STEP inside design magazine

july|august 2002

VOLUME 18, NUMBER 4
pp. 74-77

THE ONE THING A CORPORATE NAME SHOULDN'T BE IS...

CLEANING UP ITS ACT: SPOTTED DICK HAS BEEN A FAVORITE SCOTTISH PUDDING FOR DECADES, BUT THE VENERABLE DESSERT MAY SOON BE RENAMED "SPOTTED RICHARD"TO STIFFEN SAGGING SALES. IT SEEMS EVEN MEN BRAVE ENOUGH TO EAT HAGGIS BLUSH ASKING FOR "DICK" AT THE GROCER'S.

BY DIANNA EDWARDS

"sanitized for your protection"

STEP inside design GETS DOWN AND DIRTY WITH A
HUNDRED MONKEYS IN SEARCH OF THE PERFECT NAME.

For the past three years, the most popular baby names in America have been Jacob/Michael or Emily/Hannah. This comes from one of 10,000 sites devoted to helping parents find that one perfect, uniquely ubiquitous name. For the past three years, the most popular corporate names in America have ended in -ent ( Lucent) or -ant (Luminant). This comes from a brave little spoof site called eNormicom.com that is devoted to poking corporate naming companies and their clients where it hurts: right in the suffix. The Lucent/ Naviant/Scient/Viant/ Noviant/Novients of the world are the Stepford Wives of corporate America, monikers phonetically engineered to capitalize on assets, maximize performance, and amortize investment. They are also so safe and squeaky clean it hurts; completely bereft of something Steve Manning of A Hundred Monkeys calls "life force." And that's the kiss of death in the name game.

MONKEY SEE, MONKEY DON'T DO
"Naming is your first shot at being different," says the website of A Hundred Monkeys. "Don't pick a name that makes you one of the trees in the forest and then spend the rest of your marketing budget trying to stand out."

The company walks its talk. "A Hundred Monkeys" is a nod to the old adage that a hundred monkeys banging away at typewriters would eventually turn out a Shakespearean sonnet. After a decade in business, A Hundred Monkeys has created names of pure poetry for icons such as Apple Computer, ABC-TV, Timberland, Ben +Jerry's and Goodby Silverstein + Partners.

Long the province of advertising agencies, naming came into its own when thousands of nascent internet companies clamored to cram technology-credibility-vision into a new, distinctive, pronounceable, memorable, and most important - trademarkable name.

Naming companies sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Whole divisions of designasaurs like Landor and Lippincott were deployed against naming, wielding tools with names almost assheepheaded as eNormicom's "Nametron 3000TM." Linguists towing diphthongs and fricatives joined the fray, helping focus groups weigh the nuances of dotting an I with a circle or without.

"Pseudo-science," says A Hundred Monkeys with a collective snort. Hocus-pocus designed to legitimize instinct. Or replace it."Focus groups, word morphemes, computer generated stuff... that's the easy way out," says founder Danny Altman. "When science decides, it's nobody's fault, nobody can be blamed because science showed us the way. Of course, there really is no science that exists to do all that stuff."

CONNING, ER, COINING A NAME
What science there is fits under the broad umbrella of linguistics,the study of human speech. Fascinating stuff, really. No, really. Think of it like this. Words are made up of arbitrary sequences of sound called phonemes. (The sound of "a", for instance.) Morphology is the study of how phonemes are combined into linguistic units. A morpheme is the smallest possible meaningful unit. (Example: art.)

Things get interesting-and naming companies getrich - when you understand that even the smallest phoneme carries meaning, and different meanings in different cultures, at that. That's where the linguists and ethnolinguists come in.

Not only can these specialists tell you what a particular morpheme can mean, they also know their way around naming's ultimate trump card: Latin. You don't have to be a linguist to know that if you can build a name around a Latin root word - voila!-you've got gravitas, baby.

"Whenever a company stoops to explaining their name in Latin or Greek," sniffs Steve Manning, "it might as well be Vulcan." The team at A Hundred Monkeys prefers the science of the heart. Their approach is equal parts curiosity, intuition, experience, and hard-nosed business savvy.

A diverse marketing perspective is critical, says Elisabeth Brinton , formerly the head of corporate marketing at Loudcloud. "Other companies look at naming in isolation. We look at the integration of positioning and messaging and the brand as the underpinning of the name. You can't surgically remove the pieces and have a winning strategy in the long term."

"It's not really about naming," adds Manning. "Naming is one small component of a positioning project. Once you figure out what the positioning is, it will point you to the name."

SUCCESS SMELLS FEARLESS
A Hundred Monkeys has many competitors, most of which are hot-linked from the Monkeys' website. Whaaaaa?

"It's the same thing we encourage our clients to do: Go where your competition isn't willing to follow," says Manning. "We wondered if linking to other naming companies could turn some of their content to our advantage. The answer was 'yes.'"

The move smacks of confidence. But then, "no fear" is almost the Monkey mantra. "The bottom line," says Altman, "is that you can't be afraid yourself. We don't get entangled in corporate politics. Somebody's got to go in there and talk about naming without worrying about the inevitable range of consequences."

The visual impact of all those sound-alike competitor names-Namebank, Namebase, Namelab, Nametrade, Namestormers, The Naming Company, Nameit, and Namix-makes a vivid point for the Monkeys. "It shows a contrast," says Manning. "We position ourselves as a very clear choice. Certainly not a choice for everybody But a very clear choice."

One of the Monkeys' most interesting competitors is a site called WordLab created by.... one of the Monkeys. Prior to joining A Hundred Monkeys, Jay Jurisich designed WordLab, an alphabet soup of fun, service, and power-to-the-people with do-it-yourself naming tools such as Morpheme Machine and The ACME Name-maker ("When you don't want to stand out from the crowd...").

The Monkeys also created The Shinola Awards (shinolas.com) where celebrity judges comment on the best and worst names in history Manning says the Shinolas are really an excuse to examine the effects of corporate language "muscling its way into our psyches and culture."

Jurisich, a closet lingo-Dadaist, plays with language like an ADD toddler plays with food. "Like the Oulipo," he says happily."French avant-garde literary anarchists messing with language. They mix it all up in brilliant ways. Georges Perec wrote his long novel, AVoid, without ever using the letter e."

"Jay has duplicated those efforts using every other letter,"offers Altman. The fact is, for A Hundred Monkeys, the process of naming is more a mindset than a process. "You're always on the lookout," says Manning. "By the time you start a project, you've already got a million ideas. I'm just as likely to get ideas from a magazine as reference material. There's just not much interesting territory in a thesaurus."

"What's fresh about theMonkeys' process, is that it's honest," says Brinton. "It's not spin and hype." Altman (who points out that even though he is the senior member, his card does not say "Silverback") has the last word. "It does not do any good to have a structure and a formal process if you can't attach that to real people and serious thinking. As soon as you ask a question that's not on the program, you're in uncharted territory. And from my standpoint, that's the only place I want to be."

CORRY'S SLUG & SNAIL DEATH IS A REVERED PRODUCT NAME AT A HUNDRED MONKEYS. "THEY DON'T MESS AROUND," SAYS JURISICH. "THEY DON'T TALK ABOUT MAIMING THE SNAILS FIRST, OR RELOCATING THEM. IT'S OUT-AND-OUT SNAIL GENOCIDE."

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

1
MARK YOUR TERRITORY
Naming is personal. It demands a deep dive into a company's culture. Manning: "A big part of the job is taking a hard look at the competitors - their attitude, positioning, and messaging. We have to figure out what we can own. Where we can go that other companies won't follow." A smart first move? Sniff out the Alpha Dog. "Make sure he or she has a stake in the process," says Jurisich. "It's too easy to look at a name down the road and say, nah, not crazy about that."

2
MAKE CHANGE FUN
When people loosen up and act like people instead of TeamNewName, the results are better. "We take fear out of the equation early," says Manning. There's a project name on the table from the start so people can get comfortable with the idea of change. On its heels will come real names ranging from mundane to insane. "We put a name in front of them and say, 'If this were the name, what would that mean to our personality?'" "Nothing works better than real stuff," says Jurisich: "All our names are important. Even names that don't wind up in the finals help clarify the story."

3
KEEP IT REAL
There's no consultant-speak allowed with A Hundred Monkeys. They don't do it and they can't stand it. "I gotta believe it was invented to eliminate discussion," says Manning. "Nobody can really understand it." Brinton thinks the hidden agenda is mystery. "They try to build a black box around what they're doing. It becomes a frustrating and completely alienating device." Jurisich chimes in: "Like Windows."

4
GIVE IT CONTEXT
No name is an island. Without its brand trappings, even the iconic "Apple" sounds silly. So A Hundred Monkeys presents finalists in faux print ads, not a deck of brand attributes. "The rubber meets the road in the advertising," says Manning. "It's easy to dismiss a word on a page, but if you make it come alive..." Brinton agrees: "Names have to live in the real word. That's why we do the exercises we do, why we create a place where people can get beyond their fears and politics."

5
MAKE FRIENDS
Most Monkey projects last a month, but given the intimacy of their approach, the friendships are long lasting. "Part of the experience of working with us," says Brinton, "is that there are no account reps or grand Pooh-bahs. Our clients get five people who matter; who are there to listen." Altman goes further. "We develop relationships, even if the projects are short. The same principles always apply-you've got to have a good relationship, you've got to understand what clients really mean when they say something. All of that stuff is critical."