An important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the world what business you are in or what your product does. Intuition dictates that this will save you the time and money of explaining it, which actually turns out not to be true. Why not?

The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support, which, when you think about it, is impossible. The name will appear on a website, a store front, in a news article or press release, on a business card, on the product itself, in advertisements, or, at its most naked, in a conversation.

There is simply no imaginable circumstance in which a name will have to explain itself. This is fortunate, because having a descriptive name is actually a counterproductive marketing move which requires an enormous amount of effort to overcome. A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack. It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors.

The following is a list of companies in the naming and branding arena. While each of their names describes what they do, you can clearly see the heavy marketing price they pay for such a shortcut:

Brand-DNA (.com) Brand-DNA (.net) DNA Brand Mechanics Brand 2.0 Brand Doctors Brand Equity Brand Evolve Brand Fidelity Brand Institute Brand Mechanics BrandForward	Brandico Brandjuice Consulting BrandLadder BrandLink BrandLogic BrandMaverick BrandPeople Brandscope Brandslinger BrandSolutions Brandtrust
Name Development Name Sharks Namebase Nameit Namexpress Namelab Namington Naming Systems	Namerazor NameSale Namestormers Nametag Nametrade NameQuest Namix Naming Workshop
Nomen Namepharm	Nomenon Medibrand
Absolute Brand Interbrand Building Brands Real Branding	Core Brand Futurebrand The Branding Iron Spherical Branding
I.D.ENTITY	Identity 3.0
Idiom Brighter Naming Corporate Icon	Metaphor Megalonamia Wise Name
Creating New Names The Name Works	ABC Namebank The Naming Company
Ivarson Brand Vision	Strategic Name Development
The Brand Consultancy	Lexicon Branding
Independent Branding	TradingBrands
The Better Branding Company	Not Just Any Branding

There are three pieces of advice that will serve you well in avoiding a similar dilemma:

1. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: There are competitors–the idea is to distinguish yourself. Business is a competitive sport.
2. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support. This is never true for any business or product.
3. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: When judged without the context of a clear positioning platform and an intimate understanding of how names work and what they can do, the best solutions are either never considered or quickly dismissed.

For example, any one of the following intuitive concerns could have been enough to keep these powerful names from ever seeing the light of day:

Virgin Airlines

• Says "we’re new at this"
• Public wants airlines to be experienced, safe and professional
• Investors won’t take us seriously
• Religious people will be offended

Caterpillar

• Tiny, creepy-crawly bug
• Not macho enough – easy to squash
• Why not "bull" or "workhorse"?
• Destroys trees, crops, responsible for famine

Banana Republic

• Derogatory cultural slur
• You’ll be picketed by people from small, hot countries

Yahoo!

• Yahoo!! It’s Mountain Dew!
• Yoohoo! It’s a chocolate drink in a can!
• Nobody will take stock quotes and world news seriously from a bunch of "Yahoos"

Oracle

• Unscientific
• Unreliable
• Only foretold death and destruction
• Only fools put their faith in an Oracle
• Sounds like "orifice"–people will make fun of us

The Gap

• Means something is missing
• The Generation Gap is a bad thing – we want to sell clothes to all generations
• In need of repair
• Incomplete
• Negative

Stingray

• A slow, ugly, and dangerous fish–slow, ugly and dangerous are the last qualities we want to associate with our fast, powerful, sexy sports car
• The "bottom feeding fish" part isn’t helping either

Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac

• I don’t want hillbilly residents of Dogpatch handling my finances.
• They don’t sound serious, and this is about a very serious matter.

As you can well imagine, this kind of negative deconstruction is at the root of why a committee can’t agree on a non-descriptive name that has any meaning. It’s also what gave birth to the second major school of bad naming: the "unique empty vessel" that "can become whatever you want." Here are some of the victims:

Acquient, Agilent, Alliant, Aquent, Aspirient, Aviant, Axent, Axient, Bizient, Candescent, Cendant, Cerent, Chordiant, Clarent, Comergent, Conexant, Consilient, Cotelligent, Equant, Ixtant, Livent, Luminant, Mergent, Mirant, Navigant, Naviant, Noviant, Novient, Omnient, Ravisent, Sapient, Scient, Sequant, Spirent, Taligent, Teligent, Thrivent, Versant, Versent, Viant, Vitalent and Vivient.

As with the descriptive list, these names are not part of an elegant solution, they are the seeds of a branding nightmare. This type of name is arrived at because of the lust for a domain name, consensus building and as a shortcut to trademark approval. At some point in the process marketing left the room, and nobody seemed to notice. And while they may technically be unique, it’s at the level of a snow flake in a snow bank.

The third type of name is the evocative name. These include the aforementioned Apple, Stingray, Oracle, Virgin, Yahoo etc. While everyone respects evocative naming when done well, most corporations don’t go down this road because it’s the toughest to understand and execute.

On a very fundamental level, here are the basic ingredients of the best evocative names:

Differentiate

A competitive analysis is an essential first step. How are your competitors positioning themselves? What types of names are common among them? Are they all projecting a similar attitude? Do their similarities offer you a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd?

Apple needed to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time who had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, Sperry Rand, SAP, PSDI, Syncsort, and Tesseract.

They needed to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They were looking for a name that was not like a traditional computer company, and supported a Positioning Strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different.

Positioning

The next step is to carefully define your positioning. The idea is to position yourself in a way that rings true in a fresh way–that cuts through all of the noise out there. The goal is to have your audience personalize the experience of your brand, to make an emotional connection with it, and ultimately to take you in. To redefine and own the territory.

One of most important things that the best of the best brands accomplish is to be thought of as greater than the goods and services offered, to create an aspiration. Nike’s "Just Do It’ helps them rise above selling sneakers. Apple’s "Think Different" is bigger than computers. Fannie Mae’s "We’re in the American Dream Business" elevates them from mere mortgage brokers.

On a product level, Velveeta, Slinky, Mustang, Snapple, etc., are tapping into something outside of the narrow definition of what it is they do, and are allowing the consumer to make the connection, to personalize the experience. This type of active engagement created by playing off of images that everyone is already carrying around in their heads is an essential ingredient in creating a great name.

From there, a name should contain as many of the following qualities as possible. The more of them that are present, the more powerful the name:

SELF-PROPELLING

• A name that people will talk about.
• A name that works its way through the world on its own.
• A name that’s a story in itself, whether it’s at the local bar, on the job, or on CNBC.

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

• What does the name suggest?
• Does it make you feel good?
• Does it make you smile?
• Does it lock into your brain?
• Does it make you want to know more?

POETRY

• How does the name physically look and sound?
• How does it roll off the tongue?
• How much internal electricity does it have?
• How does it sound the millionth time?
• Will people remember it?

PERSONALITY

• Does the name have attitude?
• Does it exude qualities like confidence, mystery, presence, warmth, and a sense of humor?
• Is it provocative, engaging?
• Is it a tough act to follow?

DEEP WELL

• Is the name a constant source of inspiration for advertising and marketing?
• Does it have "legs"?
• Does it work on a lot of different levels?

The key is to step outside the box that the industry – any industry – has drawn for itself, and to do it in a fresh way that hits home with the audience. To accomplish this, it is necessary to think about names in this fashion:

Virgin

• Positioning: different, confident, exciting, alive human, provocative, fun. The innovative name forces people to create a separate box in their head to put it in.
• Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.

Oracle

• Positioning: different, confident, superhuman, evocative, powerful, forward thinking.
• Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.

As an exercise, go back and see how the other names deconstructed above–Apple, Caterpillar, Banana Republic, Yahoo!, Palm Pilot, The Gap, Stingray, and Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac–stand up when held to these high standards. These are the qualities that separate a potent, evocative name from a useless one that is built without a considered positioning platform, such as BlueMartini or FatBrain. Random names like these disallow audience engagement, because there are no pathways between the image and the product–there is no connection to be made.

Want more? Download our Naming Guide PDF.

[ More posts about naming a company | More posts about company naming ]

Welcome to the End of Days, as the final two signs of the Apocalypse were checked-off late last week. Igor’s own creative director Jay Jurisich spouts off in not one, but two articles in the current edition of BW.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it…”

Some of Igor’s latest work: DirecTV Audience network

At Igor we deal with intellectual property rights every week as we search thousands of trademarks while naming products for our clients. It’s not enough to have a good idea, you need one that you can legally own.

Kevin Costner’s much publicized Ocean Therapy Solutions company developed a soon-to-be-implemented oil and water separation machine. BP has ordered 32 of them thus far to help deal with their latest environmental disaster.

You can view the patent filing, description and drawings for Costner’s oil spill clean up machine here. Click on the pic in the upper right corner to see the full diagrams.

Wordlab has a great collection of free name generators that can help you get started if you are trying to name a company, product or service yourself:

Wordlab’s Business Name Generator – 7,223,742 potential company, product or domain names to chose from.

Name Builder – Over 340,000 possible combinations — try it for a company name, rock band, album title, product name, book of poetry.

Restaurant / Bar Name Generator – Over 100,000 potential names for your restaurant, bar, pizzaria, taco stand, tavern, pub, cafe, bagel shop, etc.

Band Name Generator – 4193 band names direct from Wordlab’s personal collection.

Drug-O-Matic – Over 9.3 million potential drug names lurking within this little apothecary’s monster.

Character Name Generator – If you need to name any kind of character, human or otherwise, this is the mother lode. With 379,175,790 potential names, mostly well off the beaten track, you can populate an entire country with uniquely named characters.

Morpheme Machine – If mashing morphemes is your thing (attention Landor!), here are over 151,000 chunks of lingo chum to chew on.

The ACME Namemaker – And finally, when you don’t want to stand out from the crowd, here are over 26,000 ways to blend in quite nicely. I think this one must be the most popular with Igor’s competitors.

Happy naming!

Our sister site Wordlab, created by one of Igor’s founders (me), just re-launched today in a big way. I completely re-designed and re-coded the site, changing it 100% from the old Wordlab that had remained largely unchanged since it launched in 1998.

The new Wordlab is a full-fledged social network for naming and wordplay, collaboration and creative thinking. As such it is structured a bit differently than what you are used to if you were a user of the old Wordlab and its Wordboard forum, but the opportunities for interaction and collaboration are much greater and more powerful.

Check it out, sign up for a free membership, and join in the fun, either as someone looking for naming help, someone who can lend suggestions and advice to other users, or both.

There has been much speculation and pontification on whence the name Xfinity came, but look no further than the looming Comcast-NBC merger. Whilst kicking the NBC tires, surely even a beast as slow-witted as Comcast fumbled across the NBC property ‘The Office”.

The Dunder Mifflin logo sports an infinity symbol

Xfinity is meant to signal Comcast’s foray into the future of high tech possibilities, while at Dunder Mifflin, “Infinity” is the name of the internal initiative to bring technology to the failing paper company.

Why would the comedy writers of “The Office” chose the name “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” for the high tech effort? Because it is silly, obvious, pitiful and ridiculous, in keeping with ambiance of the show.

The name was such a hit that DunderMifflinInfinity.com is the show’s official fansite.

In the second episode of the fourth season titled “Dunder Mifflin Infinity”, regional manager Michael Scott best summed up the idea of “Infinity” (or Xfinity, for that matter):

“Everyone always wants new things. Everybody likes new inventions, new technology. People will never be replaced by machines. In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me, the choice is easy.”

“Comcast Xfinity. The possibilities are mindless”

Erotic Capital

For those of us who toil in a nerdly field, the presence of a maverick who stomps on the terra, chokes every bead of bile from life’s clogged ducts, and then vaporizes in a defiant, atavistic lunge, elevates us all. In the Name Game, that man was John Smart of Interbrand.

This month marks the eleventh anniversary of Agent Smart’s death, and consequently the ninth anniversary of when “schwing” stopped being associated with namers. He was our Austin Powers, our Keith Richards, our Richard Branson. Most of the official record seems to have disappeared from the Web. We found only a brief account of his death:

John Smart, unarmed, shot to death on Oct. 6, 1998 when police fired at least 13 rounds into his Mercedes convertible.

That was a late model Mercedes convertible. According to published reports at the time, he was stopped in San Francisco (our fair city) for suspicion of either soliciting a prostitute or drugs or both. Police said that Smart tried to run them down, at which point his legend was externalized. For a full, rollicking year afterwards, namers of every ilk had to add extra memory to their Palm Pilots just to handle the overflow from their social calendars.

But that equity has faded, and it’s time for another high-ranking naming superstar from a big San Francisco shop to go out in a blaze of glory. We’d happily volunteer, if we thought Igor would rate better than a small mention on page eight of the San Francisco Chronicle. No, it must be someone from a page one agency, an agency like Landor. Any takers? Mr. Wrench?

I personally blame this cover art for a youthful indiscretion of mine at a Boy Scout Jamboree in the ’70s, but that’s a post for a different day. What say we send this to the real tea baggers, give them something to rant about?

Brokeback Mountain Prequel

One of the funniest aspects of alleged naming & branding firm Landor, is the ridiculous rationale they cite for the work they produce. Oftentimes they will, with capricious authority, justify a design based on what certain colors “mean” or “communicate”. These “reasons” become all the more comical when parroted by the officers of their most recent victim.

Landor’s latest for a financial company is a re-worked logo. Fiserve’s Chief Executive Jeffery Yabuki, performs the squawk of shame for the Journal Sentinel:

The new logo, which is the word fiserv. – with a period – is orange because it’s different from the common industry logo color of blue and “has a certain heat and energy to it, but not the kind of danger you perceive when you see red,” Yabuki said.

No red menace here.

Red bad. Red is color of Danger. Danger bad for financial company image.

Unless of course you can sell it to another financial client. From the bowels of the Landor site:

Landor created an identity and retail space for HSBC Direct. The use of white communicates the simplicity of the brand, while red projects a contemporary attitude.

Don't be alarmed, it's just HSBC Direct's Landorian luminosity.

Full Case study

Landor founder, Walter Landor gazing inappropriately at his half-son, Blandor.

Says Blandor the Imponderable: “I fondly recall Poppy and I attending the semi-annual wisdom tooth convention. As we sat on our haunches, grooming each other and eating our sack lunch of turkey biscotti and marshmallow toast, we would randomly jump up and shout, “Wottle up the bull throttle!”. We would then travel the 3 hours home, in complete silence, until our arrival at Mandible Station.”

More on the misspent journey of Blandor’s life.

Financial Advisor coaching & consulting

This product is no joke. GoGirl is selling 40k units a week, those units being funnels. Apparently, women have wanted to pee standing up for a while, something of a “pent up demand”. The idea being you don’t have to sit on nasty public toilet seats just to pee. It also makes getting drunk and pissing in an alley less problematic. Their tag line is also pitch perfect, “Don’t take life sitting down”.

ELISABETH THIERIOT

Are your company or product name brainstorming attempts long on storm and short on brains? Wordlab is ready to help you name whatever needs naming — most have very low mileage, are hardly ever driven during the week, and are used only sparingly on weekends to scan refrigerator contents and such. Our collection of brains can be picked through in the forums belonging to the Wordlab Groups, where you’ll find lots of free for naming and branding brainstorming fun. Jump in and pick the brains!

Tips for picking a brain:

1. Do not pick if the skin is too green–it’s not ripe yet.

2. The brain should be viscous and phlegmatic, yet hold up to a good thumping. Not too firm, not too soft.

3. The end that was twisted from the brain stem should be pliable when you poke your thumb through the outer membrane. If you can’t break the membrane with your fingernail, the brain was picked prematurely.

4. Smell is the most reliable indicator of freshness.

5. Have fun with it, but keep it platonic.

The viable bit of warm and snuggly insurance company AIG has been spun-off and dubbed “Chartis”. A bad name? Well, yes. But that is just what they needed. Sometimes a terrible name is the perfect name. In today’s Insurance Journal, a so-called naming expert spouts off:

According to AIG, Chartis derives from the Greek word for map, which the company said underscores the company’s 90-year history as a global insurance pioneer.

While AIG is apparently not alone in liking the name, is Chartis a name to remember?

Perhaps not, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

One naming expert says the new corporate moniker is neither memorable nor snappy — and in that regard the name Chartis is perfect for what AIG wants to do, which is to distance itself from its old company and not draw a lot of attention to itself while doing so.

“It’s the kind of name that’s in one ear and out the other,” said Steven Manning, managing director for Igor, a well-known international naming and branding agency based in San Francisco. “It blends into the woodwork, which is just what the assignment was.”

Even the logo, a compass, is predictable, Manning noted.

Manning likened the move to Enron’s adopting Prisma Energy and Phillip Morris choosing Altria.

“It’s about breaking the association with AIG, like going into witness protection,” he said.

Chartis Insurance is using www.chartisinsurance.com for its Web site. Chartis Group uses chartis.com and chartisgroup.com.

Chartis Insurance, headquartered in New York, of course, has quite a head start on other companies picking a name. It includes the profitable AIG/AIU Commercial Insurance, Foreign General Insurance and Private Client Group operations. It had a combined statutory surplus of $32.1 billion worldwide at year-end 2008 and more than 40 million clients around the globe.

AIG/AIU hopes that the financially strong Chartis will be recognized for its success apart from the AIG name, which has been tainted by actions out of its London financial products unit that eventually resulted in a U.S. federal government bailout. The P/C units now being branded as Chartis did not get into trouble and did not require bailout funds.