Fritinancy

The Whole True and Nothing But the True

“The New Look of Public Relations,” New York Times business section, April 29:

Fleishman-Hillard, which was founded in 1946 as Fleishman, Hillard & Associates, will rebrand itself this week as FleishmanHillard, with elements that include a new logo and a new slogan, “The power of true” — no relation, presumably, to “Truth well told,” the slogan of McCann Erickson Worldwide, or “Truth and design,” the slogan of MediaVest.

Well, obviously there’s no relation! Those other guys still use nouns as nouns; FleishmanHillard taps the zeitgeist by nounifying an adjective. (See Xfinity’s “The Future of Awesome,” ULTA’s “Welcome to Fabulous,” and others.)

Note, too, the evolution of the agency’s name, from the sober, legalistic “Fleishman, Hillard & Associates” to the crisply hyphenated “Fleishman-Hillard” to today’s smashedtogether FleishmanHillard. Because who has time for spaces and punctuation? Certainly not a global communications agency.

More on the new slogan from the Times story:

“ ‘True’ is the central concept we’re rebranding on, to deliver on our promises to be the trusted adviser to guide you through the maze of choices,” said Dave Senay, president and chief executive at FleishmanHillard in St. Louis, which since 1997 has been part of the Diversified Agency Services unit of the Omnicom Group, the second-largest agency holding company after WPP.

And on the rebranding:

Mr. Senay said rough patches are likely in the transition. Referring to the employees who have worked on public relations assignments at the agency, he said, “about a third are turned on by” the new vision, “about a third will go along with it and about a third will not get it.”

 

Word of the Week: Zajonc Effect

Zajonc effect: The tendency of people, after repeated exposure to an unfamiliar thing, to reverse their initial feelings of dislike or distaste and like the thing more over time. Also called the Mere Exposure effect or the Mere Zajonc effect.

The Zajonc effect is named for Robert Boleslaw Zajonc (1923-2008), a Polish-born American social psychologist who taught at the University of Michigan and Stanford University. (His last name rhymes with “science.”) His obituary in the New York Times singled out his work with “mere exposure”:

In a seminal experiment, published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1968, he showed subjects a series of random shapes in rapid succession. The shapes appeared and disappeared so quickly that it was impossible to discern that some of them were actually repeated. Nevertheless, when subjects were later asked which shapes they found most pleasing, they reliably chose the ones to which they had been exposed the most often, though they had no conscious awareness of the fact.

Familiarity, in other words, breeds a kind of affection, Professor Zajonc found. Even before he defined and named it, the effect was dear to the hearts of advertisers and other shapers of culture.

The Zajonc effect has implications for branding and naming. Bruce Tait of the Minneapolis brand consultancy Tait Subler wrote about the connection in a 2012 blog post:

Let’s say you have five potential brand positioning strategies. In an effort to make the best decision, you quantitatively test the alternative strategies. People being people, they respond most negatively to the most unfamiliar — and differentiating — concept. They respond best to the strategy they’ve seen before. The one your competitor is using already. That’s the strategy you run with because it “won” in research… and another undifferentiated brand strategy is born.

Look around at famous marketing failures and they are often the ideas that tested the best. Some of the greatest successes tested terribly because they were different. It is a frustrating  fact of marketing that the key ingredient to long-term brand success is differentiation but people are wired to respond negatively to a truly differentiating idea upon initial exposure.

(Hat tip: Anthony Shore.)

See also  “Forget About Love,” my 2010 post comparing a successful corporate name to an arranged marriage.

Other eponymous effects discussed here in previous posts: Dunning-Kruger, Streisand, Bradley, Coolidge, Martha Mitchell, Droste, Forer, Fujiwhara, McGurk, Meisner.

On the Visual Thesaurus: How 'Livery' Changed Its Spots

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at how a very old English word, livery, has changed meanings over the last 700 years. Livery comes from Latin liberare, to liberate, via French livere, and it originally meant an allowance of clothing or food provided by a master to his servants or animals.

My interest is in a much more recent definition of livery: the distinctive look of a vehicle or product. You may have noticed this usage in stories earlier this year about American Airlines’ first new visual identity in 45 years.

 

Photo from Chicago Tribune: “American Airlines Reveals New Logo, Livery”

Full access to the Visual Thesaurus story is restricted to subscribers (who also get to read all the other great content on the site). Here’s an excerpt:

Meanwhile, in general usage livery’s meaning gradually shifted to “a servant’s uniform,” on the one hand, and “the renting out of horses for a fee,” on the other. (Livery can also be an adjective – “having the flavor or texture of liver” – but that’s beside the point here.) Livery also acquired a metaphorical sense of “outward appearance,” as in the line in a Shakespearean sonnet: “Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now.”

That figurative sense is the one preserved nonfiguratively in American Airlines’ “logo and livery.” But the path from Bard to brand was neither straight nor swift. Unlike many examples of contemporary commercial jargon, it first cropped up in the Old World and took more than a century to cross the Atlantic.

Read the rest of the column.

February Linkfest

Does something called VerMints belong in your mouth? Jessica Stone Levy thinks not.

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“The meaning of love in your dictionary is wrong. The meaning of love is the Jonas Brothers”: and other reader submissions to the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary, compiled by M-W lexicographer Kory Stamper.

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Why nauseating diamond ads are here to stay. Gretchen Gavett’s article for the Harvard Business Review includes this boggling tidbit: Tiffany has had a lock on the top right corner of Page 3 in the New York Times for more than 100 years. (More on diamond marketing here.)

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When words collide: Neal Whitman considers the “neat linguistic trick” that produces the movie title A Good Day to Die Hard, the portmanteaus netiquette and spork, and the expression sweet tooth fairy.

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Designer Ben Pieratt has created a “brand in a box”—name, logo, URL, social-media accounts, website theme, and more—that he’s selling for $18,000. It’s up to the buyer to choose how to use it. The brand’s name is Hessian, which Pieratt says he chose to honor Richard Hess, an advertising art director who died in 1991. Until I learned that, I assumed it had something to do with the German mercenary soldiers who fought on the British side in the American Revolution, or possibly a type of coarse woven cloth. The domain included in Pieratt’s brand package is dot-tv, which may be a deal-breaker for potential buyers. Read more at AdFreak.

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At the New Yorker blog Culture Desk, a gallery of weird stock photography from DIS Magazine, accompanied by an interview with DIS.

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“To us, the unicorn symbolizes the never-ending quest for mastery”: a Tumblr of the absurd, pretentious, and just plain daffy things branding agencies say about themselves, from the understandably anonymous Agency Wank.

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In a similar vein: Design Jargon Bullshit, ripped from actual websites. Sample: “We designed a series of bubbles that represented both the idea of the consumer as having options and the letter ‘o’.”

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An unofficial campaign to change the Kentucky state motto from “Unbridled Spirit” to “Kentucky Kicks Ass” has more than 12,000 Facebook “likes.” “We certainly would not sanction or endorse that phraseology,” sniffed a state tourism department spokesman. Better buy the T-shirt now. (Via Patrick Cox.) (More ass news here.)

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I’m betting some of the people who admired the “So God Made a Farmer” spot for Dodge Ram that aired during the Super Bowl had never heard of Paul Harvey, the right-wing radio broadcaster (1918-2009) who provided the soundtrack. (Harvey is credited with coining “Reaganomics,” “skyjack,” and “guesstimate”; he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and opposed school busing in the 1960s, but eventually opposed the Vietnam War and supported abortion rights.) It didn’t take long for GMaF parodies to appear. Here’s God Made a Factory Farmer, God Made a Realtor, God Made a Gay Man, and God Created Transit. And here’s some background on the Dodge ad. (This just in! So God Made a Banker, via MJF.)

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I’ll wrap this up with something substantial: “102 Spectacular Nonfiction Stories from 2012,” selected by Conor Friedersdorf and presented in alphabetical order by author’s last name. Not only does the list contain a whole bunch of articles I missed last year, it includes several publications I’d never heard of, like Idle Words and Defunct. I’m looking forward to getting acquainted.

More on the UC Logo Controversy

I’m scrambling to meet multiple deadlines, so today’s post is short and a bit of a cheat. It’s a follow-up to last month’s post about the furor over the new University of California monogram (“The New UC Logo: Let There Be Haters”). I refer you to a thoughtful and important essay by Christopher Simmons, a graphic designer and principal at the San Francisco design office MINE, that was published yesterday on the AIGA website. The subtitle reveals the thesis: “How 54,000 People, the Mainstream Press, and Virtually Every Designer Got It Wrong.”

Fifty-four thousand is the number of signatures on a Change.org petition to “stop the new UC logo.”

The university caved to the pressure, and that, writes Simmons, is “disheartening”:

Design as a discipline is challenged by this notion of democracy, particularly in a viral age. We have become a culture mistrustful of expertise—in particular creative expertise. I share [UC creative director Vanessa] Correa’s fear that this cultural position stifles design, as designers increasingly lose ownership of the discourse. “If deep knowledge in these fields is weighed against the ‘likes’ and ‘tastes’ of the populace at large,” she warns, “we will create a climate that does not encourage visual or aesthetic exploration, play or inventiveness, since the new is often soundly refused.”

My own area of branding – the development of names and taglines – is similarly vulnerable to the dubious wisdom of crowds. I see it in the misplaced notion that names and taglines will somehow be strengthened by the opinions of focus groups, and in the trend toward crowdsourcing – soliciting names and taglines from well-meaning but underqualified amateurs.

I sometimes put it this way: Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but only a few are entitled to a veto.

One more quote from Simmons:

In the case of the UC rebrand, almost everyone engaged in the “critique” of the new identity—designers included—did so based on very little information. What was the brief? What challenges is the UC system facing? What is their long-term plan? What are other institutions doing? What is the assessment of the current identity? What audiences are they trying to reach? These are critical considerations that no doubt precipitated and drove the design process. But throughout this controversy, no one wrote about the strategy behind the new identity. In fact, no one wrote about the identity. Instead we fixated on one deliverable of a thoughtfully considered design process: the logo.

Thanks to Patricia Bruning for the link to Simmons’s article.

Year-End Roundup: The Names, Logos, Words, and Maps of 2012

Lots of late-breaking X-of-the-year news:

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Laura Wattenberg, astute observer of baby-naming trends, selected Blue Ivy as the Baby Name Wizard name of the year. The story of the name, she writes, is “all about the essence of intellectual property rules: invention, identity, exclusivity and control.”

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In a commentary for NPR’s “Fresh Air,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg defended “Big Data,” his choice for the 2012 word of the year: “It’s responsible for a lot of our anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us as we wander around the Web. It has even turned statistics into a sexy major.” Nunberg also talked about the political buzzwords of 2012 – right to work, entitlement, evil, and more – in a Bill Moyers Q&A.

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The Australian National Dictionary Centre’s word of the year is green-on-blue: “(used in a military context) an attack made on one’s own side by a force regarded as neutral.” It beat out qubit, fourth age, brotox, and fossil farming – none of which, I’m fairly confident, are on any US WotY lists.

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Collins Dictionary (UK) didn’t pick a single word of the year: it picked 12, from broga (yoga for men) to fiscal cliff.

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From the Wordnik blog: the best TV words of 2012, from anaphor to unwindulax, and the best language stories of 2012, from Rick Santorum’s “blah people” to the New York Times’s “offensive adjective inappropriate for family newspaper” – which wasn’t an adjective at all.

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In the New York Times, Grant Barrett’s annual roundup of the year’s notable words and expressions includes some by-now-familiar contenders – Eastwooding, 47 percent, Gangnam style – as well as some surprises, including doga (yoga with a dog), nomophobia (a Fritinancy word of the week in February), and pet shaming.

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Lynne Murphy of Separated by a Common Language picked the best American-to-British import (“wonk”) and the best UK-to-US counterpart (“bollocks”). Influencing her choice of “bollocks” was Newcastle Brown Ale’s “No Bollocks” ad campaign – used in the US but not in the UK.

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The Brand New blog identified the year’s best visual identities (logos) and the worst.

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The year in maps, from The Atlantic Cities, includes, at #5, the delightful Metrophors map of geographic X-is-the-Y-of-Z metaphors (“THE Ukraine is THE Ohio State University of European countries”). (Hat tip: Lance Knobel.)

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Coming next week: the American Dialect Society’s word-of-the-year vote. If you’re in Boston on Friday, January 5, get yourself over to the Marriott Copley Place to support your favorite words. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s a total hoot. I attended the January 2009 vote in San Francisco and wrote about it here.

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And in case you missed my earlier posts, here are my words of the year, brand names of the year, (other) names of the year, and (possibly) the name of the year.

Names of the Year 2012

The American Name Society is accepting nominations for Names of the Year, with the winners to be announced at the society’s annual meeting in Boston on January 4, 2013. Anyone can play; submit your nominations no later than January 1.

Here are my own picks in the categories established by the ANS.

 

Personal Name

Blue Ivy. The daughter of Jay-Z and Beyoncé, born January 8, was destined to make headlines because of her celebrity parents. But her unusual name – “Blue” because it’s Jay-Z’s favorite color, “Ivy” for the Roman numeral IV (maybe) – also guaranteed the spotlight. In October, Jay-Z and Beyoncé failed to get trademark protection for “Blue Ivy”: a Boston events planner had beaten them to it, in 2009.

Higgs. Scientists at CERN announced in July that they’d discovered a particle that behaves like the Higgs boson, aka the “God particle.” The particle is named for Peter Higgs, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh.

Jeremy Lin. The New York Knicks point guard had a sensational season, and his surname was turned into a string of puns, from Linsanity to Linspirational to Linderella. Ben Zimmer wrote in February about the Lin-guistics of Lin-sanity.

Kony. Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan guerrilla group, was the subject of a documentary film, Kony 2012, released in March. The film, produced by Invisible Children, Inc., went viral; it was seen by more than 100 million viewers within a week of its release. It also inspired a critical backlash. (Jen Doll includes Kony in her “2012’s Worst Words” roundup at The Atlantic Wire.)

Malala. First name of the teenage Pakistani activist who in October was shot by the Taliban for refusing to abandon her campaign for girls’ education. She is still recovering in a hospital in Britain.

Mitt. It’s possible that only the mother of 2012 Republican presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney ever called him by his legal first name. Romney was named for family friend J. Willard Marriott, founder of the hotel chain, and Milton “Mitt” Romney, a cousin of his father’s.

Trayvon. The fatal shooting of unarmed Florida teenager Trayvon Martin on February 26 inspired national protests and more than 2 million signatures on an online petition.

 

Trade Name

FiveThirtyEight. Nate Silver’s polling-aggregation blog takes its name from the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college. I gave my reasons for choosing this name (and nine other notable brand names of 2012) in my recent column for the Visual Thesaurus.

 

Place Name

Gangnam. Did anyone not see the “Gangnam Style” music video this year? The monster hit by Korean pop star PSY takes its name from Seoul’s Gangnam District. On Language Log, Ben Zimmer wrote about a “Gangnam Style” spoof that featured linguist/political critic Noam Chomsky.

Gaza. Site of eight turbulent days of fighting in November between the Israeli and Palestinian forces.

Literary Name

Grey. The eponymous protagonist of the publishing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey and its sequels. “Young entrepreneur Christian Grey” is “brilliant, beautiful, and intimidating,” with “singular erotic tastes.”  

Amy. There’s been a spate of “Amy” characters in recent novels, movies, and TV shows: The protagonist of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl. Laura Dern’s character on the HBO series “Enlightened.” The baby on NBC’s “Up All Night.” Anna Chlumsky’s character on HBO’s “Veep.” The American teenager in ABC Family’s “Secret Life of American Teenager.” Mayim Bialik’s character in CBS’s  “Big Bang Theory.” Rebel Wilson’s character (actually called Fat Amy) in the 2012 movie Pitch Perfect. “Amy” hasn’t been a top-ten baby name since the 1970s, when it was ranked #2 in the United States; I’m guessing the creators of all those Amy characters were also born in the 1970s – and grew up in a sea of Amys.

The New UC Logo: Let There Be Haters

Because I have no training or experience as a graphic designer, I prefer not to write about visual identities, aka logos, unless there’s a language angle I can cover. That’s why I’ve avoided any comment on the new University of California logo, even though (a) I’m an alumna myself (Berkeley campus) and (b) it is, as you can readily see, a pretty dramatic development.

Old and new logos via Berkeleyside.

But in the weeks since I first learned about the logo redesign, the story has become too huge to ignore. (Even James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, has weighed in.) And when I realized there was a tiny language angle after all, I decided to add my two cents.

First, some clarification from the university about how the new logo was developed and how it’s being implemented:

The University of California seal isn’t going anywhere. It will continue to grace diplomas and other official UC documents, just as it has for most of the university's long and storied history.

Jason Simon, marketing communications director at UC’s Office of the President, issued that reassurance as debate continued over a small monogram that appears on many of the university's systemwide Web pages, as well as its marketing and communication materials.

“The seal signifies the prestige and tradition of the university itself, and is a treasured part of the UC identity,” Simon said. “There has never been any plan to replace it with the monogram.”

Reassuring, right? Not so fast.

Brand Names of the Year: 2012

My new column for the Visual Thesaurus is an end-of-the-year review of the notable brand names of 2012. My top-ten list includes food brands, consumer-technology brands, a numerical brand, one of those ubiquitous -ly brands, and a back-from-the-nearly-dead toy brand. Access to this column is unrestricted, so go forth and read freely!*

Tomorrow on the blog: my words of the year for 2012. I’ll report my (non-brand) names of the year sometime next week.

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* But wouldn’t a Visual Thesaurus subscription make a swell holiday gift for your favorite linguaphile?

Word of the Week: Swank

Swank: Elegance (noun); fashionable; pretentious (adjective).

Swank has always been classified as slang. It was first documented in 1809 as a verb meaning “to behave ostentatiously, to swagger or strut”; by the middle of the 19th century it was being used as a noun meaning “ostentatious behavior.” The adjective sense – “stylish, classy, posh” – dates from 1913, but swanky in that sense dates from 1842. In the 16th century, a swanky (noun) was “an attractive young fellow.”

The OED says swank “apparently” comes from Middle Low German and Middle Low Dutch words meaning “flexible, supple, slender.” If so, it’s related to some wonderful-sounding words: swancor, swankel, svangr (Old Norse, “thin, lean”), swange (“the flank or groin”), swink (Old English “labor, toil”), and modern German schwang (“to oscillate” and also “to be in vogue”). It may also be related to Middle High German swanken, “to swing,” which would confirm its kinship with swag and swagger.

The US trademark database lists 44 live trademarks for “Swank,” including Swank Daddys (a musician), Hollywood Swank (furniture), and Baby Swank (bibs and accessories). But when I hear “swank,” this is what first comes to mind:

“A fabulous assortment of unusual cuff links…” 1955 Swank ad in the Saturday Evening Post; see it larger here.

Swank, Inc., was founded in 1897 as the Attleboro Manufacturing Company in Attleboro, Massachusetts. The company made jewelry for women only until 1908, when it added a division, Baer & Wilde, to manufacture men’s jewelry. The new division struggled until 1918, when its “Kum-a-Part” cuff button became a huge success. (Yes, Kum-a-Part. For more early-20th-century brand names with “K” spellings, see my August 2011 Visual Thesaurus column.) The company also made dog tags for World War I doughboys.

“Swank” first appeared in a 1927 ad for a men’s collar holder, “but it was almost another decade before it became the corporate name,” according to a detailed company history on FundingUniverse. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swank, Inc., as it was known by then, acquired several other companies, including Countess Mara and Prince Gardner.

 

Swank cufflink ad via Found in Mom’s Basement.

In May 2012, Swank was acquired by Randa Accessories, which owns 75 global brands and has offices in nine countries. The Swank label lives on, along with the gorgeous Art Deco wordmark, although the designs have lost a lot of their former exuberance.

Swank is also the name of a “cocktail and coffee club” in San Francisco’s swanky Pacific Heights.

And Swank is also, of course, a surname.

Read more about swanky at The Word Detective.