According to my bio I’m a magazine junkie with a predilection for high fashion. It’s true - I love magazines, especially my wife’s fashion mags (yeah, I’ll admit it). Flipping through her recent edition of People Style Watch I noticed this curious new brand name for a lip moisturizer: Chicken Poop. That’s right - CHICKEN POOP. As intended, I was a bit taken aback. Perhaps even a little outraged. Yeah, I guess I *was* outraged because my hands were up in the air, I was talking to myself about it and I’m sure I was making some pretty ugly faces. “What are they THINKING?! Chicken Poop??!! For a MOISTURIZER??? For ANYTHING??? This IS an outrage. It’s inflammatory! I’ve got write to someone. But who?? The FDA??? Nah. My congressman?? Yeah, right. Maybe I’ll just blog about it. Who else is gonna listen?”. So you’re all I’ve got. Thanks for being there for me.

Let’s face it - as namers we’re simply unable to evaluate a name without thinking about all the conceivable associations, the potential linguistic and cultural issues, the name length and construction, how easily it’s pronounced, its appropriateness for the product, and about a 100 other naming measurements. It’s like our DNA became altered 15 years ago when we got involved in brand name development. It’s now physically impossible for us to just DIGEST A NAME. We’ve gotta really chew it up, super fine, to a paste, before sending it down our gullets. Which is fine, and to be expected I suppose; we love what we do. But sometimes you just wanna read a name as anyone else would. As any consumer would. So here goes. Chicken Poop as evaluated by Mark Skoultchi, general consumer and magazine thief:

Holy Crap!! CHICKEN POOP??!! For a MOISTURIZER??!! Why would I want to smear chicken poop on my lips??? That’s absurd. What are they thinking? Idiots. Ohhhhh, wait. It’s probably not *really* made with chicken poop, is it?. No, I bet it’s not. This is some sort of marketing gimmick, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s it. There’s some other reason why they’re calling it Chicken Poop. Probably just wanna get my attention, be a little diiiiffrent. Probably not one turd in the whole recipe. But still, Chicken Poop?? For a lip moisturizer?? Whatever the story, do I really wanna be a part of it?? Hmmm. I’m not sure. Probably not. Maybe just a stick, to see how how it works. Maybe more, I don’t know. It’s funny. My friends will laugh. Certainly something to talk about. But long term?? I don’t know. It’s kind of a joke. Can’t imagine myself ever taking it seriously. And while Kiehl’s is a whole lot harder to spell, it works really well and I’ve always liked that brand. Guess I’ll just have to see.

So there you have it folks. Straight from the general consumer’s mouth. Sounds like he’s intrigued, but I’m not sure he’s gonna develop a real loyalty to that brand. Granted - he’s just an audience of one, but my guess is that Chicken Poop never displaces any of the heavy lippers in the category. That’s not to say it won’t make Jamie Tabor Schmidt (owner) a lot of money (and by the way, Jamie, I do love tongue-in-cheek marketing, including your “Simone Chickenbone, Natural Put-Ons” slogan, as you call it), but I do wonder how much traction the brand will have over time. And perhaps that’s just fine with Jamie. As she indicates on her website, www.ilovechickenpoop.com, she has 7 new products in the making. I’m sure the new brand names will be similarly provocative. Turkey Flem Hair Paste anyone??

Posted in Advertising, Brand Naming, Branding, Fun stuff | 1 Comment

Saw a commercial for this contraceptive the other night. Actually really like the name. Marketed by Berlex Labs, Yaz is sort of a follow-up to the company’s already successful Yasmin oral contraceptive. I think Yaz has less estrogen in it than Yasmin, and Berlex claims it can treat emotional and physical premenstrual symptoms, and even improve moderate acne! Nice. Improve your skin - Improve your sex life – Time to protect yourself! Well done guys.

So the brand name. Yeah, I like it. Especially for a pharmaceutical brand name. It seems at least some of the branding folk in women’s healthcare kinda “get it”. Yasmin, Seasonale, Alesse, Mircette, Cyclessa – all relatively appealing brand names. And now Yaz, which, in my opinion, raises the bar even higher. For starters, how many pharmaceutical brand names have only three letters? And how many are as easily pronounced as “Yaz”?? I also love that the brand name has energy, emotion and personality, which is very consistent with the product’s marketing. Heck, I’m screaming the name and I don’t even see an exclamation point next to it! Lastly, it smartly alludes to “Yasmin”, and implies a relationship between the two products and the company that develops them. A shorter name for a lower estrogen product with the same progestin (drsp, or drospirenone). Makes at least some sense to this naming consultant.

So I like the name. I just wish they would have put a little more thought and consideration into the COPY. My goodness people, who’s doing your writing for you?? Having just touted the brand name I have no qualms about including the following piece of dreck pulled from the Yaz website:

One of the great things about being a woman is that you’ve got so many options, and the power to make your own decisions about them. You decide who you’ll hang out with, how you’ll spend your free time, what job you’ll take. This includes birth control options, too.

Huh? When did women get the power to make their own decisions?? Is someone pulling my leg?? And wait, don’t I, as a man, also have that right? Did I lose that right?? I’m pretty sure I can still hang out with who I want, though I’ll admit my kids pretty much do monopolize my free time, so I guess I don’t have much choice there. But still, I’m pretty sure the right to make your own decisions is a right shared by both men and women. Nothing exclusive about that right, RIGHT?

So good name guys! Poor copy, but good name!!

Posted in Advertising, Brand Naming, Branding | No Comments

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!”

Posted in Advertising, In-the-News, Product Naming | No Comments

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.

Posted in Advertising, In-the-News, Product Naming | No Comments

EachDay.com has done a great job compiling the Web 2.0 companies who use the speech bubble in their logos. Trevor Elliott asserts that the speech bubble is now so overused, much like the “iBlank” naming convention, that companies need to stop using it in their graphic identity. As much as I love a few of the bubble logos, I don’t think I realized the extent to which they have been used by the Web 2.0 crowd. So, I have to agree with Trevor here: Stop with the bubbles and stop the insanity!

Posted in Advertising, Company Naming, Fun stuff | No Comments

Did anyone else catch Stuart Elliott’s piece in yesterday’s NYT on TIAA-CREF promoting their .org status as a differentiator? I guess now that saying “.com” is assumed, those people with something else to say might as well try to capture the moment. We naming consultants were not so impressed.

They overlooked the fact that .org is not strictly regulated to include only not-for-profit companies. Unlike the .edu suffix, which is carefully monitored to ensure that only secondary, accredited schools can register domains using the suffix, .org is open to anyone. In fact, many companies register the .com AND the .org (including TIAA-CREF) whether they are for-profit or not, merely as a defense against someone else registering the domain for some other use.

I think it would be a great step forward for the powers that be to consider limiting .org registrations to non-profits (the same way the .edu domain names are regulated). TIAA-CREF’s strategy would be more defensible, and more radical, in that context. And the rest of the non-profit community would find name development much easier.

Posted in Advertising, Branding, Company Naming, Domain names, In-the-News | 1 Comment

I heard an ad on the radio yesterday for AM/PM mini-mart. The purpose of the spot was to push junk food in mass quantity. Super-sized sugar drinks with extra-large bags of cholesterol and carbohydrate bombs. And it was all summed up by their new tag-line: Too much good stuff. Puh-leeze.

Did the folks at AM/PM miss the memo? Obesity is the new plague. Diabetes the new pox. It’s one thing to sell the food — all convenience stores do that, and will likely continue to do that until every one of their customers drops dead. But the tag-line is just plain dumb. It calls attention to the problem, and then gives it the snub.

The folks at AM/PM don’t need a tag-line that suggests they are doing the world a favor by selling this junk, but I think they could have done better than this. I know a great naming company that would love to help…

Posted in Advertising, Branding, Language use | No Comments

As seen in CIO magazine: The Most Annoying Workplace Clichés

We hear these phrases all the time. They used to have meaning, but now they’re shorthand for “I read some books about business that I got from Amazon. I am one of the business people.”

As professional word people, we’d just like to say: Please stop. If you’d use regular English, we’d all be so much happier!

15 MOST ANNOYING CLICHES
As identified by the Accountemps survey of 150 senior executives

1. At the end of the day
2. Solution
3. Thinking outside the box
4. Synergy
5. Paradigm
6. Metrics
7. Take it offline
8. Redeployed people
9. Core Competency
10. Win-win
11. Value-added
12. Get on the same page
13. Customer-centric
14. Generation X
15. Alignment

Posted in Advertising, Fun stuff, Language use | No Comments

When I was a student at Rutgers, there was a proposal to change the name of the school’s teams, from the “Scarlet Knights” (Rutgers’ color is red) to “something more reflective of the state of New Jersey”. My suggestion, which won some kind of award in the school paper, was to change the name to “The Turnpikes”.

In that spirit, I present excerpts from the newsletter of Weird NJ magazine:

NEW JERSEY ASKS CITIZENS TO SUGGEST NEW STATE SLOGAN
“It seems New Jersey officials are trying to come up with a new, catchy slogan for our wonderful state. The NJ Division of Tourism asked all citizens of New Jersey to help them out in this quest to rid themselves of the “NJ and You: Perfect Together” slogan that they feel is outdated, and offered a chance for everyone to throw in their two cents.

Acting Governor Richard Codey thought the genius of ordinary New Jerseyans could come up with something better than the slogan delivered by Lippincott Mercer, a New York image consultant firm that was paid $260,000 to come up with “New Jersey: We’ll win you over.”

The tourism department was ready to roll with their paid-for slogan, but Codey rejected it because he thought there was a negative connotation to the phrase.

“It reminded me of when I was single and I’d ask somebody out and she’d turn me down, and I’d say ‘Give me one day for a chance to win you over,’” said Codey at a Camden appearance in a recent Star-Ledger article.

The public voiced some strong sentiments about the state as soon as this new slogan search was announced. It also voiced disapproval at the state for paying such a big amount of money to a marketing firm (from New York, no less) to come up with such a lackluster slogan.”
 

Many people have posted suggestions at the Weird NJ message board. Here are some of my favorites.

New Jersey…More than a Turnpike.

First in war…and first in pizza.

New Jersey. You’ve arrived. Now get the Hell out of here and go back where you came from!

New Jersey - Within Pissing Distance of New York

New Jersey - You’ve seen it, now go the hell home.

New Jersey. At least we’re not Delaware.

Welcome to New Jersey. What’s that smell?

New Jersey- What The Hell You Lookin’ At?

New Jersey: You want a slogan, I’ve got your slogan right here.

Posted in Advertising, Fun stuff, In-the-News | No Comments

The city of Atlanta is giving itself a name refresh. They’re new moniker: ATL. It all started with rap artist Outkast singing about “cruising in the A-T-L” in one of his songs. The Brand Atlanta Committee decided that with the pop culture reference and the airport designator also being ATL, it made perfect sense to use the letters to give a new “fresh” face to the capital of Georgia.

The notable examples of successful city abbreviations include: SF, LA, NY or NYC, NOLA, and potentially DFW (although it’s really a metro area). In each of these cases, each letter abbreviates a word: Los Angeles (LA), New York City (NYC), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW), etc. Each of these abbreviation is an intuitive replacement, and also shorter and easier to say than the original.

The two notable examples of marketing-inspired initialisms are FLA (Florida), and ATL (Atlanta). In neither of these cases is the abbreviation intuitive — they don’t shorten three longer words. Nor are the abbreviations shorter or easier to say than their original counterparts. Because of this, I find it unlikely that people will actually add FLA and ATL to their vernacular.

However, far be it from me to be able to predict the wacky world of initialisms. If FLA and ATL are the beginning of a trend, here are a few other abbreviations that cities might consider exploring:

ALBU (pronounced al-boo) - Albuquerque, NM
CGO - Chicago, IL
ELP (pronounced like ‘help’, without the ‘h’) - El Paso, TX
MPH - Memphis, TN
MIMI (pronounced mee-mee) - Miami, FL
VEG (pronounced vedge) - Las Vegas, NV
LULU (pronounced loo-loo) - Honolulu, HI
and finally
W (pronounced dub or dubya!) - Washington DC

It’s an irrelevant initialism party, and everybody’s invited to abbreviate!

Posted in Advertising, Brand Naming, Fun stuff, In-the-News | No Comments