But I don’t want to deal with the confusion of booking a hotel, or taking a taxi, or telling my friends I am staying in THEhotel and then having to explain it is not a hotel, but THEhotel. Ouch all the way.  Why not the Mandalay Peninsula, as one simple example, that deftly helps spread the brand warmth?

And this blog has a picture with it just so you know I am not kidding! I sure pity the marketing folks and interior designers. How do you not make it feel live every other generic hotel anyone ever stayed in – that are all an ugly forgettable blur today.

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.

This is probably justified though. If I took such a name to a team of executives, assuming they were from some other planet and had never heard the name before, the men would say “Ah no.. reminds me of Kodiak bears or something” and the ladies would say “reminds me of a tampon brand.” The other reason not to adopt abstract names is the fact they can take years to promote and brand through a consumer channel unless you have a megahit product like Google.

From a linguistics standpoint though, Kodak is an ideal name. It starts and ends with the same sticky consonant – K. It is two syllables with the emphasis on the second. It has a heavy d in the middle imparting strength. And it is easy to spell and say in many different languages. Plus, being very unique at its inception, it was completely trademark clear worldwide.

Plus as my regular readers know, I always like product names that also have some visual identity too. Why not, after all we are all so visual anyway.

So when you find a great root name that is so applicable to your product, as ghost is, then coin a unique, new, applicable word and dress it up, you get all my votes and endorsement. And on top of that to provide such a useful little package for free – fabulous. You deserve a big name award.

For those of you who don’t want to be tracked on the internet, this is the software to run. It even shows you which trackers have been disabled site by site. I have just exited the NFL site after checking football scores. Along the way I found eight spyware packages that would have been tracking me were it not for Ghostery. Thank you from the bottom of my computer heart.

So, of course, I couldn’t resist looking up steve.jobs, which takes me to Employ Media LLC, who I think is the actual registrar of .jobs domains, since their website leads to dot.jobs.  And yes, Coca Cola does own cocacola.jobs so www.cocacola.jobs leads to their employment page. But it is stupid to think they will be forced to buy up all the new domains to protect their brand. In fact, they may not even qualify to buy many of them. For example, one of the new domains is bound to be .hotel.  Assuming CocaCola has not yet put their name on a hotel, they may not be entitled to this domain, just like they can’t have a .edu name without proving they are an actual education facility, or a .cat name without proving they have an office in Catalonia, Spain.

This all goes to show how feeble the US advertising and major brands consortium protest about the new domain names has become. In fact, the bigger push has come from the international markets. If you were Russian wouldn’t you want some domains in the Cyrillic character set? Or in Arabic if you were a Middle East country? Or Kanji or Katakana in Japan? Or with simply a proper accented character if you were French or Spanish or Scandinavian? Thank goodness ICANN is not controlled by the USA at all. The internet is now a global communications major infrastructure and deserves the world’s input and direction.

Now that I had reason to actually use such a service, I visited them again and am completely blown away. They have become the site for professional photographers. Yes you have to pay them a little… but it took me only a few hours on their free trial before I was saying please take my money. It is far more than a photo cataloging site. It is the place to sell and show quality photos. But it is also a great backend for any website that has to handle hundreds of photos that change and evolve a lot – which means it has to be user driven and not webmaster driven.

In my case I was researching this on behalf of a separate family business, and they don’t even do photography per se. But it is a great tool for them to catalog all their jewelry collections. They were adding photos via  a simple drag and drop at a rapid rate the day after I set them up. It is also the perfect tool for storing all the artwork of a graphics department or ad agency or corporate marketing images or science pictures to share worldwide.

So.. in short, a great find and a real fine pro job. Very classy.  But that name?  Sure it is catchy. And yes they can have fun with it. But no it is not about mug shot databases for prisoners or employees – a whole other business application. I fear that however they perfume the pig, the name SmugMug will never be as classy an outfit as they really are. Pity.

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.

Write what you know is the old mantra. So I set my story in Half Moon Bay California, a favorite town of mine just south of San Francisco. And I even called out the town’s two lighthouses in my story. Darned if I don’t open The Mercury News newspaper early in the week to find a whole story on how the Pigeon Point lighthouse is being restored (with photos like one here – Thanks SJ Merc). Same week as our Very Scary Christmas Tales anthology came out! Wow. Talk about supernatural or paranormal! Or is this just some weird coincidence?

Anyway…  See FodenPress.com or Amazon’s Kindle site to get your copy electronically in time for Xmas. Print version too. My co-writers have also often used real settings for their stories… together it looks like we knew each other well with a common cadence to all the stories. But this is the first joint work. Hope you like it.

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?

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.