The United States of Brazil: Total Information Awareness

Terry Gilliam’s brilliant 1985 film “Brazil”, an Orwellian black comedy set in a decidedly backwards future, has never seemed more prescient.

The United States Department of Defense has proposed a new “Total Information Awareness” (TIA) initiative and corresponding “Information Awareness Office,” whose motto, “Scientia Est Potentia,” translates into the King’s English as “Knowledge is Power.” A Cato Institute analysis of what this means reads like a manual in how not to brand a new homeland security initiative if you want buy-in from a public already wary of the government trampling on its basic constitutional rights, including a great deconstruction of the Office’s new logo:

The TIA’s logo…features an edited version of the Great Seal of the United States: the 13-block pyramid (think 13 original colonies) topped by the Eye of God. The original carries the phrase (translated from Latin) “A New Order of the Ages,” reflecting a principled view of individual freedom quite alien to that of the Orwellian TIA office. The TIA’s version perverts the proud seal that originally symbolized our freedom. The “eye” is no longer God’s, but the federal government’s, surveying the entire globe in a single glance. TIA’s new slogan? “Knowledge is Power.” But whose knowledge? And power to do what?

To make this plan even scarier, the Feds have hired John Poindexter, President Reagan’s former National Security Advisor who during the Iran-Contra scandal was convicted on several counts of lying to Congress.

In Brazil, the protagonist works in the “Information Retrieval Office,” where government lackeys can pull up any and all information on every citizen. Sound familiar? And compare our Office of Information Awareness’ slogan–”Knowledge is Power”–to these like-minded gems scattered throughout Brazil:

• “Information–The Key To Prosperity”
• “Help The Ministry Of Information Help You”
• “Be Safe: Be Suspicious”
• “Loose Talk Is Noose Talk”
• “Suspicion Breeds Confidence”
• “Happiness: We’re all in it together”
• “Trust in haste, Regret at leisure”
• “Don’t suspect a friend, report him”
• “Who can you trust?”
• “Power today. Pleasure tomorrow.”

Total Information Awareness: It’s so real it’s like being in a movie.

A Senate hearing placed a spotlight on the regulatory tangle surrounding the approval process for genetically-engineered salmon. Potentially the country’s first GE animal for human consumption, the salmon have raised a host of worries among critics including the impact on the environment should they escape fish farms.

(Read More)

If only the GE Salmon project had a viral, catchy tagline….

Usually.

The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support, which, when you think about it, is impossible. The name will appear on a website, a store front, in a news article or press release, on a business card, on the product itself, in advertisements, or, at its most naked, in a conversation.

There is simply no imaginable circumstance in which a name will have to explain itself. This is fortunate, because having a descriptive name is actually a counterproductive marketing move which requires an enormous amount of effort to overcome. A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack. It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors.

The following is a list of companies in the naming and branding arena. While each of their names describes what they do, you can clearly see the heavy marketing price they pay for such a shortcut:

Brand-DNA (.com) Brand-DNA (.net) DNA Brand Mechanics Brand 2.0 Brand Doctors Brand Equity Brand Evolve Brand Fidelity Brand Institute Brand Mechanics BrandForward	Brandico Brandjuice Consulting BrandLadder BrandLink BrandLogic BrandMaverick BrandPeople Brandscope Brandslinger BrandSolutions Brandtrust
Name Development Name Sharks Namebase Nameit Namexpress Namelab Namington Naming Systems	Namerazor NameSale Namestormers Nametag Nametrade NameQuest Namix Naming Workshop
Nomen Namepharm	Nomenon Medibrand
Absolute Brand Interbrand Building Brands Real Branding	Core Brand Futurebrand The Branding Iron Spherical Branding
I.D.ENTITY	Identity 3.0
Idiom Brighter Naming Corporate Icon	Metaphor Megalonamia Wise Name
Creating New Names The Name Works	ABC Namebank The Naming Company
Ivarson Brand Vision	Strategic Name Development
The Brand Consultancy	Lexicon Branding
Independent Branding	TradingBrands
The Better Branding Company	Not Just Any Branding

There are three pieces of advice that will serve you well in avoiding a similar dilemma:

1. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: There are competitors–the idea is to distinguish yourself. Business is a competitive sport.
2. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support. This is never true for any business or product.
3. Names don’t exist in a vacuum: When judged without the context of a clear positioning platform and an intimate understanding of how names work and what they can do, the best solutions are either never considered or quickly dismissed.

For example, any one of the following intuitive concerns could have been enough to keep these powerful names from ever seeing the light of day:

Virgin Airlines

• Says “we’re new at this”
• Public wants airlines to be experienced, safe and professional
• Investors won’t take us seriously
• Religious people will be offended

Caterpillar

• Tiny, creepy-crawly bug
• Not macho enough – easy to squash
• Why not “bull” or “workhorse”?
• Destroys trees, crops, responsible for famine

Banana Republic

• Derogatory cultural slur
• You’ll be picketed by people from small, hot countries

Yahoo!

• Yahoo!! It’s Mountain Dew!
• Yoohoo! It’s a chocolate drink in a can!
• Nobody will take stock quotes and world news seriously from a bunch of “Yahoos”

Oracle

• Unscientific
• Unreliable
• Only foretold death and destruction
• Only fools put their faith in an Oracle
• Sounds like “orifice”–people will make fun of us

The Gap

• Means something is missing
• The Generation Gap is a bad thing – we want to sell clothes to all generations
• In need of repair
• Incomplete
• Negative

Stingray

• A slow, ugly, and dangerous fish–slow, ugly and dangerous are the last qualities we want to associate with our fast, powerful, sexy sports car
• The “bottom feeding fish” part isn’t helping either

Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac

• I don’t want hillbilly residents of Dogpatch handling my finances.
• They don’t sound serious, and this is about a very serious matter.

As you can well imagine, this kind of negative deconstruction is at the root of why a committee can’t agree on a non-descriptive name that has any meaning. It’s also what gave birth to the second major school of bad naming: the “unique empty vessel” that “can become whatever you want.” Here are some of the victims:

Acquient, Agilent, Alliant, Aquent, Aspirient, Aviant, Axent, Axient, Bizient, Candescent, Cendant, Cerent, Chordiant, Clarent, Comergent, Conexant, Consilient, Cotelligent, Equant, Ixtant, Livent, Luminant, Mergent, Mirant, Navigant, Naviant, Noviant, Novient, Omnient, Ravisent, Sapient, Scient, Sequant, Spirent, Taligent, Teligent, Thrivent, Versant, Versent, Viant, Vitalent and Vivient.

As with the descriptive list, these names are not part of an elegant solution, they are the seeds of a branding nightmare. This type of name is arrived at because of the lust for a domain name, consensus building and as a shortcut to trademark approval. At some point in the process marketing left the room, and nobody seemed to notice. And while they may technically be unique, it’s at the level of a snow flake in a snow bank.

The third type of name is the evocative name. These include the aforementioned Apple, Stingray, Oracle, Virgin, Yahoo etc. While everyone respects evocative naming when done well, most corporations don’t go down this road because it’s the toughest to understand and execute.

On a very fundamental level, here are the basic ingredients of the best evocative names:

Differentiate

A competitive analysis is an essential first step. How are your competitors positioning themselves? What types of names are common among them? Are they all projecting a similar attitude? Do their similarities offer you a huge opportunity to stand out from the crowd?

Apple needed to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by the other computer companies at the time who had names like IBM, NEC, DEC, ADPAC, Cincom, Dylakor, Input, Integral Systems, Sperry Rand, SAP, PSDI, Syncsort, and Tesseract.

They needed to reverse the entrenched view of computers in order to get people to use them at home. They were looking for a name that was not like a traditional computer company, and supported a Positioning Strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different.

Positioning

The next step is to carefully define your positioning. The idea is to position yourself in a way that rings true in a fresh way–that cuts through all of the noise out there. The goal is to have your audience personalize the experience of your brand, to make an emotional connection with it, and ultimately to take you in. To redefine and own the territory.

One of most important things that the best of the best brands accomplish is to be thought of as greater than the goods and services offered, to create an aspiration. Nike’s “Just Do It’ helps them rise above selling sneakers. Apple’s “Think Different” is bigger than computers. Fannie Mae’s “We’re in the American Dream Business” elevates them from mere mortgage brokers.

On a product level, Velveeta, Slinky, Mustang, Snapple, etc., are tapping into something outside of the narrow definition of what it is they do, and are allowing the consumer to make the connection, to personalize the experience. This type of active engagement created by playing off of images that everyone is already carrying around in their heads is an essential ingredient in creating a great name.

From there, a name should contain as many of the following qualities as possible. The more of them that are present, the more powerful the name:

SELF-PROPELLING

• A name that people will talk about.
• A name that works its way through the world on its own.
• A name that’s a story in itself, whether it’s at the local bar, on the job, or on CNBC.

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

• What does the name suggest?
• Does it make you feel good?
• Does it make you smile?
• Does it lock into your brain?
• Does it make you want to know more?

POETRY

• How does the name physically look and sound?
• How does it roll off the tongue?
• How much internal electricity does it have?
• How does it sound the millionth time?
• Will people remember it?

PERSONALITY

• Does the name have attitude?
• Does it exude qualities like confidence, mystery, presence, warmth, and a sense of humor?
• Is it provocative, engaging?
• Is it a tough act to follow?

DEEP WELL

• Is the name a constant source of inspiration for advertising and marketing?
• Does it have “legs”?
• Does it work on a lot of different levels?

The key is to step outside the box that the industry – any industry – has drawn for itself, and to do it in a fresh way that hits home with the audience. To accomplish this, it is necessary to think about names in this fashion:

Virgin

• Positioning: different, confident, exciting, alive human, provocative, fun. The innovative name forces people to create a separate box in their head to put it in.
• Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.

Oracle

• Positioning: different, confident, superhuman, evocative, powerful, forward thinking.
• Qualities: Self-propelling, Connects Emotionally, Personality, Deep Well.

As an exercise, go back and see how the other names deconstructed above–Apple, Caterpillar, Banana Republic, Yahoo!, Palm Pilot, The Gap, Stingray, and Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac–stand up when held to these high standards. These are the qualities that separate a potent, evocative name from a useless one that is built without a considered positioning platform, such as BlueMartini or FatBrain. Random names like these disallow audience engagement, because there are no pathways between the image and the product–there is no connection to be made.

Want more? Download our Naming Guide PDF.

[ More posts about naming a company | More posts about company naming ]

You can order yours here.

Additionally, Andy is the organizer of The Global Scavenger Hunt, a convoluted tax dodge.

Via The San Francisco Examiner:

The organizer of The Global Scavenger Hunt, a race around the world that begins in San Francisco on Friday, is tight-lipped about the countries and challenges that await 15 two-person teams raising money for charity during the three-week competition. Valvur, 53, won a similar race in 1989. He works as a branding manager in San Francisco and writes for CNN’s humor blog, Capitol Punishment.

After winning the 1989 race, why did you decide to stay involved? Who is not going to enjoy trips around the world? I also like watching people come back in and say, “Did you see? Did you go there?” when they discover something new. The thrill of discovery that you turned somebody on to something new is really cool.

How is The Global Scavenger Hunt different from “The Amazing Race”? In “The Amazing Race,” you have to get from one country to another and have to scramble to the airport. This doesn’t have that craziness — it’s pretty fast-paced, but the challenges start and end in the same city — then we all travel together to the next location.

What traits make for winners in The Global Scavenger Hunt? You got to be quick on your feet, and you have to be able to look at a town and figure out the local transportation system really quick. It’s a lot of map reading and time management.

Why did you think this race should raise money for charities instead of offering a big monetary prize to winners? Instead of ugly Americans running around the world, you’re traveling and at the same time giving a little bit back. We’ve had such a bad reputation in the world — it’s a tiny measure of repairing some of the damage.

And he has done a lot of damage.

Via the May 25, 1998, issue of Business Week:

…it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why a lot of people at Apple get paid a lot of money, because they’re supposed to be on top of these things.

It’s true, you either know what you’re doing or you don’t.

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.

Caterpillar is the most effective name in the earth-moving equipment sector precisely because it is not “Bull” or “Elephant” or “Workhorse” or anything else that is linear and obvious. Caterpillars are weak and easily squashed, yet Caterpillar is the most engaging name in its industry. And of course the word “Apple” is the antithesis of high tech, and an “Oracle” is not scientific nor reliable.

Here are some of the strong, specific negative images that were instantly overcome by powerful, provocative names:

Why the name Skin Flik? Because they are skins that change color with a flick of your finger across their surface. There was a second reason…but memory fades…

Happily, they use no power whatsoever from your portable device. It’s true. Highly reflective LCD technology.

Why no “c” in Flik? We dropped the “c” to pull it away from the time-honored “Skin Flick” and create a unique brand name. Visually it was done for balance; to make both words 4 letters and get the ki-ik bookend thing happening between the two words. And of course to make it findable instantly on Google and not be blissfully buried beneath reels of “Skin Flicks”.

Currently available for iPod Touch, coming soon for iPhone. Check out all the designs at the Improv Electronics site.

• Look for a name that paints a picture
• Make an emotional connection
• Go for stopping power. If a name can get people to pause and think for a moment – that’s as good as it gets.
• Ignore “negative” connotations

We Call It Brown, They Call It “Weekend in the Country”

In pursuit of emotional connections, some paint companies have swept aside even basic rules, including the one that said to avoid negative connotations.

Martha Stewart offers Darkening Sky and Tempest. Benjamin Moore has Stormy Sky. Pantone has Turbulence and Tornado.

“These names might be disturbing to some,” said Lee Eiseman, executive director of Pantone. “But these are things that exist in nature.”

And then there is Dead Salmon, a taupe-like color from Farrow & Ball, the English paint company. Sarah Cole, the company’s marketing director, explained that the word “dead” in Britain means matte. Has the company considered dropping the “dead” for its American audience? No, Ms. Cole said. “It’s fun, and people pick up on it.” (The company also offers Arsenic.)

Read the full article here.

Always eager to produce less, we responded. The naming guide is now available in two different lengths: soul-crushing (89 pages) and moderately-irritating (16 pages).

Either version of the naming guide can be downloaded here.

IP.com has a great free guide that you can download called “Defensive Publishing Via Technical Disclosures“.

Check it out.

And here is a great place to initiate a Patentability Search

MGM Aria, Las Vegas

Via The Las Vegas Sun:

The centerpiece of CityCenter — the Aria Resort & Casino — will open Wednesday, marking a day of grand opening celebrations for the $8.5 billion project…

…The 4,004-room resort and casino will feature more than 150,000 square feet of gaming space, a 215,000-square-foot pool area with 50 cabanas and an 80,000-square-foot spa, the largest among MGM Mirage properties.

The resort also will include 10 bars and lounges, and 16 restaurants. Aria will be home to Cirque du Soleil’s newest show, “Viva Elvis,” which takes guests on a trip through Elvis Presley’s life and music, with first performances beginning Friday.

Until Wednesday, VIPs and company executives will be testing the waters at Aria, ensuring the resort is ready for its first public guests.

Don’t fret, we weren’t invited either.

Landor’s latest for a financial company is a re-worked logo. Fiserve’s Chief Executive Jeffery Yabuki, performs the squawk of shame for the Journal Sentinel:

The new logo, which is the word fiserv. – with a period – is orange because it’s different from the common industry logo color of blue and “has a certain heat and energy to it, but not the kind of danger you perceive when you see red,” Yabuki said.

No red menace here.

Red bad. Red is color of Danger. Danger bad for financial company image.

Unless of course you can sell it to another financial client. From the bowels of the Landor site:

Landor created an identity and retail space for HSBC Direct. The use of white communicates the simplicity of the brand, while red projects a contemporary attitude.

Don’t be alarmed, it’s just HSBC Direct’s Landorian luminosity.

Full Case study

Landor founder, Walter Landor gazing inappropriately at his half-son, Blandor.

Says Blandor the Imponderable: “I fondly recall Poppy and I attending the semi-annual wisdom tooth convention. As we sat on our haunches, grooming each other and eating our sack lunch of turkey biscotti and marshmallow toast, we would randomly jump up and shout, “Wottle up the bull throttle!”. We would then travel the 3 hours home, in complete silence, until our arrival at Mandible Station.”

More on the misspent journey of Blandor’s life.

But the fine print could cause a panic: “*While supplies last”

WTF?

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a longtime proponent of deregulation, acknowledged on Friday that failures in a voluntary supervision program for Wall Street’s largest investment banks had contributed to the global financial crisis, and he abruptly shut the program down…

…Christopher Cox, the commission chairman, said he agreed that the oversight program was “fundamentally flawed from the beginning.”

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work,” he said in a statement. The program “was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, because investment banks could opt in or out of supervision voluntarily. The fact that investment bank holding companies could withdraw from this voluntary supervision at their discretion diminished the perceived mandate” of the program, and “weakened its effectiveness,” he added.

What the hell, let’s give him the “Moronic Statement of the Decade” award while we are at it, for, one more time:

“The last six months have made it abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work”.

The last six months??? How about the last fifty thousand years? Jackass.

Here’s an idea, you know that program whereby the I.R.S. may audit you? Let’s make that voluntary — you know, opt-in / opt-out, whatever works for you.

Or that annoying thingy where the cops pull you over for drunk driving? Same deal, you want out of that program? No sweat, we’ll give you a special decal for your windshield. You know, the “honor” system. Worth a try. Who knows, it could work.

“Who are these guys?” (thanks Paul, for everything)

Whoop makes it easy for every company, agency or individual to create, publish and share rich mobile content to almost every mobile device. Not just text, but pictures, videos and, well, everything imaginable for mobile entertainment, marketing, communications, commerce and social networking. With Whoop, you can share your stuff with more than 3.5 billion phones in every country on the planet.

Whoop. Everything mobile.

Did we mention we named Whoop? O.K., we are done here.

Naming and branding parody site Landor has posted an article which they claim authorship of called “How not to name“, accompanied by a photo of Anthony Shore, head of global naming at Landor. It is posted on a section of their website that they ironically named “Thinking”.

Here is an except (from point 2, paragraph 3):

This “positivity principle” explains why a scandalous name (Virgin), a slur (Banana Republic), and a small, hairy larva (Caterpillar) are perceived positively.

And here is how this thought was written five years earlier, both on the Igor website and in the Igor Naming Guide:

Unless everyone understands the positioning and the correlation between it and an evocative name, this is the type of feedback that evocative names will generate:

Virgin Airlines

• Says “we’re new at this”
• Public wants airlines to be experienced, safe and professional
• Investors won’t take us seriously
• Religious people will be offended

Caterpillar

• Tiny, creepy-crawly bug
• Not macho enough – easy to squash
• Why not “bull” or “workhorse”?
• Destroys trees, crops, responsible for famine

Banana Republic

• Derogatory cultural slur
• You’ll be picketed by people from small, hot countries

The Landor article “How Not to Name” is written in a format that states popular misconceptions and the debunks them. Here they attack the mistaken idea that focus groups are helpful in choosing company or product names (from point 6, paragraph 1):

As a rule, it’s smart to entrust strategic business decisions to someone who trades an hour of their time for $25 and a few handfuls of M&Ms.

And here is how Steve Manning, co-founder of Igor, expressed the same idea 5 years earlier in an article in Elsevier Food International :

“If you’re trusting the future of your brand to a bunch of people who are willing to give up their time for $45 and a stale sandwich, you’re in trouble.”

Was Mr. Shore of Landor aware of Mr. Maninng’s quote? Of course he was, Mr. Shore was quoted in the very same article as Mr. Manning.

The final insult comes at the end of this “Landor authored” naming article:

© 2007 Landor Associates. All rights reserved.

Reached for comment, Anthony Shore, head of global naming at Landor had this to say.

Related

It’s the Neutrogena Wave, a sex toy with plausible deniability built-in.

Here’s to wiggle room: