they did manage to create a super metropolis and agree on its African name of Tshwane – not that they can agree on where it comes from – other than something to do with the Ndebele tribe or language. Most of us will end up pronouncing it schwain, and not the proper Shwa Nay in the local language. To emphasize what the name is supposed to mean, the city uses a great tagline: We are the same.

While the debates rages on (see wikipedia), it appears that the hard deadlines of hosting the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament is helping some decision making along. And today, at the start of the Federations Cup (a warm up for World Cup) the Italian team, which is using Tshwane as its base city, was presented the keys to Tschwane.. without the name Pretoria being used.

So now, all around the world, will we have to update that grand old marching battle hymn of the republic “We are marching to Pretoria”?  Maybe not. Most who sang this song probably didn’t have a clue it was a real city they were singing about. Just one with the right melodious tone to it.

In the meantime, we are impressed with this super-city doing such a good self-branding campaign.

Mzinga no um singa in America

A client recently brought this name to my attention. “Why on earth would a company change its name from Prospero to Mzinga?” he asked. Well they don’t say anywhere on their website corporate information, so we can only assume something was broken or not working with Prospero. After all, there are no other reasons to change your name, especially when the company is doing well. [Ed. it has now been brought to my attention that Mzinga acquired Prospero]

But more interesting for me (being a namiac) was the choice of a Zulu word. Sure, finding domains is tough, but stretching to the Zulu language is not the norm. In fact, common and popular words in Zulu are all taken already as .com domain names too!

Mzinga, pronounced Um Zinga  (soft um), is the word for The Ring. But if you want to look this up in a Zulu dictionary, you have to enter zinga or  ~zinga. In English (and most Western languages) we modify words with particles at the end, like in  ringer, ringing, ringed, etc. or we use a pronoun like The or A in front. In Zulu, the modifier goes in front. You will see this too in other eastern African languages.

Did you know you can track African tribal migration by the commonalities in their languages? Tribes who migrated thousands of years ago share language similarities with the Zulu language. Of course, Zululand is part of South Africa, and they could migrate no further South without getting on a boat.

On the south west coast of South Africa, Xhosa is the dominant language, and it has almost nothing in common with Zulu, as it evolved from migration down the west coast. Now you might understand why South Africa has 6 official languages….four from  from tribal history (though there are more in usage), Afrikaans from the Dutch Settlers, and English from the English colonizers. They all come together at the bottom of the continent, in a country that has such a common name you have to use the term Southern Africa for the region and not the country name. A great melting pot. A country with a great tagline from that wise, wise man Dr Nelson Mandela: The Rainbow Nation.

PS In Zulu you will hear Hamba Gahle when people leave. No it does not mean Goodbye. It translates almost exactly into the common American farewell phrase: Take it Easy (literally Go Carefully).

PPS As you can see from the comment, Mzinga is used in Swahili for beehive …yes Eastern African language roots – beehives are round in nature after all. But Swahili is not a language per say. Like Fanagalo in South Africa, it is the common overlap of many languages used in the region. Purists might say a bastardization of all of them.

Time at last to shop victoriously

Taglines and slogans are part of the art and science of naming, so I thought it is about time we gave an award to a good new tagline. In case you have been on another planet, eBay has changed its tagline to Shop Victoriously. Not only is it a great tagline, it is also a great marketing slogan and general rallying cry. It is both descriptive and inspirational.

And a massive improvement over the old Whatever it is, you can get it on eBay. Oh how I love the power of the right two words… that rescue us from the boring, corporate, descriptive taglines of old.

PS Do you know that eBay’s original company name was WebAuction? See other Famous Name Changes too and learn how a less descriptive name is a better brand name in the long run.