Eat My Words - The Kitchen Sink

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NameTag®, You’re Not It

We are always amused by our competitors when they glorify their naming processes as “proprietary” methodology and come up with mumbo jumbo voodoo jive to describe what’s behind the curtain. Sometimes all that behind the curtain is empty space.  Let us say it again:

Everyone names things the same way, but some just do it better than others.  When you can stand by your names proudly, you don’t need falderal to sell your names.

Which brings us to worldwide brand strategy, naming firm and falderal experts, NameTag® International, Inc. 

 

( who claims their names are…)                    

Here is their International mumbo jumbo voodoo jive:

“Our proprietary   Idiotics™  Ideonics™ process encompasses BrandVision™, strategic ideation, trademark assessment, brand testing and brand rollout assistance.” 

Falderal to English translation:

Our process, that is like everyone else’s, involves thinking up names, checking for conflicts,  testing it and stuff then pretend that we came up with great names (although we won’t tell you that part).  Then, in our downtime, we sit around and think up junk like Ideonics™,  BrandVision™ and:

InSight Research, which breaks down into four distinct options for your brand research needs:

·         4Sight™ provides our clients with rapid market indicators of the viability of their brand name.

·         EquiTest™ measures the brand equity of an existing name.

·         WorldTest™ serves as an international brand inference testing procedure providing a preliminary, global linguistic analysis in languages specified by the client.

·         VeriTest™ addresses global research and is designed to assist clients with name assessment and final name candidate viability

Yikes. Nothing new there.

Here is what you get with Ideonics™ et al ; Everything from Amazara to Zintrepid, with STŌK, Sorian, Aerius, Cognis and Teligen in between. 

They say:

                                                                      We   Say:

          

Eat My Words creates truly unforgettable names like Spoon Me frozen yogurt, Cake Financial,  Frigid ice cream, BackBeat ear buds and iPod clock radio we named Moondance.  We can do the same for you….and we promise never to say falderal ever again.

Palin Bailin'

Someone from Alaska, who has the same name as someone who works for the Central Committee  of the Alaskan Republican Party, has purchased the following domain names:

Palin2012.com

SarahPalin2012.com   
 
PalinForPresident.com

  

Scarier still is that the domains were purchased on August 24, 2007.

Tasty Tidbits from the past week...

Sometimes we find juicy news not worthy of a full blog post, yet too darn good to not share with you. These "Tasty Tidbits" are digestible bites of news about new names and the naming industry and what we think of them here at Eat My Words. Bon Appetit!

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Oracle announced its first hardware product this week, called Exadata.  Yawn.  Apparently, Oracle has been working on this product for three years.  However, it sounds like they started working on the name part about three days ago and grabbed something off of a whiteboard at the last minute.  We can't find a description anywhere on the Oracle website on the meaning of Exadata, but they show a picture of the product that has an "X" on it, so that makes it clear....

Also, there is a joint  HP /Oracle product that is being simultaneously released, which they are calling....wait for it......the

  HP Oracle Database Machine

Really?  Isn't that a description rather than a name?

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison refers to the products as "radical new thinking".  Maybe, but not so much for the names. 

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In the "Sure, That Will Fix the Problem" files comes this "rebranding"  news from WPP Group's MindShare:

"The agency's North American senior executives are relinquishing their formal job titles. For example, Scott Neslund, CEO of Mindshare North America, will now be identified simply as Scott Neslund, Mindshare North America, the agency said." 

In phase 2 of the job title changes to be implemented early next year,  he will be identified simply as, "The Scottmeister". 

Also, for no apparent reason, they will now be known as Mindshare, not MindShare.  In related news, they are negotiating  with the City of New York (their headquarters location) to change the city's spelling to neW yorK.

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Interesting Trademark Lawsuit of the week:  Intel is suing Intellife Travel for trademark infringement.   We are all for protection of your trademark, but come on.....

One is a small travel agency specializing in travel between North America and China and one is the world's leader in semiconductor technology.  Well, we're confused, but not in the way Intel thinks we are.

Techcrunch lays it all out for us.

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We can't help our fascination with the trainwreck of an idea, Namethis.com.  Watch later for our discussion why it cannot possibly succeed as a real business (hint: it has something to do with venture capital backers wanting an actual ROI).  If anyone wants to give us $3 million, we'll tell you how to make it really work.

In the meantime, here is the Namethis.com lame name of the week:  "Pixelouvre.com", an original name for a modern e-commerce art gallery. The company preferred a "one-word name" that "must be available as a .com".  That one sentence alone explains dreck like Pixelouvre.com. 

As anyone who knows anything about domain names knows, one-word names are all gone.  Also, emphasis on names that must be available as .com forces the production of junk names.  In any case, the explanation behind the creation of  Pixelouvre.com is:

"pixel + louvre. pixel represents the ecommerce." (a pixel is a single point in a graphic image..how does that represent e-commerce exactly?)  "louvre: an art museum that is a famous tourist attraction in Paris (Right.... Lucky it starts with an "L" or else it wouldn't have worked with pixe"l") "the domain is available" (there is a reason for that).

P.S. As of 6:00 am Pacific time on 09-26-08, Pixelouvre.com was still available, so maybe the company that bought the name doesn't want to waste another $9.99 to lock up this winner.  We were going to buy it on a lark, but decided we didn't want to face a  Pixelouvre.com  domain dispute dustup.  For free, we offer the following (domain names available) as backups:  PixelSmithsonian.com, PixelMuseumOfModernArt.com and PixelTheGetty.com.

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There's Something Rotten in Zenmark

This is a continuing series of  postings that will spotlight other naming firms.  We think our clients should have a choice, and clearly Eat My Words is not the only naming firm in business.

Next up is the self-proclaimed "Last Word in Naming", Zenmark.

Besides being the last word in naming, they are the first to apply for a patent on a naming process, or should we say a "Verbal Identity Engineering Process." 

Really.  No joke.  They did it.  Here is an excerpt from the press release: 

Zenmark Brand Engineering, Inc. announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has received and acknowledged the company's patent application filing for its invention of a unique and innovative creative development process in the area of product, service, and company naming. Zenmark's Verbal Identity Engineering (Patent Pending) process has proven to revolutionize the naming industry by applying a rigorous and repeatable methodology to the often unstructured and undisciplined process of brand name creation.

"Our engineered approach combines art with science, which is entirely new to naming," said Greg Balla, president of Zenmark. "By adding scientific scrutiny to the process of legal analysis, linguistic assessment, and market testing, it gives clients more confidence that the names they ultimately choose will be the ideal vessels for their verbal identity and the most solid infrastructure for building brand equity.

Wow.

We have a few questions:

1. Do you want a naming company to apply a rigorous and repeatable methodology to your naming project?  Does it sound even remotely creative?  We want our dentist to apply a rigorous and repeatable methodology to cleaning our teeth, but that's about it.
2. What's wrong with being unstructured and undisciplined?  We embrace it.  The best names come from non-linear thinking. 
3. Proven to revolutionize the naming industry?  According to whom?
4. "What on earth is adding scientific scrutiny to the process of legal analysis, linguistics and market testing?  Scientists are not good namers.
5. We would love to take a look at the patent application, but we can't find it in the USPTO database.  According to the Patent Office it takes 1.5 to 2.5 years to get a patent.  Zenmark applied in May 2005, so.....

This (patent pending) process is so revolutionary and unique that Zenmark warns...yes warns potential clients that:

"Zenmark’s Verbal Identity Engineering (patent pending) Process can currently be shared with you and your team only under non-disclosure.  Federal law prohibits any unbound discussion of the trade-secret details involved in the Zenmark Design Team’s unique creative development in the area of naming and branding." 

We share mints with our clients and never threaten them with federal statutes.

OK, so what does all this double-talk and folderal about engineering and scientific scrutiny get you?

The Zenmark Portfolio!

• Airave  
• Afaria
• Amicor
• Applimation
• Audistry
• Certiport
• Evoltra  (anyone else think of revolting when reading this name?)
• Explorist
• Fusic
• HipTop
• Jurni
• LifeDrive
• MassTrans
• Mobshop
• NetVein
• Print 2.0 (Nothing like immediately time-stamping a client's name.)
• RoadMate
• SabreSonic
• Suvus
• Trax
• Vistrio
• Wellbound
• XOHM  (Read our previous post about this howler which is a leading contender for the worst name of 2008)
• Zoove

So that's what a rigorous and repeatable methodology buys you.  On the other hand, if you want a name that is free-wheeling and unique like Neato home cleaning robots, Spoon Me frozen yogurt, Cake Financial, Frigid ice cream orMonkey Dunks dips for kids, give us a call.

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.