Friday, July 29, 2005
What’s Your Name Worth?
I’ve spent the past few days naming a client’s business. They’re a high-end retailer in a very competitive category, and I’ve been driving myself batty crafting nomenclature for the business as well as for their services and product lines that fit with an overall value proposition to a very specific audience segment: style-conscious, upscale shoppers of a particular gender. (If you think I’m being vague, you’d be, um, right.)
It got me pondering about the nature of the naming business. Which, in case, you didn’t know, exists, and is one of the most ridiculously overpriced things you can buy from agencies crafty enough to sell it. My philosophy has always been that if nomenclature is required of a brand strategy project, it shouldn’t count exponentially over the other identity requirements. But I’m in a tiny camp, and the naming business thrives like you wouldn’t believe.
One of the craftiest perpetrators in the naming racket is Landor Associates, the company behind doozies such as Avaya, Avanade, astrium, and of course, the famous renaming of the Philip Morris holding company to, what else but, Altria.
But Landor’s greatest hit was a project that’s still snickered about in agency circles. When Hewlett-Packard decided to break-off its instrumentation division into a separate company to compete against arch rival Lucent, they hired Landor to find them a suitably grand name. Using processes momentously titled “Brand Alignment Process”, “BrandAsset Valuator”, “Random Visual Association Methodology,” they finally arrived a naming proposition that would allow the new company to be as strong as human nature—“indomitable and immutable.”
The name that all those lovely-sounding processes, 70 Landor executives, nine months, and $1,000,000 ended up with?
Agilent.
Hmm. Agilent.
If someone had paid me a million dollars, and asked me to create a company name that could compete against Lucent, Agilent sounds like a name I’d joke about. Here’s probably what happened at Landor.
“Hey, they’re ‘Lucent’, like a ‘lucid entity’, so how about we become something similar?”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Aw shucks, dunno, how ‘bout a “clear entity”, like Clearent, or an easily moving thing, like ‘fluid’, so perhaps we should call them Fluent.”
[Chuckling ensues.]
“Or a fast entity, like Fastent. No, no, wait… I have it. An agile entity, like Agilent.
[Loud laughter now.]
“Ha! I’d like to see you sell that baby in.”
“Oh, I bet I could.”
“Let’s bet on it.”
“What’re the stakes?”
“Tell you what Johnny boy. If you can sell Agilent in, I’ll let you name my new baby when Karen delivers in 7 months.”
Sadly, there’s now a little boy who toddles around, with the very Landor-like name of “Buoyant”.
Look, I’m not picking on Landor. I’m just pointing out that the ridiculous notion that you need to pay millions of dollars in fees and additional monies in extensive market research about a name for a major tech company is complete horse-poop. I understand research when your product needs to specifically tap into an ethnic or immigrant market, or if your name happens to be a word that might mean something in a language that’s offensive to people. I understand that, to a certain extent, you need to consider linguistics. And I understand completely that it now very difficult to find truly functional, usable names. Which is why people are now making up words like Jabberwocky, and JamCracker, and joining words together like Blue Nile and Raindance.
And of course, you need a name that doesn’t tread on other trademarks or copyrights. The legal implications of naming are truly frightening, and there are law firms that specialize in making sure you’re locked down and protected. Then of course, you have the added issue of the domain name being available. This was never truer in the US than for Nissan Motors, who decided to sit on their ass until 1996 before trying to register Nissan.com. In a battle they still haven’t won, they’ve been terrorizing Nissan Computer to give up the domain name.
But think about it.
If you were naming the most powerful software company in the world, would you call them Microsoft?
If you were naming a $13 billion environmental protection company, would you call it Waste Management?
If you were creating nomenclature for a country that wanted to change perceptions of being a haven for pedophiles and prostitutes, would you name it Thailand and Bangkok?
If you were naming the most powerful cable channel for teens and young people in the market today, would you call it Music Television?
If you were naming the world’s premier telecommunications company, would you call it AT&T? Wouldn’t you argue about whether the domain name was “guessable”?
My point is not that we should throw away our naming budgets and just come up with stuff without thought or research. All of the legal and cultural implications of names that I mentioned above are real, and need to be addressed. My point is that names, in the end, have very little to do with how brands eventually position themselves. PR, products, quality, imagery, brand associations, emotional context, messaging, and customer experiences have much more to do with the acceptance of a name than the name itself.
So, the next time you’re naming a product or service, spend a little less time arguing about whether everyone’s going to love the name, and a little more time thinking about how to make customers love your company and your service. And use the money you save in investing in better customer experience toolsets, both online and offline. You’ll thank me for it.