Start-Ups Spend Time, Money
In Search of the Perfect Name
By MARTIN VEITCH and KAREN
KELLY
Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Unlike Shakespeare's rose, a company by any other name can end up
the butt of consumers' jokes and media ridicule. As finding an original
name becomes more important, and more difficult, companies are spending
vast amounts of time -- and money -- in their search for the perfect
moniker.
In March 2001, the U.K.'s Post
Office Group rebranded itself as Consignia PLC. The new name, it said,
came from the verb "to consign" and would underline its
international role in e-commerce as well as traditional postal services.
The company was panned for the move and the new name was ridiculed.
Just 15 months later the company is changing its name again, to Royal
Mail Group PLC. That pattern may be repeated many more times as firms
reassess the trendy but vacuous naming conventions that have dominated
recently.
In the 1970s, with relatively
few companies competing, firms were likely to go for straightforward,
descriptive names like International Business Machines Corp. and Digital
Equipment Corp. Today, however, start-ups are under pressure to think
up something that will not only pass trademark rules but also make
a catchy global Internet URL, distinguish the firm from rivals in
an intensely competitive sector, and not be offensive in foreign languages.
The result has been progressively wilder names.
Odd word compounds (Red Hat Software)
and strange punctuation (E.piphany) are common, and, of course, many
Internet firms have the suddenly archaic .com suffix. Fashion retailer
Boo.com and the like may have failed but many of the new names are
deeply embedded in the consciousness of users even if -- think of
Yahoo! and Monster.com -- they once appeared off the wall.
Desperate to Be Different
Desperate for differentiation,
many recent ventures such as Ocado, Opodo, Scient, Viant and Accenture
have favored made-up names. The companies themselves claim that they
are based on hard research but they can lead to confusion at a very
basic level. Accenture receives many calls for Adventure while Opodo,
a Web-based travel booking service, maintains that its name can be
said as OPodo or OpODO. Skeptics say such names are watered-down attempts
to avoid legal issues or controversy.
"There's no emotion, [the
new, made-up names] mean nothing to anybody," says Steve Manning,
managing director of A Hundred Monkeys, a naming company based in
Sausalito, California. "If I suggested a name like [database
software giant] Oracle today it could never happen. If there were
10 executives in the room, you can bet somebody would say 'we're about
scientific analytical stuff -- oracles used to only ever forecast
death and destruction and we can't be associated with that."'
A Hundred Monkeys is one of a
generation of naming firms that are paid tens or even hundreds of
thousands of euros to develop company names and brands. These firms
research the company and attempt to think up a name that is novel,
attractive and memorable in many languages. Increasingly, the demand
is for names that trip off the tongue and linger in the mind, while
avoiding the pitfalls of trademark legislation.
"There has been a great
proliferation of coined words and part of that is down to the simple
clutter of trademarks and URLs in the high-tech industry," says
Anthony Shore, senior director for naming and writing expertise at
Landor Associates, one of the biggest naming groups. "They are
less likely to be descriptive and they are more expansive."
For example, Dow Corning Corp.'s
spin-off Xiameter -- a Web-based marketplace selling silicon products.
The name "has real roots in real meanings for efficiency and
speed," says Mr. Shore. Its proximity to the word diameter suggests
a connection between company and customers, he adds.
Beware 'Monstrosities'
This won't wash with A Hundred
Monkeys' Mr. Manning, who rails against what he calls "constructed
morphemic monstrosities" that create company names like Xiameter
and Lucent Technologies Inc. spin-off Agere Systems Inc. Agere, pronounced
a-GEAR, has roots in the Latin verb "ago," meaning to lead,
according to the firm, which selected the name based on feedback from
staff, focus groups and industry analysts. "They're doing a great
job of appealing to Greeks and Latins," quips Mr. Manning. Companies
all want to sound cool, he adds, "but they don't want to sound
stupid and it's all done by committee so they end up with neutered
names."
One thing all experts agree on
is that the Internet-specific names must be avoided at all costs,
especially those once prized generics such as Pets.com that limit
a company's area of activity. Also, like dot-com names, many high-tech
naming conventions now appear dated.
"Nobody wants to be called
dot-com anymore and now we stay away from little i or e, or 'cyber'
or 'digital' anything," says Jim Singer, president and creative
director of Namebase, a naming agency in Cardiff by the Sea, California.
But while companies spend thousands
on coming up with the perfect name, which is often prefigured for
months or even years by a codename, some people at the sharp end of
the information technology industry's forays into new names and brands
are more skeptical. Who really cares what the company is called if
the product works?
"I don't understand why
they can't just keep the codenames," says Mike Magee, editor
of The Inquirer, a Web-based publication that often satirizes high-tech
absurdity. "Intel has all these lovely names of lakes, rivers
and mountains like Merced and McKinley for its chips but when they
come to market it's Pentium and Itanium. A lot of it is pretty daft.
I have a Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook laptop. It's a nice computer but,
I mean, what's a Lifebook?"
Despite the technicalities, naming
decisions can often be pretty prosaic. "The short answer is that
if you're a tech business with a hot new service then the chances
of coining a good name that is not in use are virtually zero,"
says Chris Buckham, marketing director of U.K. information-technology
services firm Sanderson Group. Mr. Buckham was once on the committee
that named Apricot Computers Ltd., one of the U.K.'s most successful
computer companies in the 1980s.
"The project code-name was
Apricot but we paid a company to come up with a name and top of the
list was Rascal, which I quite liked," recalls Mr. Buckham. But
Apricot founder Roger Foster "said at the beginning of the meeting
that if anybody thought Rascal was a good idea they had no future
at the company ... so that was that."
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