Naming | Are the rules of the game changing? By Drew Letendre

In naming, as in any discipline, we all conform to certain best practices. We counsel that names should be highly distinctive/don’t sound like other brand names, avoid pejorative connotation (or resemblance to words that don’t), ‘sound corporate,’ have matching URLs, don’t sound too exotic, and give some indication of business category. Well, consider these…

Exelis

Experis

Insperity

Xylem

Mondelēz

Are these ‘good’ names?Do they sound ‘corporate’?Do they sound like companies you recognize?What businesses are they in?Do they conjure up any negative ideas?

Exelis

Experis

Insperity

Xylem

Excel (MS)Experis(!)

disparity

asylum

expires

Mondelēz a second baseman from the Dominican Republic?

Well, here’s my take… …Connotations, Associations, and Semblances

Exelis

Experis

Insperity

Xylem

Mondelēz

Truth is: these are real names of real companies, divisions, or spin-offs, thereof…in spite of all the identified ‘ballast’—exotic and obscure sound, resemblance to existing brands and businesses, pejorative associations, etc.

InsperityExperisExelisXylem

Mondelēz

1 don’t sound ‘big company’ or corporate

2 sound like other companies or products

3 sound exotic or strange (or like somebody’s name)

4 sound like words with pejorative meanings

6 don’t ‘say’ what business they’re in, but…

5 don’t have matching URLs

The Big Take-Away | there are big companies out there taking names that stand naming best practices on their heads, names that…

But why?

7 they are legally available and

8 can tell a story—they have the potential to build a compelling business narrative around them

The pre-eminent criterion

Most important after availability

They adopt those kinds of names because…

Conclusions | Yes, the tables have over-turned (but not completely). They’ve tipped precipitously, in the direction of ‘whatever’s available.’ Availability—so it would appear—now covers a multitude of sins. A multitude, not a universe. For there remains one further rational criterion that still makes sense, even after we’ve allowed things like uniqueness, corporate gravitas, and clean URLs s to fall by the wayside, and allowed in things like semblance to pejorative words: ‘namely,’ the potential to craft a clever story that interprets or ‘decodes’ a name’s business meaning or consumer promise. Thus does an exotic plant like “Mondelez’ justify itself: ‘Monde’ meaning world ‘delez’ meaning ‘delicious’ or ‘delectable’ sum up to ‘a world of good taste’ or ‘good-tasting foods,’ an apt, if somewhat roundabout message for an F&B business. Thus does ‘xylem’ an exotic-but-real word, that refers to the ‘vascular tissue in plants that conducts water and dissolved nutrients upward from the root’ justify its relation to a water management business of ITT. And thus does ‘insperity,’ the fusion of ‘inspiration’ and (or ‘toward’) ‘prosperity’ rationalize itself—albeit far more loosely—as the transformation of Administaff away from temporary staffing to a much more general, but highly inspiring business notion. In the end: meaning matters…perhaps most of all.

See how RiechesBaird has been successfully leveraging these naming trends and insights in our naming portfolio on http://www.riechesbaird.com