Quiznos now has around one-fifth the number of stores Subway has, but is the number one sandwich store in terms of growth while Subway continues to tread water. It’s time for Subway to get bold and reinvent, or die.

Perhaps they could run with this campaign:

Hamlyns Pinhead Oat Meal of Scotland. Yummmm!

Gearing up for November’s elections, Fox News has quietly morphed their corporate color scheme, replacing nearly all of the red with blue.

Hey, when your brand is all about championing the powers that be, being a chameleon is your only survival option. The problem with this weather vane approach to brand positioning is that over the long term, even if you can accurately forecast the zeitgeist climate change, you end up having no brand at all.

The Fox News website before the latest Gallup poll and impending elections, and now. Click on each pic for the full-size view.

[ More posts about fox news | More blogs about naming ] [ More posts about product names | More blogs about product names ] [ More about how to name a product ]

Landor strikes again:

Landor created the name Centigon, which rhymes with Pentagon and is coined from “sentry” suggesting protection and “century” hinting at heritage.

The “Diamond Shield” mark was inspired by the prestige and strength of a diamond, the world’s most impervious element, the personal protection and agility of chain mail armor and the mobility and performance of a luxury car. The mark is luminescent, prestigious, and communicates the important functionality of layers of protection.

“Aentagon, Bentagon Centagon, Dentagon, Eentagon, Fentagon, Gentagon, Hentagon, Lentagon, Jentagon, Kentagon, Lentagon, Mentagon, Nentagon, Oentagon, Qentagon, Rentagon, Sentagon, Tentagon, Uentagon, Ventagon, Wentagon, Xentagon, Yentagon, Zenatgon…hold on, I’ve got it!”

Seriously though, if you want to save a bundle on your next landoresque naming project, here’s a hot tip. Zentagon is clear for U.S trademark registration in any and all businesses.

But hold fast your beating colon, there’s more. Zentagon.com is available for registration as of right now.

Here is a great spoof, which like all great spoofs is spot on. It’s a look at what would happen to the iPod identity if Microsoft got a hold of it.

Via Wordlab.

Song Airlines has taken a final bow and, well, we told you so. Two years ago we were so appalled at the naming and branding of Delta’s new venture that we wrote this post predicting its demise.

Everything about Song’s brand package hit a sour note. The bizarre Song logo prophetically portrayed something spiraling into the ground. It’s true.

Apparently, the name “Song” was meant to help convey some sort of JetBlue / Virgin hybrid, and the crew’s Kate Spade designed cabinwear was aimed at melding Branson’s rock and roll sensibilities, a touch of SoHo and, somehow, cheap fares.

Who did Delta hire when they decided to try and create a “cool” brand? Landor. Yes, it was like paying Dick Cheney to teach you the Macarena so that “chicks would dig you”.

Sorry for the visual.

There are lots of branding companies you can go to when you need a visual identity. They have portfolios detailing the logo work they’ve done for others, explaining the ideas that are conveyed by each logo element, the importance of a logo, how it can help propel your unique brand message and achieve separation from your competitors, etc.

We would argue that you can tell a lot about what a branding firm really believes in based on the work they’ve done in presenting their own brand.

Landor, Interbrand, Pentagram and Siegal & Gale all wax poetic about the power of the logos they created for others, yet they’ve all chosen to go gentle into that good night, sans logo.

Instead they each opted for a type treatment.

Note how each visual identity demonstrates their respective understanding of the power of visual identiy to communicate the unique qualities of their individual brands.

We think they’ve each succeeded in communicating that understanding brilliantly.

More blogs about landor.

Here it is, the 6th sign of The Apocalypse. Wikipedia has become a dumping ground for corporate p.r. (complete with logos):

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Forth & Towne is a brand of clothing stores that is owned by Gap Inc., which also owns the Gap, Banana Republic, and Old Navy brands. Forth & Towne focuses on women over 35 who grew up with the Gap brand, but have “lost touch” with it.

History

The brand was announced by Gap Inc. in September 2004, and has a planned launch date sometime in Autumn 2005. At that point, Gap Inc. will begin a test phase of the new concept with four stores in the Chicago area, and one in New York . If successful, the company plans to add at least 50 additional stores in the United Kingdom, France, and Japan by the year 2007.

History??? What kind of header is that? It’s not even open yet, just a store that Gap plans on opening and it merits an entry in an encyclopedia? Not in one that wants to maintain its hard-won credibility.

Lest you think the Book of Revelation reference too heavy-handed, check out the number of search results returned here. There are no coincidences.

When is a corporate photo not a corporate photo? When it’s an effective and compelling branding, marketing and PR vehicle. One way to take a normally banal bit of collateral and amp-up its efficacy is to jettison those same old same old corporate photos of your staff and replace them with photos that people will actually engage with, that help to define your brand attitudinally and emotionally. In order to pull this off, you need the right photographer.

We just had a fantastic experience with San Francisco-based photographer Jon Hope who came to Igor headquarters to take some people shots for an article in the July edition of Arrive magazine. Check out his portfolio and ask yourself, “Is our corporate photography working hard enough?”

Logo is the name of MTV Networks’ new Gay / Lesbian / Transgender-themed channel. Logo comes out next month, but for those of you who can’t wait for a logo outing, the folks at b3ta have outed a bunch of logos this month via their Phallic Logo Awards.

The UN is getting into the naming business, and its first unsuspecting client is FYR (“Former Yugoslav Republic of”) Macedonia, reports esctoday.com:

United Nations mediator Matthew Nimitz suggests a new name for the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia; ‘Republika Makedonija-Skopje’. The Greek and Macedonian governements are debating about the name issue since 1991, when FYR Macedonia became an independent nation.

The Greek minister of foreign affairs, Petros Molyviatis, agreed that this new proposal is a basis for further negotiations. Greece generally fears that the name ‘Macedonia’ encourages a claim on the northern Greek province of Macedonia. A majority of the Macedonians avoid the name ‘FYR Macedonia’ or the abbreviation ‘FYROM’. Skopje has not yet made any official statements on the proposal.

The Balkans are definitely ready to use the current lull in bloodshed to latch onto just the right pretext for the next round of bloodshed, and perhaps this initiative will do the trick.

Whatever name the UN’s mediator-namers ultimately graft onto this fledgling republic, one thing is certain: the FYR Macedonians have a groovy, psychedelic flag. Hopefully New Zealand is paying attention.

William Safire’s On Language column in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine has a succinct etymology of and an interesting take on the overuse of the word Brand in contemporary English language and culture:

The hot word in the field of sales — indeed, pervading the world of perfect pitching — is brand.

”The King Is Dead, Long Live His Brand” is the Times headline above an article about the way ”Michael Jordan is being mortalized so his sneakers can stay in the game.” That’s because ”building a brand on the back of a legend works only until that back breaks.”

The noun blazed on the scene a thousand years ago as a burning stick, and the meaning soon transferred to the mark left on the skin of a horse or a criminal by such a stick, or branding iron. That mark became the sign of infamy: Richard Hooker wrote in 1597 of an age marked ”with the brand of error and superstition,” and later, a firebrand became the symbol of an inflammatory rabble-rouser.

The burned-in mark, in the 19th century, began to signify ownership not just of an animal but also of liquids in wooden casks, like wine or ale. The brand-mark became a ”trademark,” and in the 20th century the designated item so labeled became a brand. In 1929, Fleischmann’s Yeast absorbed the coffee maker Chase & Sanborn and other companies to form Standard Brands (now a part of Kraft), in hopes that brand names would produce brand loyalty. A generation later, David Ogilvy, the advertising executive, was dubbed by the author Martin Mayer in 1958 as an ”apostle of the ‘brand image”’ who sought to persuade the consumer ”that brand A, technically identical with brand B, is somehow a better product.” Within two years, the novelist Kingsley Amis extended brand image from a product to a genre: ”mad scientists attended by scantily clad daughters” constitute ”the main brand-image of science fiction.”

…”It’s a new brand world,” wrote Tom Peters in the magazine Fast Company in 1997, playing on the compound adjective brand-new. In an article titled ”The Brand Called You,” Peters argued that ”the main chance is becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents . . . looking to establish your own microequivalent of the Nike swoosh. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of remark.”

Well before the blogosphere became a media power, Peters held that ”the Web makes the case for branding more directly than any packaged good or consumer product ever could. . . . So how do you know which sites are worth visiting? The answer: branding. The sites you go back to are the sites you trust. . . . The brand is a promise of the value you’ll receive.” His article helped project a new sense of the word into common usage, as he suggested ways for individuals to self-brand by focusing on the values (of imagination or budgetary dependability, of creative talent or personal charm) that make an individual’s brand unique.

We now have a Brandweek magazine, and a Web site aimed at what used to be called ”Madison Avenue” named Brand Republic. Basketball teams, rock bands and celebrities rise and fall as brands. Business Week headlines a story about Yahoo’s attempt to establish itself in foreign markets with ”Exporting an Über-Brand.”

In a world where the words new and fresh are relentlessly repeated on every product label, the name of the sales technique is getting old and stale. Where is the ad-Übermensch, the creative Ogilvy, who will put forward a new moniker for the name of the atmospheric marketing game? The time has come, as John Kerry puts it, to unbrand the word brand.

Safire then gets a little cranky and goes on to pick a bone with Yahoo! for forcing the terminal exclamation point on him, and vows that from now on when he has to use the name in print he will write it with a question mark instead: Yahoo?

More interestingly, the redoubtable language maven makes a good point in his lambasting of a particularly egregious dot com-era naming convention, “internal capitalization”, as well as tracking down the Eve that birthed this monster:

BlackBerry, appropriating the name of the fruit of a bramble bush, sports what is called ”internal capitalization” to make the brand name distinctive. That’s the next worst thing in corporate nomenclature, stemming like kudzu from the 1951 TelePrompTer. Entranced by the symmetry of two five-letter groups beginning with b, the corporate namers capitalized both, turning a proper noun improper, at least in my book.

What reason do I have to resist this sly typographic mind-manipulation? As Shakespeare put it in ”Henry IV, Part I”: ”If reasons were as plenty as Black-berries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.” (The Bard wrote the word as ”Black-berries,” with initial cap and hyphen. Four centuries ago, that was O.K.)

Ultimately, internal capitalization is unnecessary and distracting. Blackberry is a perfect name for a diminutive email device that looks like a blackberry; ‘BlackBerry’ serves no purpose and just dilutes the power of the brand.