Love Hurts

The reliably clear-thinking Laura Ries goes off on a tear in her blog today over the positioning and naming blunders of the company that makes her favorite athletic shoe. MBT shoes are a classic example of a marketing myopia. It’s a condition found in clients...

Gr8 Baby Names? UGTBK!

The UK’s Daily Mail reports “More parents using txt language to make their child’s name gr8.” Abbreviated versions of traditional Christian names are appearing on birth certificates along with “original” ways of spelling which even...

The Ford Fiesta, Refried

The Ford Fiesta is making a return to the American market. Company officials announced that a new version of the Fiesta, which has been selling well in Europe, Asia and Latin America for the past 30 years, will be launched globally within the next two years. And in a...

The Trail of Broken Memes

Sometime in the past few weeks, I read about an Intel processor platform codenamed “Skulltrail.” This bad boy has two quad-core microprocessors, resulting in a total of EIGHT processing engines running at 3.2GHz on a 1600Mhz system bus. The result?...

Dark Roots

I’m always bemused by corporate America’s faith in Latin roots–as if these meanings are burned into customers’ DNA and, if people just thought about it (which they don’t), they’d get what their brand name means. Microsoft is just...

Learn to Speak Ikea Like a Native

Today’s Guardian features a story that serves as a Rosetta stone unlocking the secrets of Ikea’s cryptic naming system. Sofas, coffee tables, bookshelves, media storage and doorknobs are named after places in Sweden (Klippan, Malmö); beds, wardrobes and...