Eat My Words - The Kitchen Sink

Microsoft Not Equipped for Equipt

Microsoft's newest offering, previously code named "Albany" or rather optimistically "Valuebox" has been announced.  It is.......Equipt.  Now, Equipt is a real word, but not the common spelling.  What we find funny is that when you type "Equipt" into Microsoft Office products it gets flagged with that little red wavy line underneath it indicating it is misspelled.   

Here is the company line on the chosen name: "The name comes from the idea that the package will help customers "equip their PC with a core set of services", said Bryson Gordon, a group product manager for Microsoft Office. "It resonated well with customers in testing."  We're guessing these are the same "consumers" that thought the whole Vista thing resonated too.  What Mr. Gordon doesn't say is that once you get those core services you have to pay licensing fees for them year after year or they turn off.  In other words, Equipt rhymes with ripped, if you get our meaning

While there are worse names out there, Equipt fails several items on the SMILE & SCRATCH test and does not get our blessing, or our business.

Can your name pass The SMILE & SCRATCH Test?

The secret to powerful, unforgettable and sticky brand names is simple, "A name should make you smile, instead of scratch your head." We evaluate every name we create based on this no-brainer philosophy - and now you can too with the new Eat My Words SMILE  and SCRATCH Test^TM. Run your own product and company names through the test and see how they hold up. It's not as easy as it sounds. Most names fail because they are spelling-challenged, hard to pronounce, and meaningless to customers who don't know Latin (which is just about everyone except for Alexandra's mother). So cancel your focus groups and use this criteria any time you're trying to objectively evaluate a name. You'll instantly be able to see if you have a winning name or if you should scratch it off your list.

SMILE – the qualities of a powerful name
Simple – easy to spell, say, and understand
Meaningful – your customers instantly "get it"
Imagery – visually evocative - creates a picture in your mind
Legs – carries brand, rich wordplay, brand-extensions
Emotional – empowers, entertains, engages, enlightens

SCRATCH - scratch if it has any of these deal-breakers
Spelling-challenged - it's not spelled the way it sounds
Copycat – similar to competitor's names
Random – disconnected from the brand
Annoying – hidden meaning, forced
Tame – flat, uninspired, non-emotional, boring
Curse of Knowledge – only insiders get it
Hard-to-pronounce - not obvious, relies on punctuation

All of our names pass the test: Spoon Me, Neato, Monkey Dunks, Cake Financial, DayTipper, Dizzywood, Dash, and countless others. Do yours?

How other naming firms work: the process revealed

In a stunning admission in a recent article, Jim Singer of Namebase (the naming firm behind such gems as Any'tizers™, Tranax, and Softwin razors), revealed the company's naming process, "We sit around a table and think up good-sounding words, and then we take them apart and try to sell them to the clients afterwards with a lot of science behind it. But really we're just kind of babbling in there, and when a good one comes out, we write it down." WHAAAAAAAAAAAT? That's like saying we wait for images to show up in our toast in the morning (The Virgin Mary, President Bush, Brad Pitt) and then we run ourselves through a series of ink-blot tests ("I see a car, a butterfly, a pygmy goat!"). Then we combine the first three letters of the toast shapes with the last three letters of the object that we see in the ink blot.