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One of the scariest Halloween stories ever was discovered today.
It comes not from a lost volume of Edgar Allen Poe, a new novel by Patrick McGrath, or a passage from the secret diaries of Fred Rogers. No, this soon-to-be fright-night classic comes straight from the front page of today’s New York Times. But be warned, the Hellish description below of two incompatible species attempting to mate makes Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau read like a reassuring lullaby:
According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft - desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business - approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.
While the overture appears to have gained little traction–Google indicated that it preferred the initial offering route, the executives said–it demonstrates the enormous importance that Google represents as both a competitive threat to Microsoft and as Silicon Valley’s latest hope for a new financial boom.
Though seemingly spurned, Microsoft may still be interested in pursuing Google at a later date, according to an executive briefed on the discussions.
If this unnatural act is consummated and belches forth a viable mutant, look for future generations to replace the relatively affable BOO! with the far more bone chilling MICROOOGLE! and GOOSOFT!
There is a new naming and branding company in town, and they have named themselves Novience.
Why Novience? Clearly not for any marketing or branding reasons. Novience doesn’t mean anything, it contains no imagery or associations and its only personality traits are cold and distant. Perhaps they are just using the occasion of their first naming job to demonstrate their imaginative marketing know-how. More than likely they chose the name Novience because the dotcom was available, whereas Navigant, Naviant, Noviant and Novient had already been registered.
Watch for the new company to issue a Landorian justification that will go something like this:
The first two letters of our name, “No,” are derived from a word in the ancient Jain language that means “Yes,” which our proprietarily expensive focus group research showed was overwhelmingly positive. The next letter, “v” (the 22nd letter of Roman alphabet!), comes courtesy of a modified medieval Serbo-Croatian symbol that was used to mark the door of a village’s champion chicken wrestler, a designation of great honor and respect. The last part of the name, “ience” is from the modern day concept of the convenience store, meaning that our thinking never closes.
The other new entry in the world of naming and branding agencies is Mnemonic, which was clearly chosen for its ease of pronunciation, spelling and memorability.
But it’s actually deeper than that. As Mnemonic’s home page declares in a bold header: “A name reflects a brand’s soul.” We couldn’t agree more.
Fuse TV is launching as a “music only” cable channel (remember MTV?), competing squarely with MTV-2, though the latter will probably be all “reality” shows soon enough anyway.
Fuse has adopted a scrappy, scruffy, in-your-face positioning — More Music, Less Crappy TV — aimed squarely at teens who lack the attention span of a full half-hour of Cribs and just want to see and hear some kick-ass video jams. But for the rest of the demographic spectrum, they have this:
Although the descriptive tagline used in the ad, The New Music Television Network, is not very inspiring, a mere retread of MTV’s original “Music Television.” The irony here is that the “new” music television is more like the “old” music television of MTV before the “M” fell off MTV, which was really the “new” music television (”new” because, alas, it didn’t even have music in it!).
Thanks to Adrants for alerting us to this story.
Family sick of living on Butt Hole Road, Reports Ananova:
A South Yorkshire family have moved home because they are fed up with their address - Butt Hole Road.
Paul and Lisa Allot, who lived in the £150,000 bungalow with their two children for 15 months, got sick of people pulling their leg.
Not to mention posing for photographs in front of their house with their pants down, stealing the street sign, and refusing to deliver pizza or send taxis to the joke-sounding address.
But firmly in the one-man’s-butthole-is-another-man’s-paradise department, selling the house was not a problem:
…new owner Peter Sutton says he’s happy to live on Butt Hole Road: “I think it’ll be fun and I know what to expect.”
Indeed.
CNBC reports that Miller Lite has rebounded recently from slumping beer sales by promoting the hot new buzzphrase of the brewing industry: low-carb. Apparently, the “hip” image-conscious advertising strategies employed by rivals Bud and Coors Lite can’t keep up with the “healthier lifestyle” approach of Miller Lite, which is winning market share from away from them.
Perhaps all the people jumping on the Atkins Diet bandwagon are looking for a low-carb controlled substance to wash down their steaks with. Whatever the cause, look for an explosion in the use of “low-carb” or “low in carbs” to describe everything from food products to cars in the days and nights to come.
According to a ZD Net report, Microsoft announced Monday that its mobile entertainment software unit, which was code-named Media2Go, will now be known by the much catchier and more memorable name Windows Mobile software for Portable Media Centers.
Let it roll around on your tongue a little before it falls out. Just missing out was the runner-up name: Microsoft Windows Mobile Device Operating Software for Portable Mobile Audio and Visual Media Device Centers.
Buick of Canada has just learned that the name of one of their models, the LaCrosse, is a Canadian slang term for masturbation. In keeping with their hundred year old tradition of avoiding association with anything pleasurable or exciting, Buick has announced that it will change the car’s name.
The journal of “All Things Moist and Wicked,” the BBC, reports:
Red-faced officials at General Motors in Canada have been forced to think of a new name for their latest model after discovering it was a slang word for masturbation.
GM officials said they had been unaware that LaCrosse was a term for self-gratification among teenagers in French-speaking Quebec.
They are now working on a new name for the LaCrosse in Canada. The car will go on sale next year to replace the Buick Regal.
The article goes on to highlight other self-gratifying car names of the past:
In the 1970s, GM exported its Chevrolet Nova to Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, only to be told that Nova translated into “doesn’t go”.
More recently, Mitsubishi had to change the name of its Pajero model in Spanish speaking countries, where the word is a slang term for “masturbator”.
While Toyota’s Fiera proved controversial in Puerto Rico, where fiera translated to “ugly old woman”.
And Ford didn’t have the reception it expected in Brazil when their Pinto car flopped.
They then discovered that in Brazilian Portuguese slang, pinto means “small penis”.
Of course, these cars all face stiff competition from the Hummer for the hearts and palms of pimply-faced Canadian teens.
Personally, we think the good folks at Buick should keep the name LaCrosse and not worry about the slang meaning. After all, the two most powerful men in the USA are named Bush & Dick.
A new trend that surely has the American Psychiatric Association revising its members’ revenue projections upward has been reported by the Denver Post. It seems that adrift parents have increasingly been naming their doomed offspring after famous brand names, a la Nautica, Timberland, Infiniti, Armani, and L’Oreal.
In unrelated but equally disturbing baby news, the website collectiblestoday.com is hawking a gruesome aberration so unsettling, we are (almost ) at a loss for words. This nasty bit of injection-molded plastic madness, dubbed “Welcome Home Baby Emily,” is described as follows:
Once you see them, touch them, and hold them you’ll agree that acclaimed doll artist Linda Webb’s baby dolls are amazingly lifelike. “So True Real™”, in fact that you may want to send out birth announcements (six FREE “birth announcements” are included)!
“Welcome Home, Baby Emily”, an exclusive Ashton-Drake collectible doll shown here, will be followed by three other masterpieces of realism that re-create the experience of watching a real baby as she begins to experience the world around her. Don’t miss these incredible babies. Order your Ashton-Drake Loving Emily collectible doll collection today!
A horrific bargain at only $149.95 per doll + $13.98 shipping and handling. And the generous allotment of “six FREE birth announcements” should be more than ample to cover the circle of friends of anyone sick enough to “need” one of these precious little cuties. It’s just so True Real™.
Eschewing the alphabet soup of names for Sport Utility Vehicles, Volkswagen passed on the obvious SUVW moniker. Instead, the marketing executives at VW chose a bold new name, Touareg, which Car & Driver reviewed and described as a “luxury sedan with a mountain-goat attitude” built on the same platform as the Porsche Cayenne.
That sounds exciting. However, we don’t review automobiles; we review their names. So, where on Igor’s Taxonomy of SUV Names would you expect to find Touareg? Is it an invented name or an evocative name? How would you score the name Touareg on a scale of -2 to +5 on your taxonometer? Apparently, it’s pronounced twah-reg or tour-egg or something like that, depending on who’s talking. Does pronunstipation matter? Would you consider the etymology of the word? Does the name come with more baggage than the vehicle can carry?
Fortune Magazine dug up the dirt on the name Touareg, and reports:
Look at the trouble Volkswagen has run into after deciding to name its new SUV after a tribe of Saharan nomads that dates to the 11th century: the Touaregs (sometimes spelled “Tuaregs”). The tribe is known in Europe for its ability to survive in hostile environments, a perfect quality for an SUV, or so VW reasoned. But it turns out that while the Touaregs have some picturesque customs (men wear blue veils in the presence of women and carry intricate swords), they historically followed another, less attractive one: They were notorious slave owners and traders until the beginning of the 20th century.
For VW dealers in the U.S., who had already voiced their objections to the obscure, hard-to-pronounce name–”they preferred something catchier, like SUVW”–the slavery issue added injury to insult. German executives insisted on staying the course. “We deplore any society’s past history of slavery,” says a U.S. spokesman for VW. “Unfortunately, nearly all cultures have it in their pasts, including our own.”
I don’t think we’ll be seeing Tiger Woods in a Touareg anytime soon.
Adapted from a post by Abnu to our sister site, Wordlab.
Emode, the premier destination for personality tests and matchmaking online, hired Igor to name their new social network, which launched today as Tickle.
The fast emerging and highly competitive social network sector is populated with mostly descriptive names, such as Friendster, Friendspot, people2people, Six Degrees, Zero Degrees, Everyone’s Connected, ITSNOTWHATYOUKNOW and Visible Path. Other names include Rhyze and Huminity, which defy rhyme, reason and classification. (See Igor’s newly posted Social Networks Name Taxonomy for more.)
As always, we were looking for the one name that worked on as many levels as possible. In this case, the name simply had to be fun, human, memorable, distinctive, relevant yet non-descriptive, able to be used as a verb, capture the attention of the world, support the company’s positioning, provide them with a deep well of marketing/advertising imagery and language going forward, tap into the hearts and minds of their audience in a unique way, give them a strong competitive advantage, and be a compelling advertisement in and of itself, as well as the usual requirements that it be short, memorable, and loaded with meaning. And of course it had to be available from both a trademark and a domain name perspective.
After carefully examining every possibility in every known language, it became clear that Tickle was the perfect name for a new social network.
There are two major reasons why product and company naming exercises go bad. Names are either created for an internal corporate audience rather than for the end consumer, or they are created without regard to the field of competitive names. Today’s naming news brings us two examples of product naming that each managed to commit one of these errors.
Transmeta, whose first generation processing chip was called Crusoe, just released the new Efficeon. Get it? It’s efficient! And with the “eon” ending, it blends in with the names of competing chips, a savvy marketing move. Clearly, this name was created to please an internal audience; otherwise, the company could have followed up “Crusoe” with “Friday,” or anything but Efficeon.
The sin of naming without concern for competing names was transgressed when the PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, for those keeping score at home) recently announced the name of their next generation PC card standard: ExpressCard.
With consumers showing affinity for names like FireWire, WiFi and Airport, choosing a wallflower like ExpressCard is a mystifying move. [Here is a taxonomy of other names in the computer port product space — see where you think ExpressCard rates.]
But let’s take something positive from these events. At least now we are in no danger of seeing a television commercial for a pharmaceutical product along these lines:
V.O.: Because your time is so very important, it’s not merely enough to improve stool flow. You need bowel relief that conforms to your busy schedule, so you’re not a slave to your stool. Efficeon not only makes the passing of stools as easy as blowing bubblegum bubbles, it actually schedules your shits in manageable time units, so you’ll have more time on your hands, and less on your butt.
[Scene: Two smartly dressed executive women, conversing over a business lunch.]
Woman 1: Here’s that report you requested, Rhonda.
Woman 2: Really? How’d you finish it so quickly?
Woman 1 [casual laughter]: Simple. I took Efficeon to schedule and manage my fecal output, freeing up enormous amounts of time I would otherwise have spent reading Self magazine diet plans on the potty. And with the new Efficeon ExpressCard, I earn points every time I use the restroom at a Marriot, Applebee’s or on one of twelve major airlines!
Woman 2: It’s a productivity miracle!
Woman 1: No, it’s just efficient shitting, thanks to Efficeon and the Efficeon ExpressCard.
Woman 2: [Raising a glass] Bottoms up! [Laughter from both women]
Beware of new names that cover-up old nightmares. Yes, it’s true: the mullet has returned, says the Arizona Republic (Arizona being America’s ground zero for mullets), this time in the guise of “disconnected hair”:
“They’re back, so back I can’t even say how back they are,” says Ethan Murray, owner of E’s Urban Hair in Phoenix, who has been giving his more daring clients mullets for a few weeks now.
It’s more layered now, a little “chunkier” of a cut, Murray says. And it’s called something different - “disconnected hair” - to disguise it, he says, to make people less afraid.
This is a strategic attempt to replace a well-known, evocative name with a bland, anonymous descriptive name solely for the sake of obfuscation. This strategy may work within the hairy confines of E’s Urban Hair, but on the street, expect the epithet “mullet!” to be hurled your way if you dare your hair into this shape.
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Posted by Jay on
October 31st, 2003 - 9:33am |
company names + pop culture + what the...? |
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