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| February 21, 2000 |
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By Todd Wasserman The stampede into company and product names employing an "i" or "e" prefix is fast reaching a point of diminishing returns, warn branding experts. The i's have it. At least that's the way it appears now as the arcane business of high tech naming edges towards moniker's beginning with the letter "I," often in lower case. Companies that lately have employed the prefix du jour include i-gift.com. i-drive, iWon.com. iwin.com, iExchange.com and i2Go, while new products have run the gamut from i-Opener (a stripped down PC from Austin, Texas, startup Netpliance) and iPaq (a bare-bones PC tilted towards the corporate market from Compaq) to i Cruiser (IBM's own stripped down PC), Apple's iBook notebook computer and Polaroid's i-Zone instant camera. That's not to mention longer-lived products like IBM's "i" Series of ThinkPad notebook computers and Apple's iMac desktop computer, whose idiosyncratic look and positioning, and big success, started the trend. Contrast the trend with the 1998-99 mania over "e," usually in the lower case as well. Perhaps influenced by IBM's $200 million e-business campaign that launched in 1997, the "e's" have multiplied. Among the dot.coms there have been eBay, E*Trade, eCampus and eToys, to name but a few. Meanwhile, in its advertising, the computer industry in a rush to keep up with IBM, has been touting e-services (Hewlett-Packard), e-learning (Cisco Systems) and e-Travel and e-business (Oracle). The "e" never made much of a splash on the product front, but there have been a few notable exceptions, including Energizer's soon-to-be-released [e.sup.2] super-battery. Tech names have also leaned heavily on both the previously neglected "@"sign (Gateway's latest $50 million "Gateway@Work" ad campaign; cable Internet service Excite@Home), and the "z" (Flooz.com, IBM's Z Pro series workstations and notebooks). But those are nothing compared to the "i/e" juggernaut. Maybe it's time for the reign of those vowels to reach its end. Certainly, it's hard to find companies that are in the business of creating product and company names that don't believe the stampede into "e" and "i" prefixes has run its course. Danny Altman, creative director of A Hundred Monkeys, Sausalito, Calif., seems to be one of the more forceful in convincing clients to eschew the siren of the "i" or "e" name. "Generally, we refuse to do it," Altman said. "Most clients we deal with immediately recognize that's not the thing to do. If you're trying to draw attention to yourself, why would you want to use something that everybody else is using?" Some, like Joe Selame, co-founder of BrandEquity, Newton, Mass., caution that it's dangerous to get too caught up in fads that, by definition, tend to have a short shelf life. "it's just like with clothing retailers. If a certain color is in that year and then everybody does it, all of a sudden nobody wants that color." Perhaps worse, Selame said, these names will date companies of the '90s just like the "compu-" prefix and the "-tech" suffix dated companies of the '70s."I would think one of the things I would be careful of is following a trend if you think your company is going to last any length of time," Selame said. "In a few years, that 'e' or 'i' is going to look very, very old-fashioned." A similar fate befell those who were shortsighted enough to hitch their logos to the craze for Helvetica typefaces in the '60s or swish logos in the early '90s, he said. Ditto for Allen Adamson, managing partner of Landor Associates, the brand consultancy arm of Young & Rubicam, N.Y. Adamson said the "e's" and "i's" are both overused at this point. "The problem with naming is that by the time a trend is visible, it's obsolete," he said. "If you're first, you win. If you're the second one out, you're still good. If you're third, you wonder what happened. If you're fourth, you lose." Adamson credited Apple's iMac with launching the "i" craze. Meant to be shorthand for "Internet," as in Internet-ready, the "i" is no longer a product differentiator, he said. Apple declined to be interviewed for this article. Still, by most accounts, "i" has not yet reached "e's" effete status, emblematized in a recent Microsoft TV spot, via McCann-Erickson, San Francisco, that shows a jumble of e-terms in increasing speed, ending with "e-nough." Michael MoClaren, director of client services at McCann, said the spot illustrates e-information overkill. "People are just getting bombarded with these messages," he said, "and we're saying it doesn't have to be this complicated and confusing." The e-craze may have started with a strategic decision--some say blunder--by IBM not to trademark the term "e-business," the focus of a major global campaign starting in October 1997 that has succeeded in repositioning what has still been viewed as a "big iron" manufacturer as a leading-edge guide to Internet applications. Marilyn Merserau, vp-brand advertising for Big Blue, said the move undertaken with agency Ogilvy & Mather, New York, was in keeping with IBM'S rebranding philosophy "People in the past have always thought of us as closed and proprietary," she said. "It had to be an industry term. As Marianne Caponnetto, vp-worldwide media/digital media, recalled, that effort sought to put IBM back in a position of setting the industry's agenda, in the process improving its relevance to current and future customers. "The browser wars were on," she said last week at an American Marketing Association conference sponsored by Brandweek. While many vendors were focusing on issues like content," nobody was really talking about business." The e-business push, which was customized for 37 different markets globally, became a platform to refresh the image not just of IBM as a company but its individual products and people, Caponnetto said. Still, while IBM did trademark an "e" logo curlicued to look somewhat like an @ sign, the fact that "e-business" was open game was not lost on competitors. "Biggest mistake they [IBM] ever made," said Mark Jarvis, svp-worldwide marketing for software rival Oracle. "They spent $400 million creating something called e-business, and we have been most successful turning e-business into market share with a minimum of marketing." Indeed, Oracle appears to have used the phrase with success. Still, Caponnetto denied the failure to trademark" e-business" represented an oversight of any kind. "We wanted to create a category. It wouldn't have worked if we went the proprietary route," she said. Caponnetto noted that, while "all of a sudden everybody was using 'e-business,'" in research IBM'S association with the term outpaces that of its closest competitor by 5 to 1. "No company is gaining ground," Merserau said. "Nobody's made any inroads at all." "Certainly the market has become very cluttered, but we have the advantage because we've been there since the get-go," Caponnetto said. Branding companies say the surfeit of "e and "i's" is more broadly symptomatic of a rush to snare Internet domain names, the Web addresses usually ending in .com (see Top of Mind, page 20). By that argument, even with their clear imperfections, those names still may be better than anything else that's available. "Just five years ago there were only 5,000 domain names," said Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank, NewYork. "Today there are 11,000 new ones a day" "There are so many new brands in dot.com that our naming group is overrun," Adamson said. "Everyone comes in saying they want short, memorable names and they have buckets of money Unfortunately that's the one thing we can't deliver." Those stuck in a naming conundrum can take heart, though. Even venerable Apple has come up short recently When the company tried to import its AirPort wireless communication device to Japan, it found the name was already taken and changed it to AirMac. Similarly, IBM had trouble when it was trying to re-name its line of PC servers in 1997. It dug into its wealth of old brand names to find "Netfinity." Not, to their credit, iNfinity but Netfinity So far, indications are that it was a good choice, thanks in part to an attention-getting ad campaign from Ogilvy. COPYRIGHT 2000 BPI Communications,
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