Lone Landor naphephiliac Anthony Shore gets snarky on a name, and deservedly so. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A camel named Jake wore a bush hat with the company logo. Five elephants formed a reception committee. A sea lion called Odie reclined in a golf cart. The scene in Vallejo on Wednesday morning looked like a cross between Noah’s Ark and “Jurassic Park.”

It wasn’t. Instead, the occasion was a rebranding ritual: Marine World is now Discovery Kingdom…

…”It sounds like the bastard offspring of the Discovery Channel and the Magic Kingdom,” said Anthony Shore, creative director of naming and writing at Landor Associates, a strategic branding and design consultancy in San Francisco.

“Discovery is a word that’s used a lot in the world of entertainment and theme parks, and kingdom is also hardly unique in the category,” Shore said. “They now have their work cut out for them — to help create more distinction from all of those other discovery brands.”

Says Blandor the Imponderable: “My Willy hasn’t been this free in decades! Alas, I feel the pounding hooves of our PR Emergency Response Team in the corridor. Twas a brief dalliance… “

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Thanks to Tom Whitwell of The Times of London, who waved this one under our noses first thing in the morning. Tom e-mails:

If you’re going to have a brand name like Eat Fussy, you have to be very careful which fonts you use.

Lower case was probably a good call…

We’re sold. And after you meet Annabel Karmel, you will be too.

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Perhaps it’s part of a brand makeover and a recruiting drive, but now I’m really confused. You’d think “mortification of the flesh” would be a tempting tagline.

The TSA is selling advertising space on its screening equipment at airports.

Christopher Emley

Hamlyns Pinhead Oat Meal of Scotland. Yummmm!

Searching for bleeding edge naming news, we turn to that eternal source of befuddlement, the Landor naming portfolio. Landor proudly lays claim to a total of 18 naming jobs on their website, 16 of which date from 2001 or earlier. The remaining 2 are proving difficult to date:

Fillboard (TM filed 1998)

Astrium (not a gay bar – 2000)

Tality (again, not a gay bar – 2000)

Chancellor Academy (date unknown. only web reference to this name change resides here)

Certegy (2001)

Clarica (1999)

Exostar (2000)

EverCare (1999)

Advantix (TM filed 1995)

Durex (yes, the penis people – 1998)

Midea Group (“Formal registration and application of the brand” – 1981 )

ProNational Insurance (1998)

Spherion (2000)

Techint/Tenaris (2001)

Pactiv (1999)

Flipside (circa 2000, dead dotcom)

Uniqa (1999)

Wildlife Conservation Society – We can’t pin a date on this donkey, but they had been calling themselves “WCS”, an acronym for Wildlife Conservation Society. Landor stepped in and “Landor urged the Wildlife Conservation Society to boldly and consistently embrace its full name, and forego the acronym.”

We’re not ready to officially classify advising the Wildlife Conservation Society to call themselves Wildlife Conservation Society as a naming job, but without it Landor is left with Chancelor Academy as the only possible naming job since ’01 in their portfolio, so we’ll let it slither in.

Says Blandor the Imponderable: “Fools! Naming is about quality, not quanity! I’ll stack my portfolio up against any random name generator software anytime! As for not being currant, it’s cranberry juice I need, and in copious quantities. Your ignorance has inflamed my condition”

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