Dick Corp. restructuring brings new name, new owner into fold [sic]
Dick Corp., the region’s largest construction company, is planning a restructuring that will bring a new name to the family-owned firm and give a nonfamily member an ownership stake.
Instead of carrying the last name of co-chairmen David and Douglas Dick, whose family has owned Dick Corp. for more than 80 years, the firm is expected to introduce a new name, DCK Worldwide LLC, within the next few weeks, according to Nadine Lee, Dick Corp.’s marketing manager.
DCK stands for “Diversified Construction Knowledge,” according to an e-mail sent by a Dick Corp. executive to members of the local construction community. The e-mail also included an attachment with a new company logo. [entire article]
Nice spin, but “It’s a shorter Dick” would have sufficed.
Today, at the Web 2.0 Summit, Radar Networks is announcing an invitation-only beta test of its new “semantic web” application, Twine. The press release says:
Twine provides a smarter way for people to leverage and contribute to the combined brainpower of their relationships. “We call this ‘knowledge networking,’” said Radar Networks Founder and CEO Nova Spivack. “It’s the next evolution of collective intelligence on the Web. Unlike social networking and community tools, Twine is not just about who you know, it’s about what you know. Twine is the ultimate tool for gathering and sharing knowledge on the Web.”
It’s being touted as a The Start of Web 3.0 which is almost annoying enough to make me ignore it. However, Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web says “while the app isn’t ready yet for the public, I was impressed with what I saw in Nova’s demo.” He says:
The aim of Twine is to enable people to share knowledge and information. At first glance it is very much like Wikipedia, but there is a whole lot more smarts to the system. Spivack described it to me as “knowledge networking” — ie it aims to connect people with each “for a purpose”. It’s not based around socializing, but to share and organize information you’re interested in. Using Twine, you can add content via wiki functionality (there are many post types), you can email content into the system, and “collect” something (as an object, eg a book object).
Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP, an international law firm with approximately 600 attorneys in nine key markets, announced this week that the firm will now be known simply as “Thelen” for branding purposes. “It rhymes with wheelin’,” says The Wall Street Journal Law Blog.
Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner had well-laid plans to rechristen itself with the shorter and catchier “Thelen” but was held up by a Korean cybersquatter. The marketing move, which launched Monday, was threatened by the distant owner of the “thelen.com” domain name. But if there’s one thing a Web entrepreneur should know, it’s this: Don’t register a domain name of a 600-lawyer law firm and expect nothing to happen. “We did get pretty heavy-handed with him,” says Thelen partner Robert Weikert. [via Law.com]
Born in 1908 at Carnduff, Saskatchewan, Ernest Manning became the youngest cabinet minister in the British Commonwealth at the age of 26. His legendary common-sense approach to politics made him a popular favorite of the people as well as a formidable adversary in parliament.
His belief in recognizing the intelligence of the common person as well as his strong ideals of honesty, integrity and sincerity allowed him to retire undefeated, the longest serving elected leader in Canada’s history.
The Ernest C. Manning Innovation Awards program was named in honour of and under the patronage of this statesman whose own innovative ideas provided much inspiration during nearly half a century of public service.
Earlier this year, the International Herald Tribune put the spotlight on Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba.com:
“I’m a normal guy,” he said during a recent interview in Singapore. “I feel ashamed because I feel I’m stealing the contribution of my team. They made it; my job is more, ‘Let’s go do it.’”
Started in 1999, Alibaba International is now the world’s largest online business-to-business marketplace, with more than 500,000 people visiting the site every day and 2.5 million registered users from more than 200 countries. By targeting small and midsize companies, the site, for example, allows a mom-and-pop toy maker in China to sell directly to a shopkeeper in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, Alibaba China has become the largest Chinese-language business-to-business marketplace with around 14 million registered users. The privately held company does not reveal its financial data. However, Alibaba’s deals with Yahoo in 2005 — in which Yahoo took a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, while folding its own China business into Alibaba’s — valued the Chinese company at about $3 billion at the time, said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group in Shanghai.
Today, it was announced that Alibaba.com Ltd., operator of China’s largest trading Web site for companies, and its parent may raise as much as HK$10.3 billion ($1.3 billion) in a Hong Kong initial public offering that attracted investors including Yahoo! Inc., according to this Bloomberg article.
So, you might be asking, “Is this where the forty thieves come in?” alluding to the tale of The Thousand and One Nights. We’ll leave that for the financial analysts to consider. But what of the brand? Is it not counterintuitive for a trading company to choose a name that might be associated with thieves? More about that later, but first: where did Alibaba, the brand name, come from? On a company forum on the Internet, we found this discussion quoting an interview with Alibaba.com’s CEO, Jack Ma:
LH - Now Alibaba… Fancy name, catchy too! But it conjures up, at least to me, something to do with thieves, not legitimate business. Why Alibaba?
JM - One day I was in San Francisco in a coffee shop, and I was thinking Alibaba is a good name. And then a waitress came, and I said do you know about Alibaba? And she said yes. I said what do you know about Alibaba, and she said ‘Open Sesame.’ And I said yes, this is the name! Then I went onto the street and found 30 people and asked them, ‘Do you know Alilbaba’? People from India, people from Germany, people from Tokyo and China… They all knew about Alibaba. Alibaba — open sesame. Alibaba — 40 thieves. Alibaba is not a thief. Alibaba is a kind, smart business person, and he helped the village. So…easy to spell, and global know. Alibaba opens sesame for small- to medium-sized companies. We also registered the name AliMama, in case someone wants to marry us!
Alibaba is a provocation.
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.
Fortunately, consumers process these negative messages positively. As long as the name maps to one of the positioning points of the brand, consumers never take its meaning literally, and the negative aspects of the name just give it greater depth.
Nothing is more powerful than taking a word with a strong, specific connotation, grabbing a slice of it, mapping that slice to a portion of your positioning, and therefore redefining it. This naming strategy is without question the most powerful one of all.
Read more about provocative names and Igor’s theory of negativity in successful naming and branding here.
Blasting Landor’s ridiculous work used to be a burden shouldered solely by Igor, but now the mainstream media has taken up the slack. Via Design Week:
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – acquired by Unilever in 2000 – was a pioneer of faux-naif design, with its cartoon pictures of cows, clouds and daisies, smile-in-the-mind copy and child-like handwriting. Some see Innocent’s branding as an imitation of Pete & Johnny’s smoothies, which created the UK smoothie market in 1994 and adopted a Ben & Jerry’s, child-like style. Acquired by PepsiCo in 2005, the brand was renamed PJ Smoothies and relaunched with a cold, corporate look by Landor Associates, which failed to strike a chord with consumers.
Impotence is now ED and painful bladder syndrome is IC/PBS. Naming specialists brainstorm to come up with innocuous acronyms for embarrassing diseases to be associated with name brand drugs.
And then, pharmaceutical companies have to come up with memorable names for drugs their customers can associate with those syndromes, and ask their doctors if it’s right for them.
It’s the job of drug consultants to create a name that’s not already taken, won’t lead to medical mix-ups and can help cut through the marketing clutter.
What makes a good name?
“A lot of it is more art than science,” said William Trombetta, professor of pharmaceutical marketing at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. “There are certain letters that express power and control, like Z, M or P. Other letters, like S, are more passive. Depending on what the drug does, you want to give the name certain features.”
Want to sound high-tech? Go for lots of Z’s and X’s, such as Xanax, Xalatan, Zyban and Zostrix.
Want to sound poetic? Try Lyrica, Truvada and Femara.
Want to suggest what it does? Flonase is an allergy medicine that aims to stop nasal flow. Lunesta, a sleeping drug, implies “luna,” the Latin word for moon — a full night’s sleep.
Then there’s Viagra, the erectile-dysfunction drug made by Pfizer. It uses the prefix “vi” to suggest vigor and vitality. The word rhymes with Niagara, suggesting a mighty flow.
“You know exactly what Pfizer (PFE) was trying to say with that,” said Andy Valvur, senior brand strategist at Igor, a San Francisco branding company.
Drug names can suggest, but under FDA rules they can’t come right out and make medical claims. That’s why you won’t see TumorBeGone or CureAll.
For the latest thinking on naming and branding in the pharmaceutical industry, there’s Better Naming Through Chemistry by Igor.
Born in 1908 at Carnduff, Saskatchewan, Ernest Manning became the youngest cabinet minister in the British Commonwealth at the age of 26. His legendary common-sense approach to politics made him a popular favorite of the people as well as a formidable adversary in parliament.
Earlier this year, the International Herald Tribune put the 