The Pollywog Blog

BEST BRAND NAMES OF 2007

1.Wii - With a name that sounds small and childish and makes an easy target for potty humor, the Nintendo “Wii” created a media firestorm when it was introduced. There were dire predictions of failure, and the brand name was nearly universally panned.

But it was a name that you didn’t forget. Phonetically, it sounds like “we,” a nod to its multiplayer design–or “whee,” the sound of people having fun. Graphically, the lower-case i’s resemble two little people, which has been used to great effect in the Wii’sTV commercials.

Despite the negative press surrounding its introduction, the “Wii” quickly outsold the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 and continues to lead the category as of this month.

2. FUBAR - Could there be a better name for a demolition tool? Stanley scored a home run with this extreme name for its extreme redesign of the lowly crowbar. The name’s acronym (”F*cked Up Beyond All Recognition”) aptly describes “FUBAR’s” end result. Having “bar” in the brand name helps define the tool, while the profanity embedded in the acronym gets the brand down and dirty along with its customers. And heck–it’s just fun to say.

3. Jawbone - A Bluetooth headset, whose brand name resonates with multiple layers of meaning. In addition to describing where the headset is worn, “jawbone” means to verbally persuade, and isn’t that what you’re doing most of the time you’re on a cell phone?

4. Obsidian - Caribou Coffee’s dark, smooth roast maps nicely to the black, glossy stone created by molten lava.

5. Twitter is a Web site where people share what they happen to be doing at the moment, no matter how trivial. Imagine millions of cheeping chickadees and you won’t be far off.

6. Blackbird - This sleek desktop PC is Hewlett Packard’s answer to such high-powered computer gaming system rivals as Alienware, Overdrive PC, and Dell’s XPS series. Inspired by the famous Lockheed reconnaissance plane, the name perfectly suits the contoured black wedge-shaped CPU that appears to hover a few inches above its aluminum stand.

7. First Blush - All-natural grape juice sold by Whole Foods. The name evokes the blush of the grape as well as a feeling of youthful innocence and purity–an attractive combination for a natural food product.

8. Chevy Volt - Electric concept car. The name is short, friendly and perfectly fits the product. Now if they would just put it on the market.

9. RoughRider Wheelchair - Designed for use in developing countries, this inexpensive and easy-to-assemble wheelchair has a name that says it can handle less than optimal conditions.

10. Hint - A great name for a bottled water containing no sweeteners, no preservatives and no calories–just ahint of natural flavor. And it’s fun to order, too. “Can you give me a Hint, please?”

WORST BRAND NAMES OF 2007

1. Windows Vista - Microsoft’s most important product launched in 6 years, Vista hit the shelves with much fanfare. Curiously, the name already seemed familiar. Did no one at Microsoft ever hear of the venerable AltaVista, a search engine dating back to 1995 and still in use today?

Not only does it overlap a name that’s already firmly established in the audience’s psyche, “Vista” is just plain anemic. With all that Microsoft spends on branding, surely they could have come up with a sexier name than “Windows Vista.” Sounds like a high-rise assisted living facility.

2. Diet Coke Plus - Hard to imagine a more generic brand name for Coke’s foray into the brave new world of vitamin-fortified soda pop. Whether Diet Coke Plus is a brilliant innovation–or the branding giant’s biggest blunder since New Coke–this new soda should have had a brand name that wasn’t so, well, “flat.”

3. Kindle - Amazon’s new e-bookreader is another name that makes the list in part because of unfulfilled potential. Amazon had plenty of money to spend on creating this brand name. And Amazon itself is a fantastic name, evocative and rich with multiple meanings. “Kindle,” on the other hand, really has only one meaning to most people: to start something, especially a fire. It lacks the depth of a name like Amazon, and the idea of burning combined with books stirs up a negative image that’s most likely the opposite of what Amazon intended.

4. Joost - Internet TV service. “Joost” is one of those trendy nonsense brand names so common right now, especially for technology companies. Apparently the idea is to create a word that has not yet been taken as a domain name, then spend half your venture capital getting it to mean something.

Joost made our list because of its high visibility, but so could any of these recently created brands: “Tagtooga,” “Bebo,” “Meemo,” “Qoosa.” “Xobni,” “Thoof, “Lala,” “Wufoo,” “Kijiji,” “Zoogmo,” “Faroo,” “Ponoko,” “Qoop,” “Ceedo,” “ZocDoc,” “Doostang,” “Zixxo,” “Mego,” “Wixi,” “Meebo,” “Wakoopa,” “Qosimo,” “Hulu,” “Raketu,” “Viiv,” “Woomp,” “Bliin,” Qumana,” “BooRah,” Yoomba,” Sporge,” Joomla,” “Argoo.”

5. Cocaine Energy Drink. You know you’ve made a branding boo-boo when the FDA yanks your product off the shelf.

6. Learnia - Educational assessment software from Harcourt Assessment. And a painful condition caused by thinking too hard.

7. dimdim - A free Web conferencing service. Memorable and simple to spell, but why would you imply that the service or your customers are not so bright? Unlike the “Wii,” this name doesn’t convey any meanings other than the negative one. It’s just dumdum.

8. Honda Fit - What a boring name for such a snappy little car! In Europe the same model is known as the Jazz. Honda’s naming decisions are all the more puzzling when you consider that Europeans are more fit than Americans and America is the birthplace of jazz.

9. EasyShare All-In-One Printer - This new inkjet printer from Kodak boasts disruptive technology that combines high print quality and inexpensive ink. But instead of launching it with an appropriately new and dazzling name, Kodak saddled its printer with its tired “EasyShare” brand name, which has been around since 1994 and has been applied to everything from cameras to software.

If consumers don’t yet understand that they can get great print quality and spend practically nothing for an ink cartridge, perhaps it’s because “EasyShare” doesn’t quite say it.

10. HYmini - An unfortunate name for a very cool little device that absorbs wind and solar energy and converts it to electricity for cell phones, MP3 players, and other such gadgets. How could they not have realized how close this name sounds to a part of female anatomy? Criminy.

This week, the New York Times featured a story on the befuddlement among furniture executives (*) over what to name their furniture collections. Furniture styles no longer have clear-cut delineations–eclectic tastes and mix-and-match designs have blurred the lines between categories.

What do you call a collection includes an old-fashioned wooden-legged sofa upholstered in wasabi green? Or a wingback chair in curry-yellow leather?

Naming matters. According to the story, “Describing a collection in a way that is compelling, evocative and clear can mean the difference — at least to those charged with doing it — between attracting an entirely new group of customers and repelling existing ones.”

Names and slogans are now “the hardest part of my job,” said Edward M. Tashjian, vice president for marketing at Century Furniture in Hickory, N.C., who oversees the naming of individual pieces and entire collections. “Literally, every time I do it I want to quit and find a new career.” Coming up with a name for one of the new collections “that’s descriptive and engaging — not to mention hasn’t already been used, isn’t completely banal and meets the approval of the rest of the management team — is a nearly impossible task,” he said.

We understand, Mr. Tashjian. And we’re here to help. Contact us.

*Link goes to the same story in the Herald Tribune to avoid the NYT log-in.

The dotcom bubble burst in the late 90’s, of course, and many of these generically named companies went down with it. (Interestingly, many of these generic names are now owned by branded companies. Pets.com, for example, was purchased by PetSmart.)In the year 2000, other TLDs were released (.us, .info, .tv, .biz), but by that time, people were pretty much conditioned to think of the .com extension as the most important, most credible type of domain name to have.

The tidal wave of companies that emerged in the new century began plundering available .com names at a frenetic rate. Also significant were the domain name speculators, who have purchased–and are sitting on–tens of thousands of valuable one-word “dictionary” names. Today there are more than 64 million domain names. According to some experts, every prima facie, properly spelled word of up to six characters is now unavailable with a dot com extension. Or, perhaps even more alarming, others say that 98% of all dictionary words are now unavailable as dot com names.

Like any property in finite supply, prima facie domain names have become extraordinarily valuable. Business.com sold for $7.5 million. Sex.com traded hands for $12 million. Not every one-word domain name will command that kind of money, but companies who need to buy a one-word dotcom domain to match their company brand name will likely shell out tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

So what’s a company to do?

Choose a word and tweak the spelling (Flickr). Frankenstein a brand name (Agilent = agile + -ment). Or just make up a word. Any word will do. The goofier sounding, the better.

As long as we can get the .com domain name, they think, it’s all good.

Except now there’s such a proliferation of made-up, incomprehensible, misspelled and vapid brand names, the potential distinctiveness of each individual name is largely lost. Every new gibberish name is just another drop in a great big bucket of twaddle.

But there’s hope for companies seeking a memorable brand and a strategic domain name. Our oversaturated, overmarketed collective consciousness has created opportunities for naming by companies too smart to go down the road of meaningless brand names.

To be continued.

Crusher is a scrappy new online invitation service now competing with the likes of Evite. Launched in 2007, Crusher came late to the tech party and found that, like hundreds of other startups in their shoes, they could not secure the prima facie domain name that matched their brand name.

Instead of changing their brand name to a trendy nonsense word, the founders of Crusher improvised by spelling their domain name with a touch of leetspeak (or l33t, for you purists): crush3r.com. Not a bad solution, considering the young demographic of its target market.

Here’s how they tell the story:

Why the “3″ in the URL?
Because all plain English words were already taken. Believe us, we tried hard to get CRUSHER.com but the folks sitting on it weren’t returning our calls. “Please, we don’t need the whole word. We already have most of it. We just want to buy a vowel!” exclaims Doug …(dial tone). And we’re not about to settle for a made-up name like every other start-up out there. We were set on the name “Crusher”, so we went with CRUSH3R.com for an address. If you dislike the number three we’ve got a back-up for you. We figured if we can’t have the word, then we’ll have it twice (: …you can go to crushercrusher.com and find us there as well.

Meemo. Qoosa. Xobni. Thoof. Lala. Wufoo. Kijiji. Zoogmo.Wixi. Wakoopa. Qosimo. Hulu.

Such is the sorry state of company naming these days. Tech company after tech company is slipping into a bulging diaper of infantilism by taking a snippet of baby talk as its brand name.

Why? Because the dotcom domain name was available.

The trend is reaching critical mass. We are assailed by so many nonsense brand names that they have become another burble to our oversaturated, overmarketed brains. Individually, the names are gibberish. Collectively, they are white noise.

To understand how we have come to this point–and more importantly, to understand where domain naming will go from here–it’s important to see where we’ve been.

In the beginning IEEE and Al Gore created the Internet, and it was good. When corporations realized just how good the Web could be for business, they acquired domains and named them after their company: ibm.com, hp.com, apple.com, microsoft.com. At that time were only three generic TLD’s (top level domains) available: .com for commercial entities, .net for network infrastructures, and .org for noncommercial organizations.

In addition to the brick and mortar companies establishing their Web presence, the Internet was inundated by enterprising companies looking for a way to monetize this great new thing. Some of them were pretty good at branding and chose a decent company name, which was also their domain name: Amazon.com, PayPal.com, Travelocity.com.

Others saw dollar signs in grabbing up generic domain names: pets.com, etoys.com, freeinternet.com.

More in Pt 2.