Naming a business is no easy task. Renaming a business is exponentially more challenging. Thus, it is with great excitement and pleasure that we announce yet another Catchword success in corporate branding: Daptiv.

Formerly known as eProject, this project management client approached Catchword to help them rename their company. Their need was straightforward: a new name and identity to help position themselves as more than just a project management software firm.

Once the client had defined the goal, we put on our strategic naming caps and presented a selection of unique company names. The name “Daptiv” conveys the ability to be more flexible and adaptive in an ever-changing, fast-paced business environment. After the brand name was finalized, our good friends at Michael Patrick Partners completed the corporate branding process by creating a catchy visual identity.

Congratulations to Daptiv on a successful relaunch of its company name and identity.

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We love to see press coverage of the company and product names we’ve created. We were especially excited to see Vudu, a great example of our new product naming prowess, pop up in the news over and over recently. Not only was this corporate branding and product branding project fun to work on, but the technology thrilled us.

I noticed in the Macworld article that Vudu is now the proud owner of Vudu.com. As naming specialists, we are often asked to present company names that have available exact dot-com URLs. This is no small task when naming a business, especially naming a technology start-up. A four-letter exact dot-com with a CVCV construction is nearly impossible to come across these days. We have no doubt that Vudu.com will be invaluable to the success of this promising technology brand.

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The business across the street from my office goes by the name “Drastic Changes”. I’m torn. On the one hand, the naming consultant in me sees the name and says, “Ouch.” It’s a hair salon, not a psychotherapy office. Naming companies are supposed to help folks avoid mistakes like that. Of course, most hair salons don’t often engage naming companies to create the perfect name.
On the other hand, the handbook of corporate branding says to be distinctive: “Differentiate or die!” (Again, it’s not like most hair salons are reading the latest corporate branding handbooks before they launch.)
Which is more important: a company name that stands out or a company name that has only positive connotations?

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Hey everyone:

In case you didn’t see it, C’elle has LAUNCHED. For those of you not on the cutting edge of science, C’elle is a way for women to preserve vital stem cells through their menstrual blood. It’s an absolutely fascinating (and potentially life saving) product that Catchword recently named, and we’re completely stoked that it’s hitting the market. Though the website isn’t 100% functional yet, there’s enough there to educate you on the product, the service, the pricing, etc.

So why the service name C’elle? Well, a few reasons. For starters, if you look really really closely (ok, you don’t have to look that hard), you’ll see the word CELL. Ah! Cell! As in stem cells. Nice. Of course you don’t have to squint to see ELLE, implying a product for women. Also nice, very appropriate, and strikes the right tone. Lastly, you may get CIEL, the French word for “sky”. And no one ever seems to tire of the wonderful associations with the blue above us: endless possibilities, beauty, wonder, timelessness, etc. You may be thinking, well, I wouldn’t likely pronounce it CIEL, I’d probably just say CELL. Well think again. Our friends at Cryo-Cell (the company who developed and is marketing the service) smartly included a video that launches when you reach the C’elle website. Voice-over makes abundantly clear what the preferred pronunciation is.

This one was immediately and universally favored by our client’s brand team. It was also one of our favorites.

Check it out!

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Under the header of product names I’ve never understood is Febreze. It’s a bit risky putting this kind of opinion out there, since P&G has done so well with its line of fabric and air fresheners. (And in fact, I almost like the idea of a grocery-aisle name that isn’t really word play, that isn’t totally logical…)

But really, why FEBreze instead of FABreze? The product’s connection to fabric is so obvious that not going with the Fab- prefix is a little like Windex being named Wandex.

What are the possible merits of Feb? Maybe the folks at P&G were trying to evoke a February breeze? Sure, there’s a shared “b” in Feb Breeze, but it’s such a chilly month. Maybreze is a nicer image.

Then there’s febrile and febricity — having a fever — but I’m pretty sure they weren’t going for that, either.

Febreze actually sort of takes me to pharmaceutical naming, where you might alter a vowel to avoid overpromising. (For example, Rogaine, the hair-growth treatment, is marketed as Regaine outside the U.S.) In this case, fab- might be construed as fabulous, and frowned upon by the FDA. If we were talking about an ingestible drug. Which we’re not.

So maybe it all comes down to trademark, and the need to avoid the product name Fab (the laundry detergent). That makes sense, except we namers usually try to avoid TM conflicts in a less indirect, obtuse, confusing, mystifying way.

I’m just sayin’.

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There is yet another article on baby naming called “What’s in a Name?“, by Sam Kean, at the NY Times this week (get the PDF here) - honestly, every other naming article has this title, so editors, THINK OF A NEW ONE, PLEASE. It cites work done by two members of the American Name Society (of which I am a proud member), Alleen and Don Nilsen, around the use of traditional boys’ names for girls and the subsequent drop in use for boys. Here’s a quick take on “unisex” names:

Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., has studied people’s blink reactions to unisex names. Take Casey. People classify male Caseys as more feminine than Johns or Jacobs and female Caseys as more masculine than Sarahs or Susans. That’s not all bad: masculine names are often associated with success, for instance, which might explain why parents historically chose androgynous names for girls. As for boys, Mehrabian says that today “some traditionally feminine characteristics may be seen as desirable in men, like caring and giving.” Given the desirability of those traits, at least for some, parents may be less shy about naming a boy Brooke, Taylor or Morgan than in previous decades, when the “feminine” connotations of those names might have come at a social cost — the potential loss of status, jobs or friends.

You know what? I don’t think so. I think that as soon as a “boy” name gets used for even a small minority of girls, it will become like unto death for a boy to have it. (In the US, anyway; I’m still amazed that there are men called Vyvyan, Hillary, and Evelyn in the UK.) This is because, for the majority of men, being confused with a woman is the worst thing that can happen. Ever. Women with “successful” (i.e., male) traits = good, while men with “other” (i.e., female) traits = bad. Are there truly unisex names, ones used equally as often for boys as for girls, in the same cultural context? I wonder.

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I saw a commercial on TV for this new product the other night:

VERAMYST works on a whole range of chemicals that lead to your allergy symptoms.*

*The way VERAMYST works is not fully understood.

Say what?

Although I like this pharma product name - vera connotes truth, reliability, effectiveness - the fact that the FDA has approved a prescription drug that works by magic is disturbing. I suppose I can believe that it’s non-lethal, having been through clinical trials, but I don’t think I would take a drug whose mechanism “is not fully understood”. But that’s just me.

The marketing tagline on the Veramyst site is “The Power of One”, because presumably the mysterious action of Veramyst is effective against many different types of allergens. I think they should change the tagline to “It really works - but we don’t know how!”

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Somehow I missed the news in July that Dell introduced another new brand name for its computers - Vostro. This line of computers is aimed at “the smallest businesses”, which I guess means 0-1 employees, since 1-25 (or even 1-50) is usually considered SMB. At the launch, Dell explained the name thusly:

Vostro means yours in Latin and Dell says the new brand is a milestone for the company, because it involves the company restructuring itself with a new division focussed on small businesses.

While Googling it, I noticed that “vostro” is sometimes said to be Latin, sometimes Italian. That’s because it’s both! As you will remember from your introductory Linguistics class, Latin is the ancestor of the modern Romance languages, including Italian.

It’s interesting that they’ve chosen a real non-English word here, in contrast to the real English words (Latitude), coined words (Inspiron), and alphabet soup (XPS). Maybe they’re just trying to cover all the bases.

I became aware of this brand while watching Mike Rowe on the Discovery Channel; a Vostro commercial has been running pretty often. At first I thought Vostro was a new brand name for Dell’s small business service, since the TV commercials are all about service and caring and your needs and so forth. Until I went to the Dell website, I didn’t realize that actual computers were named Vostro, too.

I think the meaning of the word is spot-on, but I disagree with points made by the good folks at Strategic Name Development:

Like many Italian words, it sounds powerful and racy.

I don’t find Vostro to be particularly “racy”, although, by virtue of the two “o” vowels it does sound grounded and weighty. (I’m not a big fan of the sound symbolism stuff, but I do think there are some cultural associations with certain linguistic structures.)

Italian also has the advantage of being a phonetic language, so it’s not hard to guess how to pronounce it.

Not really. I’m still not sure whether it’s “VAH-stroh” or “VOH-stroh”. Also, the consonant cluster “-str-” will be a bitch to pronounce in most Asian languages. So, do I like it, or spike it? I guess I like it, but sadly, it does not sing to me. Maybe Mike Rowe likes it better.

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John Zuccarini is something of legend in cybersquatting history. And now he’s in the news again:

The Federal Trade Commission has fined a “typosquatter” who served adult advertisements on misspelled domains such as BobtheBiulder.com and Teltubbies.com a second time — this time for advertising mainstream products instead of adult.

John Zuccarini has agreed to give up $164,000 in revenue from typosquatting, registering domains that are misspellings of legitimate brands, he is alleged to have received, the FTC said Tuesday.

He was in the news quite a lot in the Old Days(tm), when he was snapping up domains and redirecting them to porn sites, and getting sued right, left, and center. Then he disappeared for a while. Apparently it was too difficult to run his business effectively while in prison for typosquatting and child pornography charges. (Typosquatting is illegal, did you know that?)

But you know, $164k is a drop in the bucket to him:

Although Zuccarini forfeited $164,000 in his recent settlement, in the 2003 criminal complaint the U.S. Justice Department said that he had been making as much as $1 million per year from his adult-oriented activities.

It raises some interesting questions of whether there should be “public spaces” on the internet that no one can own, and the ethics of registering domains merely to collect money from ad clickthroughs.
Once upon a time, Catchword had registered zuccarini.info. But I think we let it lapse. I wonder if it’s still available…we could put up some clickthrough ads…

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Like most new moms, buying a stroller was top on my list of baby purchases. I wanted something easy to use and most of all, safe and secure for my precious newborn. Working in NYC prior to my impending arrival, I noticed a unique stroller milling about the streets of NYC. From what I could tell, it looked like my dream stroller. However, when I found out the name, Bugaboo, it made me think twice.

“Bugaboo” encompassed everything I would least want my stroller to offer as it means “something that causes fear or worry.” Alternate definitions cite it as a synonym of a bogeyman, “an imaginary monster used to frighten children” (Source, dictionary.com). Not exactly baby-friendly sentiments. I understand that many of us may not be familiar with the term “bugaboo.” However, in my chosen profession as a “namer” I (need to) have an expansive vocabulary and I knew exactly what a “bugaboo” meant.

So what does this tell us with regards to new product naming? Sometimes the most successful names may be ones break through the clutter, that make us a little uncomfortable. For one, they end up being memorable. Second, if it’s not an ultra-common word, it may become synonymous with product. Additionally, these types of name are even more effective when some element of the name is evocative of the product itself; in this case, people may see baby “buggy” in Bugaboo. Another example of this type of name is “Fandango”, an online movie ticket site. The real meaning is a “lively Spanish dance” but people may just see “fan” and associate this with entertainment. In any case, evidently the Bugaboo name seems to work, as parents are willing to spend around $800 for one…obviously it’s not something that “causes fear or worry!”!

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