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Buzzwords of the year

Come and get ‘em! Whether you are a zorbing metrosexual or a Google-bombing hasbian, here are your buzzwords of the year from the New York Times (A to Z), The Word Spy (Top 100), Your Dictionary (top 10 in various categories) and, to see what words people search for most on Google, the Google Zeitgeist.

Happy New Year. Or rather, Hippy Nude Year. Or Hopi Now Hear! Or….

What brand are you?

morphologosBe careful what you make fun of: The Design Conspiracy created a nice site called What Brand Are You that spoofs Landorian morphemic names such as Accencture, Altria and Consignia. Now they are receiving the sincerest form of flattery: companies are actually snapping up and trademarking the names their software dishes up as jokes. The BBC reports:

Users of the site are asked to enter their name and select from a menu of core values, such as “dynamic” or “passionate”, and a main goal, such as “global leadership” or “client focus”.

Click the button and the site returns a suitably trite brand name. Examples include Aliquis, Vulgo and Accumulo.

“There are about 150 possible names. We just came up with them one afternoon last year,” says Ben Terrett, of the Design Conspiracy.

The idea was to generate publicity for the agency while having a go at the “uninspiring” trend for nonsense brand names.

How did Design Conspiracy generate the names?

“We used an online Latin dictionary to come up with some of the names, and just added an ‘i’ or and ‘a’ to the end. Others, like Ualeo, we don’t even know how to pronounce,” says Mr Terrett.

“We were just literally trying to think of the most stupid company names.”

Unfortunately, twenty of these deadly name spores have been unleashed on the unsuspecting populace, including Bivium, Libero and Ualeo, by companies who did not get the joke. Jasmine Malik, who says she has never heard of Whatsmybrandname.com, chose Tempero for her company name, because:

“Tempero is the Latin for moderation. We wanted something that was going to be a bit different, not gimmicky. It made the business seem more real than just something like Moderation Services Limited.”

Sadly, a Latin meaning does not a powerful brand make. Here are a few other What Brand Are You? names that companies have chosen for their own:

Amplifico
Integriti
Thinc
Winwin
Ovisovis

That last one is especially pretty, don’t you think? The only lession that The Design Conspiracy seems to have learned from this is that it’s easy to come up with names –

“Clearly, we have an aptitude for thinking up company names. But then, it’s a lot easier than it seems.”

– which is true; what’s not so easy is creating an effective one.

If you need further proof of how easy it is to merely smash phonemes together to create “unique” new names, try out the Morpheme Machine that we created several years ago at our sister-site Wordlab, which currently sports 151,000 different potential Consignias. While you’re there, try the Drug-O-Matic, among other name generators, which will put 15.2 million future Xanaxes at your fingertips.

Emotional engagement: all you need is Love

AOL has launched Love.com. According to an article on Instant Messaging Planet:

The secret sauce in AOL’s Love.com stems from its close integration with AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), and its ability to exploit some of the unique benefits of IM communications. At the site, Love.com members can browse profiles, find others who are online and available to IM, and can immediately initiate chat sessions with them.

With Love.com, AOL is getting into the increasingly competitive meet marketplace of social networks, which includes such popular places to hook up online as Yahoo! Personals, Lavalife and Tickle. Unfortunately, AOL’s system is proprietary, so users will be locked-in to using the AOL Instant Messenger software. Make this Love(.com) AOL-American Style.

An even bigger problem from a branding perspective is calling the site Love.com instead of simply Love, which is much more powerful. AOL has apparently just joined the Internet frenzy circa 1996, when many were seized by the notion that owning and promoting a primary word domain name for your company name (think Pets.com, Business.com, Drugstore.com etc.) was the secret to instant riches. The problem that most of those companies discovered to their chagrin is that generic words have no long-term brand value–they’re essentially empty vessels.

Love is different. Love is not generic, but one of highest of evocative aspirations. AOL should be creating a Love brand, not diluting it by calling it Love.com. Adding “.com” to a name was a novelty in the mid-’90s, when the Net was new, but once everybody had a website, the novelty quickly faded. To call it Love.com is to cheapen it, to pull the higher aspirations back down to earth, to associate the idea of Love with mere process, technology, and all the miserable lost luster of the popped Internet bubble.

This brand myopia is made even more explicit by the choice of tagline, which follows to the letter the most clichéd of Net Bubble Company tagline structures, that of three solitary words each followed by a period (for emphasis, you see):

Search. Find. Connect.

Again, it’s all about the process, not about emotional engagement with the brand. Love.com could be any online dating service; the only difference here is the restriction to AOL users and the fact that it probably has the most expensive domain name of the bunch. But sadly, that domain name is just being wasted in this effort.

Murder Inc. | American Brandstand | remixing China

Capitalism gangsta style: Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo, founder of Murder Inc., announced recently that the record company has changed its name to The Inc. The jury’s out whether the chairman of the board will give up his gangsta moniker “Gotti” in favor of something more like Capitalist Tool:

Gotti said the name change is meant to shed any negativity surrounding his business. He revealed that he initially intended to name the label Lockdown Records.

When Gotti saw the story of the real Murder Incorporated gang on television, he decided to use it, hoping to create a name he could brand, such as Death Row or Bad Boy.

According to a recent article in the Guardian, hip hop’s mania for endorsing brands makes street music big in the boardroom:

Such is the symbiotic relationship between hip hop and big business that marketing guru Lucian James created American Brandstand, which lists weekly the brands that feature in the lyrics of songs in the American chart.

…Some artists are said to be paid to incorporate brand names into their lyrics, an accusation levelled at Rhymes following ‘Pass the Courvoisier’. Rhymes and Allied Domecq deny the claim.

Ya think? The power of hip hop artists like Busta Rhymes to reach a young audience of impressionable minds is not missed by brand masters like Richard Branson, who recently hired the rapper to star in a series of entertaining adverts for a Busta Butt campaign for Virgin Mobile.

Corporate interests are buying control in the hood; witness the acquisition of Russell Simmons‘ Def Jam Records by Universal Music Group. It’s big bidness; what the Feds call “organized crime.” And the entertainment industry needs to clean up the gangsta image of hip hop, as it did the mobster image of Las Vegas.

The 2003 Grammy Award nominations announcement, dominated by hip hop, rap and R&B artists, is noted as a significant benchmark in the acceptance of the music of the street into popular culture, worldwide.

Hip-hop, both the music and the lifestyle, have slowly taken over the world in which you live. Television, magazines, radio and video games have all jumped aboard. The aging public and the music industry are among the last to recognize the genre’s immense output and goliath success, but that’s changing, too.

You gotta kno dat hip hop is takin’ over da world when the communist government of the People’s Republic of China is remixing Mousie Tongue.

Now, as they approach the 110th anniversary of Mao Tse-Tung’s birth, Dec. 26, the people of China - a country the old murderer would scarcely recognize anymore - are going to get a chance to refresh their memory of one of his key dictums, the Two Musts, in the form of rap music.

It’s not altogether a message that matches the hip-hop lifestyle which we in the West know so well from videos, CDs and court cases. The Two Musts run like this: “to preserve modesty and prudence, and to preserve the style of plain living and hard struggle.”

As lifestyle advice, this seems to leave little room for bling-bling, hos, nose candy, late nights and big cars. Still, the rap format has been adopted by many Chinese performers and is popular with Chinese audiences (formerly known as “the masses”). Talk about your cultural revolutions.

Will rap music be credited with the demise of communism in China, as rock and roll has recently been credited with the end of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? Will rap be the language of cultural revolution in the Far East and in the Middle East? Fo’ shizzle…

Originally posted by Abnu to our sister site, Wordlab.

The language of laws

The public has long been aware that advertisers attempt to connect the hearts and minds of customers with evocative brand names and catchy slogans. Ad agencies have earned well-deserved reputations, and unabashedly give themselves awards for the most creative advertisements cleverly designed to overcome the conditioned scepticism of the public.

The advertisee knows he’s being sold something. Generally, he’s cognisant of the fact that a product might or might not really be, “the best a man can get.” Today, most informed consumers have some idea how advertising, naming and branding work to get them to buy or do something they just might not, without some persuasion.

But, do most people appreciate the extent to which the “laws of branding” understood by advertising agencies are regularly applied to legislation to sell any old “Bill of Goods” to the voting representatives and, ultimately, to the unsuspecting public? Our elected representatives are passing laws in our best interests, right? They’re not trying to sell us anything, are they? Well, actually they are. But first, the draft legislation has to be sold to the legislators themselves. Legislation is packaged for passage; branded to sell to the elected representatives and in the end, to we the people.

Sometimes, the names of laws contain evocative words to ensure widespread political acceptance; like “partial-birth abortion” in the case of the recently enacted Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.

Increasingly, the short names of legislation are acronyms that are contrived to make memorable words that give the law an appropriate marketing spin; like CAN SPAM. Officially, this Act may be cited as the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003″ or the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003–whichever works for you.

In a post-911 world, the Congress bought into new laws that abrogated long-established civil liberties under the guise of increasing national and personal security. That legislative sales job was facilitated by the most egregious naming and branding exercise in history. This Act may be cited as the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act” or the USA Patriot Act. All in favor of the USA Patriot Act? In less than seven weeks after September 11, 2001, the Congress and the people who elected them patriotically bought into a comprehensive package of policies off the shelf, and laws hastily drafted, that were effectively rebranded, named and enacted as the USA Patriot Act.

Catchy names for legislation are not entirely new and there are countless examples that might be cited here. Perhaps the most entertaining name from the more distant past is RICO. In 1970, the U.S. government enacted federal statutes referred to as the “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations” laws to combat the influence of organized crime in legitimate businesses. It remains undetermined whether there is any truth to the urban legend that the title is taken from Edward G. Robinson’s character, Cesare Enrico ‘Rico’ Bandello, in Little Caesar, the original gangster movie. The dying utterance of Robinson’s character is a well-known cinematic catch phrase: “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”

Just the beginning, it seems. The president’s case for expanded powers in Patriot II are reported as favorably as possible by FOX News:

“You need to have every tool at your disposal to be able to do your job on behalf of the American people,” Bush told the audience of FBI trainees and agents. “The House and the Senate have a responsibility to act quickly on these matters; untie the hands of our law enforcement officials so they can fight and win the war against terror.”

…proponents say new rules in Patriot II, a term at which advocates of increased powers cringe, would not assault personal freedom and are already available to prosecutors in other criminal cases.

“It’s not revolutionary. It simply gives law enforcement the same tools against terrorists that are used [with success] against the mafia,” said Eli Lehrer, a homeland security expert for a Fortune 500 company, who argued that administrative subpoenas are subject to oversight by a counterintelligence court or other special court, but not a grand jury.

Amid allegations of abuse of powers under the USA Patriot Act, nobody expects that new legislation called Patriot II would get an easy pass through Congress; so a draft has been named the “Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act” or Victory Act. All in favor of Victory?

Originally posted by Abnu to our sister site, Wordlab.


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