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Naming Consultant Reports Severe
Shortage of Company Names.

SEATTLE, Aug. 1, 2003. John Cook, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist, recently did a story asking a very good question: "Why do companies spend millions of dollars and countless hours of research to dump well-established company names?"

The company in question was a six-year old Seattle online advertising firm called Avenue A. They hired a naming company, evaluated hundreds of names, and finally settled on aQuantive Inc. Mm-m. If you liked the old name better, listen to the rationale for the switch: "So many websites and businesses have laid claim to English, Spanish and French terms that few words are left." Terry Heckler, founder of Heckler Associates, the naming consultants in question, claims that companies have limited options these days. "Any word out of the dictionary you can't protect--you have to invent names in order to come up with unique names."

Another product naming expert joins the Greek chorus: Jim Singer of Namebase laments, "We do a lot of naming of cars, and all the good animals are gone, all the good places are gone, so then what do you do when all the good names are taken? It is a huge problem."

We may be missing something here, but Avenue A is actually a pretty cool name. It's different. It's urban. It's high energy. Just because you want the world to know that you're good at research does that mean you have to trash your name and come up with a real clunker that supposedly gets today's message across? Is that really the job of the name?

As to the argument that we're running out of company names and product names, we're happy to report it's not likely to happen anytime soon. A case in point. We do a serious preliminary trademark search on all of the names we present to our clients. On one recent project for a telecommunications company we presented a total of 120 product names--almost all of which were real, not artificially constructed words like aQuant. Over a third of the names were rated by our trademark attorneys as likely to pass trademark.

Maybe these aQuant guys weren't running out of words after all. Maybe they were just running out of imagination.