Naming and Branding Agency

Posts from: August 2005

Is that a Merkin on your shoulder or are you just happy to see me?

There is no shortage of what the…? names adorning women’s brands. Sag Harbor, as the name of a women’s clothing brand aimed at women over 35 is one of the standard bearers. But the honoree for this year’s huevos grande award was never in doubt. It goes to upscale handbag brand name Lauren Merkin. Extra points for taking a low riding word like merkin and passing it right under our noses, lightly perfumed by the preceding “Lauren”.

Seriously though, how is it that these pricey purses, which everyone refers to as “a Merkin”, can keep their cachet given the negative meaning of the word? It’s because consumers are never, ever literalists. The “negative” meaning just gives people something to remember, to talk about, to have a laugh about. It never stands in the way of sales and is great word of mouth. The “negative” is really a positive.

If more companies were focused on keeping the cash register ringing, rather than on silly personal thoughts like “ I don’t want to be on the board of Merkin, let’s not name it that”, we’d have a far bigger pool of cost effective names out there.

More on the naming principal of of negativity can be read here.

Blandor Says Blandor the Imponderable: “That name puts the cod back in my codpiece. Jouissance! I’ve been sporting this merkin on my dome for years, perhaps now the cruel taunting will be at an end. The most uniquely unique name to ooze through the pipe since this prickly chestnut was passed.

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Butterstick Panda Cub Name Contest

FONZ, the Friends of the National Zoo, are sponsoring a contest to name the baby panda known only by his nickname, Butterstick. According to Chinese tradition, the cub won’t be officially named until he’s 100 days old.

The China Wildlife Conservation Association and zoo officials selected five names to choose from, said Matt O’Lear, a spokesman for Friends of the National Zoo.

One voter will be chosen at random to receive a trip for two to Washington and what zoo officials call a “private visit” with the giant panda family, among other prizes.

The male cub, born July 9, is the first giant panda born at the National Zoo to survive more than a few weeks. The mother, Mai Xiang, and the father, Tian Tian, are on a 10-year loan from China. The cub will be sent to China when it is 2.

Voting on the zoo’s Web site runs through Sept. 30. The winning name will be announced in October.

The choices:

* Hua Sheng (hwah-’SHUNG), which means “China Washington” and “magnificent.”

* Sheng Hua (‘SHUNG-hwah), which means “Washington China” and “magnificent.”

* Tai Shan (tie-’SHON), which means “peaceful mountain.”

* Long Shan (lohng-’SHON), which means “dragon mountain.”

* Qiang Qiang (chee-’ONG chee-’ONG), which means “strong, powerful.”

Bloggers nicknamed the cub “Butterstick” because zookeepers described him at birth as being “about the size of a stick of butter.” A “write-in campaign” was immediately organized by bloggers to get the nickname Butterstick to, well, stick. One hacker created a web-based alternative voting form that allowed bloggers to submit the name Butterstick to the web servers of the National Zoo until the webmonkeys at the zoo put an end to that exercise in democracy.

Butterstick, born through artificial insemination, now weighs more than four pounds. Check out the pandacam on the official website for the Giant Pandas, and remember to vote often.

Grim Reaper-cussions in Fernwood 2-Nite

A couple of Saturdays ago, the NY Times ran this story:

MILL VALLEY, Calif. – Tommy Odom’s remains lie on a steep wind-swept hill at Forever Fernwood, beneath an oak sapling, a piece of petrified wood and a bundle of dried sage tied with a lavender ribbon. When he died in a traffic accident last year, Mr. Odom, 41, became the first of 40 people at Fernwood cemetery to move on to greener pastures – literally. He was buried un-embalmed in a biodegradable pine coffin painted with daisies and rainbows, his soul marked by prairie grasses instead of a granite colossus.

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which “each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank,” said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall.

Finally, a chance for you to do at least one good thing before you die, almost. And most convenient for this blogger, as Forever Ferwood sits atop a hill not 300 yards from my new home. This development does, however, put a stall in my plans to have a well dug in the backyard.

The name “Forever Fernwood” is compelling, and prods us to dig into the forensic etymology of the name of pop culture blip “Fernwood 2-Night”, a television show which starred Martin Mull way back in 1978. Mr. Mull spent a good amount of time in Mill Valley and its surrounding county of Marin, in fact he starred in the film “Serial”, an adaptation of the book “The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County” As described by Wikipedia:

The Serial is divided into 52 short chapters and it chronicles the lives, loves, and relationships of a number of residents, mostly in their mid-to-late 30s and their 40s, of Marin County, a suburban, generally very affluent county directly across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. The plot revolves around Harvey and Kate Holroyd, a couple in the midst of the mid-1970s Marin lifestyle who are undergoing marital problems, although there are many other characters introduced and described throughout the novel.

There are elements of soap opera in the book, although the tone is comedic (specifically, satirical) rather than tragic. The novel describes its characters’ lifestyles, including their interest in various New Age beliefs and human potential movement groups (including est, transcendental meditation, consciousness-raising, and rebirthing); their unconventional and arguably lax child-rearing techniques; and their embrace of a number of then-current fads, such as fern bars, jogging, and organic food. The book satirizes many of the elements of a particular mid-to-late 1970s subculture, also described to some degree by author Tom Wolfe in his 1976 non-fiction essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, particularly as manifested in the lives of people then between the ages of about 30 and 45 in affluent parts of California.

Many of the characters in The Serial also speak using a particular jargon or lexicon, saying words and phrases like “flash on” (a phrasal verb meaning to “have a sudden insight about”), “Really” (to signify assent), and others.

The Serial contains a great number of specific references to actual locations (restaurants, stores, streets) in 1970s Marin County. In the original edition of the book, and in most if not all later editions, black-and-white illustrations of scenes from the novel accompany the text in many of the chapters.

So was Fernwood 2-Night named after the cemetery Forever Fernwood? You might think it too big a stretch, until deeper digging reveals this bone chip about t.v. show “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”:

…a few of the supporting cast who appeared in the series
included Martin Mull, Orson Bean, Dabney Coleman, Shelley
Berman, Shelley Fabares, Richard Hatch and Tab Hunter;
the series was first run as a syndicated series, and then
was picked up for late-night broadcast on the “CBS Late Movie”
when they ran out of movies; after Louise Lasser left the
series, the title was changed to reflect the name of the
fictional town…

aka: “Forever Fernwood”

Later, after “Forever Fernwood” ran out of steam, producer
Norman Lear extended the franchise even further by creating
creating a fictional local talk show as fodder for even more
satire, called “Fernwood 2-Night”

So there you have it. And no, we don’t have anything better to do.

Mum’s the Word

As Jerry Seinfeld might have said about menstruation on tv, “If it’s only for women, why do they call it men’s truation?”

There are a lot of words and euphemisms for it because it’s taboo to speak its name—the curse, charlie, aunt flo, my friend, and the most common word for it, period.

Fibs was the first Kotex tampon, appearing in the late 1930s, and like Wix and Fax, had no applicator; Tampax (which appeared in 1936) owned the patent for applicators.

Note the Kotex crosses, which promote a medical comfort, and are typical of Kotex boxes until the 1950s. In a sense Kotex pads started out as bandages, so perhaps the crosses are not entirely fluff.

That’s why products like Tampax and Always by Procter & Gamble are marketed as feminine protection. Myths and taboos about menstruation are now passed on to young teens by advertisements.

If a manufacturer can convince a teen to use its pad or tampon, chances are good she will continue to use that product throughout her life…The taboo nature of menstruation inhibits many women from openly discussing and comparing menstrual hygiene products, which gives manufacturers the upper hand.

That’s the genius behind this ad copy for Almost™ Premenstrual Tampons.

It’s so close. So close you can feel it. You’re almost there, which is why we make Almost.

Almost is a pre-menstrual tampon designed just for you, to help you get ready for what you know is coming. Because it is coming, and you’ve waited long enough.

Almost™ Premenstrual Tampons come in four fun “flavors”– so you can be yourself, no matter what.

Almost™ Premenstrual Tampons. Because you’re almost there. Period.

The piece is a clever parody of the new scented tampons—scratch and sniff—by P&G, and their teen website BeingGirl.

To learn the facts and the fiction about menstruation, visit The Museum of Menstruation & Women’s Health. MUM for short.

Top Ten Tips for Corporate Naming

James Archer at Strange Brand continues his adventures in business and identity, hosting this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists, a roundup of the best of the business blogosphere.

Among the Editor’s Picks this week is Igor’s insightful post “Kodak Launches Digital Photography Rebranding Campaign” that was first published on our blog-relative, Snark Hunting. Wordlab made the cut, too, with “New’s Cool” about the naming and branding of colleges.

While browsing this Carnival of the Capitalists for choice links, our regular readers might want to pause and read Archer’s post “Top Ten Tips for Corporate Naming” and the comments thread there for an ongoing discussion of our favorite topic.

Flying Spaghetti Monster

Pastafarians at veganza.org want the Kansas State Board of Education to teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism as one of the theories of Intelligent Design. But it’s unclear which of the various doctrines of this new religion would appeal to the good taste of the Kansas community.

There is a branch of FSM calling itself the Reformed Church of Alfredo, which anoints its members with various sauces according to the appropriate holy day. Alfredans believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a nemesis called the Baked Ziti Beast, which takes all that is good and noodly and turns it into a sordid, dry, casserole-like affair. Alfredans are taught to avoid ziti and its relatives penne and mostaccoli in all their forms.

Tom Cruise has not weighed in.

Kodak launches digital photography re-branding campaign

Kodak’s hometown newspaper, The Democrat & Chronicle, reports a long overdue case of photosynthesis:

…The company today will let loose a torrent of advertising — online, in movie theaters, in print, on television and outdoor billboards — designed to establish Kodak’s credentials as a high-tech innovator in the world of digital imaging…

…Kodak is now rated as the world’s 62nd most valuable brand, compared with 27th five years ago. “Only dominant in a film business that shrinks every year,” the 2004 rankings said about Kodak.

The new campaign aims to reverse that perception by presenting Kodak as a diverse provider of state-of-the-art digital imaging products and services useful to many different industries — not only consumer photography. Establishing Kodak as a technology company is “table stakes” in the fiercely competitive world of consumer electronics, said Betty Noonan, director of brand management and marketing services at Kodak…

…At the same time, Noonan said the company knew it wanted to do no damage to the traditional attributes attached to the Kodak name — trust, quality, technological simplicity. Consumers in focus groups repeatedly told Kodak that its brand “was the kind of brand they could bring home to dinner,” Noonan said.

If only they were selling buckets of chicken…

This is all well and good, but there is a very specific strategy that Kodak needs to follow. There are basically three factors that determine digital image quality — megapixels, lens quality and the on-board image processor. Consumers first fixated on megapixels, an easy shorthand when shopping for a digital camera. The equation became “how many megapixels for how much money?”

A terrifying equation for the high-end manufacturers, it is a battle easily won by the low-end producers. Keen to shift the conversation away from megapixels, Nikon and Sony responded by talking about lens quality, Nikon talking about Nikon manufactured lenses and Sony through a co-branding effort touting their “Carl Zeiss® Vario-Tessar® lens”. Kodak needs to partner with a legacy lens crafter to break even on this one, but it’s the third leg, the image processor, that they can leverage and own.

Kodak has a rich history and extensive brand equity around the idea of image processing, they can make the connection from past to present and take possession of the one key aspect of digital photography that is up for grabs on this simple concept. The jump from image processing to branding an image processor within a camera is a small and simple one, and like lenses, it can’t easily be quantified with a simple number like megapixels. It’s the kind of fuzzy area where their brand can reign supreme.

And finally they need to abandon the positioning strategy point of “simplicity”, of being our guide in the complicated world of digital photography. That day has come and gone and the public no longer sees this realm as complicated. While the strategy worked well for AOL in the early days, as consumers became more savvy “simplicity” quickly came to mean “stripped down, unsophisticated and limiting”.

The idea of pushing simplicity and stewardship seems more a reflection of the ennui and uncertainty inside Kodak that made it late to the digital ball in the first place, rather than an accurate reading of consumer zeitgeist.

Kodak may indeed be the type of brand we’d “bring home to dinner”, but if they want the relationship to get more interesting, they need to realize that nothing is sexier than confidence.

Beyond Planet Hollywood

A recently announced discovery of the 10th planet has sparked the attention of astronomers around the world. Code-named “2003 UB313″ in accordance with the preliminary planet naming taxonomy of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a proposed new name has already been suggested by the astronomer who made the discovery.

According to New Scientist the person facing the planet-naming conundrum right now is Caltech astronomer Mike Brown. He and his team found our solar system’s tenth planet, which is larger than Pluto and currently three times farther from the Sun.

Brown’s team had been calling the planet Xena, after TV’s Warrior Princess. “But that was our tongue-in-cheek internal name, never intended for public consumption,” he admits. Perhaps his newborn daughter, Lilah, has offered further inspiration – Brown’s website on the new planet is called www.lilahsplanet.com.

New Scientist received submissions of suggested names from their readers, and here’s the top 10 names for the new planet selected by the editors.

1. Persephone (Greek) or Proserpina (Roman)

Many considered this the obvious favourite for naming the new planet, since Roman mythology has it that Pluto (or Hades, in Greek mythology) kidnapped Persephone, and made her his wife. So distraught was Persephone’s mother that her grief created winter. Very apt, since planets do not, as yet, get any colder than our most distant new addition. The only, but significant, problem with this name is that is already taken. As Brown himself points out: “Sadly, the name was used in 1895 as a name for the 399th known asteroid.”

2. Peace (or its Latin root, Pax)

In a war-torn world, and with terrorism rife, many of you want to use the new planet to send a message. Patricia Schiavone, of Montevideo, Uruguay summed it up: “I’d call it Pax because we all feel peace to be very far away, yet it reflects what most people were wishing for when this new planet was discovered.”

3. Galileo

Often referred to as the “father of modern astronomy” and credited with construction of the first astronomical telescope, Galileo was the leading suggestion for naming the new planet after a real person. Guillermo Dotto in Buenos Aires, Argentina, summed up voters’ feelings: “I would name it after Galileo, the genius who provided the means to search outer space.”

Other votes for real people included Isaac Newton, Brahms, Isaac Asimov, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, Euclid, Stephen Hawking, Mother Theresa, Copernicus, Aristotle and Arthur C Clarke.

4. Xena

Xena, after TV’s Warrior Princess, was the name Mike Brown and his team gave the planet upon first discovering it. He later said “that was our tongue-in-cheek internal name, never intended for public consumption”. Nevertheless, the mythical-sounding name caught your imagination. And, as Andrew Gregurich of Michigan, US, pointed out: “You could stick with Xena. She might not like it if you changed the name. HIYAH!”

5. Rupert

It might seem like an unlikely name for a planet, and it probably would be. But in the fourth book of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” – Mostly Harmless – author Douglas Adams describes a tenth planet around the Sun: “The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer’s parrot – there was some tediously heart-warming story attached to this – and that was all very wonderful and lovely.”

6. Bob

This name tickled many a funny bone, it seems. Raffy E, in California, US, explains his reasons for choosing it: “It’s one word, easy to pronounce, inoffensive, and imagine the jokes that’ll come out of the scientific community for years after! Also, I think Uranus needs a break, don’t you?”

7. Titan

This was another popular choice, but again has already been taken, as those of you who have been reading our Cassini: Mission to Saturn special report already know. The report contains several stories of the Cassini mission’s discoveries on Titan – a giant moon around Saturn.

8. Nibiru

Nibiru, is the name ancient Babylonians gave to a heavenly body associated with their chief deity, Marduk. According to ancient Sumerian tablets, it also referred to a mysterious Planet X – at that time undiscovered. Some voters believe that the writings have now come true. Others, like Mario De Leo of Mexico City, Mexico, just like the idea of it: “It’s easy, short, nice sounding and has a big, big story behind it.”

9. Cerberus

Cerberus is the three-headed beast that guarded the gates of Hades (the Greek underworld). Alex Ijzerman, of the Netherlands, says: “In mythology Cerberus is the guard-dog of the Greek underworld. He’s the solar system’s guard dog, you could say. Beyond it lies undiscovered country into which we are unable to pass at this moment.”

10. Loki

This Norse god of mischief is described by Wikipedia as “a master of guile and deception – not so much a figure of unmitigated badness as a kind of celestial con man”. Many readers thought this persona suited the tenth planet very well. Vern, in Massachusetts, US, agrees wholeheartedly: “Loki has similar underworld associations as Pluto but in the Norse mythology. And, because this discovery has instigated such a difficult debate about what is or is not a planet, the name of a “trickster” who causes such trouble is right on the money.”

The power of 10

Many voters liked the idea of naming the planet based its tenth position in the heavens: Decimal, Dekatos, Planet X, Decanus, Decimus, X, Decadia, Deka, Deca and even Dekatoo.

Dishan Marikar, of Victoria, Australia, suggested the name Bolero, “as it was famously used in the soundtrack for the movie 10 with Bo Derek and Dudley Moore.

And we also had several votes for the name Maradona. Curiously, our Argentinean readers all seem to agree that footballer Diego Maradona is the best number 10 that ever lived.

To those, we’d add the following excellent Wordlab names: Idego, Snark, Quark, Abnu, and Blandor. Brand managers with more money than us might want naming rights to call the planet Hollywood, Nike, Firefox, Netscape, or Explorer.

Kansas re-branding effort re-launched

The state of Kansas recently launched a campaign aimed at countering the negative image that has built up surrounding this squarest of states. The tagline “As big as you think” was meant to balance the perception of Kansas as small minded and intolerant. But the campaign failed and Kansas has finally realized they must play to their strengths.

We bring you Kansas’ new television spot, through which they hope to subtract a few degrees from their perceived latitude so it lines up more accurately with their actual attitude. Via WOW.

Oranges now! And hurry up the cakes!

From a recent column in the SF Chronicle by John Flinn, Culture shock still souvenir of Japan, comes the following excellent examples of Japanese T-shirt English, which I have made bold:

About the only place I saw English used consistently was on T-shirts worn by young people, and (as Japanophiles here are well aware) this was a weird, jabberwocky form of English. “Don’t mess with juicy,” read one shirt. “Hurry up the cakes,” read another.

After a while, I began to collect these slogans in my journal. They were, I thought, a peculiarly addictive form of poetry:

“Why waste lucky?“

“Oh my goodness. Don’t scully me.“

“Mischievous blue rabbit skunk.“

“Oranges now!“

(My guess is that if a Japanese speaker saw the kanji characters tattooed on ankles and shoulder blades all over America, he’d find them equally nonsensical.)