All the best names are provocations: Virgin, Yahoo, Caterpillar, Fannie Mae, Gap, Banana Republic, Crossfire, Igor. To qualify as a provocation, a name must contain what most people would call “negative messages” for the goods and services the name is to represent. Get the full scoop on the power of negativity in company names from Igor’s Theory of Negativity.
Though they have gained our utmost respect for their recent brand refurbishment, Target’s name for their in-house kid’s clothing brand is way off the mark. Waaaaaaaaay off.
We’ve been biting our tongues on this one for four years out of respect for the master retailer, but enough already. Granted, the bar is high in this category, full of names with kid appeal like New Potatoes, Gumboots, Hannah Banana, Flap Happy, Kitestrings, Oink!, Chicken Noodle, Kushies, etc. And included in the mix is Target’s “Circo“. Sound like a seller of circuitry? That may be because the same name is used by this geek catalog.
So why ruin a kid’s day with a name like Circo?. Read it and weep.
Novel graphic: If you’re in the market for graphic design, illustration, corporate ID or anything Web related, we have a juicy secret to share: Grapefruit Design. Grapefruit’s rare, uncompromising taste is cultivated by the long hot days and cool gentle nights of Eastern Romania. Theirs is a visual medium and really needs to be seen, not read about, so check it out.
Six Sigmoidoscopy, anyone? We just received a document from a document company. This document is the document. The document that documents a document company in the twisted grip of Six Sigma, the document to end all documents.
The ideology and practices of Six Sigma are marginally excusable when relegated to their initially intended use in manufacturing. But when left to wander into the remainder of the corporate corpus, and especially the marketing department, Six Sigmaism manifests itself in its true form as a cruel, aggressive, colon-ripping, artery-clogging, limb-numbing, testicle-shriveling, kitten and puppy-killing cancer. And in this case in the form of an RFP.
O.K., here are a few choice passages from “The Decline of Western Civilization,” part the last. Keep in mind, the deliverable here is a few product names, a process which should normally take no more than a couple months, not the two-year scope of this kludged-up RFP:
Do your other clients require year over year productivity?
If so, how do you define productivity?
How do you measure this productivity and what is your expectation in regard to productivity for your clients?
What are your metrics for quality, cost and delivery?
Do you benchmark these metrics against your competitors? If so, how do you rank?
Do you have these metrics available? If yes, please describe them.
What measures do you take to stay current with market trends and technology?
What volume is your agency capable of handling?
Please list your equipment and software.
Where do you store your electronic files?
What is the capacity?
Describe your back-up plan for file recovery.
How do you measure customer satisfaction? What are your results?
Describe in detail your customer satisfaction and resolution process.
What are your normal business hours?
Are you available for additional shift work for nights? Weekends? Holiday hours? At what cost?As a part of this RFP there will be a reverse auction scheduled. This will be completed after the Market Basket has been finalized. The reverse auction is only one part of the entire RFP process and does not in itself dictate preferred supplier status.
Instructions like these go on for twenty pages (!), and are prefaced by such helpful advice as, “Your proposal should be prepared simply, and provide a straightforward concise description of your abilities to satisfy the requirements of this RFP.” Isn’t it interesting that this company is unable to follow its own advice, even with the full force of Six Sigma behind them? Oh wait, perhaps that’s the problem.
Any agency that would respond to this RFP would have to be crazier than a shithouse rat. Is that really the filtering process this company wants to have in place?
For those of us who toil in a nerdly field, the presence of a maverick who stomps on the terra, chokes every bead of bile from life’s clogged ducts, and then vaporizes in a defiant, atavistic lunge, elevates us all. In the Name Game, that man was John Smart of Interbrand.
This October marks the sixth anniversary of Agent Smart’s death, and consequently the fifth anniversary of when “schwing” stopped being associated with namers. He was our Austin Powers, our Keith Richards, our Richard Branson. Most of the official record seems to have disappeared from the Web. We found only this brief account of his death:
John Smart, unarmed, shot to death on Oct. 6, 1998 when police fired at least 13 rounds into his Mercedes convertible.
That was a late model Mercedes convertible. According to published reports at the time, he was stopped in San Francisco (our fair city) for suspicion of either soliciting a prostitute or drugs or both (we have to rely on memory here). Police said that Smart tried to run them down, at which point his legend was eternalized. For a full, rollicking year afterwards, namers of every ilk had to add extra memory to their Palm Pilots just to handle the overflow from their social calendars.
But that equity has faded, and it’s time for another high-ranking naming superstar from a big San Francisco shop to go out in a blaze of glory. We’d happily volunteer, if we thought Igor would rate better than a small mention on page eight of the San Francisco Chronicle. No, it must be someone from a page one agency, an agency like Landor. Any takers? Anthony?
The sound of the beast: The unintelligible mumblings and Quixotic rantings of Igor’s managing director can be suffered-through live on Saturday, October 16 in Washington D.C. at DGUSA’s Stretch Conference, “a two-day conference for creative professionals that inspires new ways of thinking about design through an introspective look at other creative minds in architecture, product, fashion, film and more.”
For those brave souls in attendance, the payoff is the other speakers that actually have something interesting and coherent to share. Smart people like Virginia Postrel, author of The Substance of Style; Richard Boynton and Scott Thares, principals of Wink; and Brian Collins, senior vice president of the Ogilvy Brand Integration Group (BIG). As usual, DGUSA big shot Laura Des Enfants will be on hand, serving up plenty of corn dogs slathered in…well, we don’t want to think about it, err, spoil the surprise.
Volvo Rolls Over: Volvo used to own the conversation around safety in the automotive world. But in the last few years they have shifted their focus in an effort to shake their reputation of building homely vehicles. The redesigned line has been touting its newly-minted quickness and sex appeal, while relegating the safety argument to the back seat. Big mistake. They should have demonstrated the new brand qualities visually in commercials and continued to hammer home the safety conversation through the written and spoken word.
Sensing that Volvo had dropped its guard, Honda stepped into the breach and, as demonstrated on their website, has wrestled the safety conversation away from Volvo.
How bad is it? On the Volvo website, the company has inadvertently placed a navigational instruction which shows the phrase “Roll Over” next to a picture of their XC90 SUV.
UPDATE 10/25: We have made a difference! Volvo has removed the offending words “roll over” from their website. Kudos to Volvo for quickly moving to fix that egregious error and protect their brand. Now, if only we can influence the upcoming election….
