Ride the Storm: Navigating Through Unstable Periods / Katerina Rudko (Belka G...
Business Naming: Have the rules changed?
1. 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…
2. 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?
Insperity
Experis
Exelis
Xylem
Mondelēz
3. Well, here’s my take… …Connotations, Associations, and Semblances
Insperity disparity
Experis expires
Exelis Excel (MS)
Experis(!)
Xylem asylum
a second baseman from
Mondelēz the Dominican Republic?
4. 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.
Insperity
Experis
Exelis
Xylem
Mondelēz
5. The Big Take-Away | there are big companies out there taking names that stand naming best
practices on their heads, names that…
1 don’t sound ‘big company’ or corporate
2 sound like other companies or products Insperity
Experis
3 sound exotic or strange (or like somebody’s name) Exelis
Xylem
4 sound like words with pejorative meanings
Mondelēz
5 don’t have matching URLs
6 don’t ‘say’ what business they’re in, but…
But why?
6. They adopt those kinds of names because…
7 they are legally available and The pre-eminent criterion
8 can tell a story—they have the
potential to build a compelling Most important after availability
business narrative around them
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