Fritinancy

Car Names in the News

Toyota plans to sell its new Spade minivan only in Japan, but that hasn’t stopped North American automotive writers from deploring the name—a racial slur since the Reconstruction era. According to The Truth About Cars, Toyota claims that “Spade” is a portmanteau of “space” and “wide” and also the strongest suit in a deck of cards. It’s going to be difficult for native Japanese speakers to pronounce: one of my language-maven Twitter followers says it will sound something like “su pa edo.”

For more on controversial “spade” branding, see my 2006 post about Jay-Z’s endorsement of Ace of Spades Champagne.

(Via this tweet by @nameflash.)

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A tiny new electric car developed by MIT’s Media Lab has an unusual name: Hiriko. The name looks like it could be Japanese, but in fact it’s the Basque word for “urban.”

Artist’s rendering of Hiriko cars in front of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum. From Pacific Standard.

It’s a clever naming strategy for a unique car. Linguists consider Basque to be a language isolate: the only language in its family. As far as I know, this is the first time the Basque lexicon has been tapped for a car name.

According to Pacific Standard magazine, the Hiriko measures 100 inches long but folds for parking down to 60 inches. It will be sold only in fleets as a complement to city transit systems. In prototype, it was called the CityCar.

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Korean carmaker Kia is introducing a new sedan for the 2013 model year called Quoris. Autoblog sniffs:

Kia says Quoris is “derived from the English words ‘core’ and ‘quality,’” but something was clearly lost in translation here, as Quoris is not only difficult to pronounce, it is utterly meaningless. Yes, we know it follows in a long line of such car names, but we doubt this is going to be seen as one of the good ones.

Oh, come on now. “Quoris” is only slightly more difficult to pronounce than “quorum” and “chorus.” As for meaningless, can you honestly say that Quoris is worse than Tiguan? Than Yaris? Than Kia’s very own, very peculiar cee’d?

Names in the News: Lifelike

In his campaign speeches, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has been touting his business experience, especially his work as chief executive of the investment firm Bain Capital. Lately, though, that experience has come under scrutiny. Some of the attention has focused on one of Bain’s smallest and least successful investments: the Lifelike Co., which sold customized dolls that resembled their little-girl owners. The duration of Romney’s involvement in Lifelike has called into question the candidate’s claim that he began a “leave of absence” from Bain in 1999.

From the Washington Post, July 14, 2012:

Romney served on the Lifelike board from its founding in the mid-1990s until 2001, according to the former governor’s financial disclosure forms and other public records. Romney described his responsibility as a board member in his testimony in 2002 before a state panel considering a challenge to his eligibility for the ballot.

This being Life-or-Death Week at Fritinancy, I’m more interested in the name of that defunct company—forced into liquidation in 2003, according to the Wall Street Journal—than in financial arcana.

Here’s the Post’s description of Lifelike’s product:

Lifelike occupied a specialty niche in the doll business: 2-foot high replicas of actual children, fashioned using photographs supplied by parents. They sold for $150, under the brand name “My Twinn.’’

“Lifelike” is a descriptive name not just for the company but also for Romney, whose public persona has been characterized as “wooden” and “robotic.” In April, the candidate’s wife, Ann, said on a Baltimore radio show: “[I]f people think the candidate seems too stiff at times as the host suggested … we better unzip him and let the real Mitt Romney out’.” (As several commentators later noted, this was not the most felicitous of phrasings.)

Romney had personal connections to Lifelike—a college and business-school friend brought him the investment idea—but might he also have been charmed by the product name? After all, My Twinn is pretty darn close (as Romney himself would put it) to “Mitt Win.”

Back in January, New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd rubbed it in:

He has clearly brought a My Twinn on the trail — a plastic replica of a candidate who’s often described as a plastic replica: white teeth, gelled hair, windowpane shirt, Tommy Bahama jeans.

The Lifelike Co. is dead and buried, but the Lifelike name lives on in other quarters. Las Vegas has a Lifelike Hair Center that specializes in hair replacement, restoration, and retention. LifeLike Productions, in Point Reyes Station, California, is “a leading producer of state-of-the-art multimedia marketing tools”; it owns the lifelike.com domain. There’s also a Canadian Lifelike Dolls magazine, whose readers collect “reborn” dolls (also known as “living dolls” or, creepily, “unliving dolls”): vinyl dolls manufactured to look like real human babies. A 2003 book, Life Like Dolls: The Collector Doll Phenomenon and the Lives of the Women Who Love Them, was written by a man, A. F. Robertson. It devotes three pages to the My Twinn brand.

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More Life-Or-Death posts: Thanatourism, Death to Branding.

 

Names in the News: Surface

On Monday, at a shrouded-in-mystery press event in Los Angeles, Microsoft introduced a new tablet device called Surface. The device will run a version of Windows 8, the new Microsoft operating system due out this fall. It’s clearly positioned to compete with (or even prevail over) Apple’s iPad.

Image from Bloomberg Businessweek. Other colors will also be available.

The Surface has a touchscreen, but it also has a thin, detachable cover that flips down and doubles as a keyboard. And there’s a kickstand to allow easy viewing of videos. Those features alone would make me a fan.*

And the name? I like it.

I don’t loooove it, but that’s not important. Remember: a successful name is an arranged marriage, not a love match. Besides, this is Microsoft, not some perky, quirky startup. A touch of gravitas is welcome here, especially when you remember what happened when the company tried to get cute. 

Microsoft Bob, introduced in 1995 as a user-friendly interface for Windows 95 (aka Worst Windows Version Ever). Dumb name, bad product. “Imagine a whole operating system designed around Clippy, and you get the crux of Microsoft Bob,” wrote Time in a 2010 roundup of “50 Worst Inventions.”

 

“Surface” sounds smooth, elegant, and well designed. Its French roots serve it well: It could be the name of an architectural firm or a day spa. (The word literally means “above the form.”) As a noun, “Surface” draws attention to the device’s near-two-dimensionality and its glossy exterior; as a verb it suggests ascent: to surface is to come up for air. “Surface” also subtly reinforces the Windows brand: windows are all surface, all transparency.

“Surface” even incorporates “surf,” although I’m unsure whether anyone still says “surf the Internet.”**

Best of all, the name is distinctive. It doesn’t attempt to ape the Apple nomenclature (which by now is nothing if not predictable), and it sounds like a fresh beginning.

Except that it isn’t … not quite. Microsoft originally registered the Surface trademark in 2007 and used it for an LED “smart table” it developed with Samsung. The table is still around; it’s now called PixelSense.

Now, that is an uninspired name. Give me a ring, Microsoft. We’ll talk.

The Surface announcement raises another interesting question: what will be the generic term for all the new category-spanning hybrid devices in our future? In its rave review of the Surface, Buzzfeed wondered, facetiously, whether the professional version would be called a laptablet, a laptoplet, or a tabltop. (How about a tabloid?) We already have non-facetious usages of “phablet,” from “phone” and “tablet”; ABI Research defines the phablet as “larger than a smartphone but bigger than a tablet.”

Mike Pope considers the issue in a post about Surface at his Evolving English II blog:

We can reflect on the fact that while iPod has some small traction as a generic term for a digital-music player, Apple has not succeeded in making iPad, or even just pad, the generic term for this class of computer.

Related: My June 2009 post on the Microsoft search engine Bing.

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* I know I’m on the wrong side of history, but I detest those smeary touchscreens and the jabbing gestures they require. And I’ve never figured out how to hold an iPad without getting shoulder/neck/arm/wrist cramps.

** As Twitter friend Ian Preston reminded me, it’s not just surf, it’s surf ace, “suggesting browsing excellence.”

 

Names in the News: Georgi & Willow

Goodwill Industries, known for its job-training programs and bare-bones thrift stores, is trying something new: a trendy, one-of-a-kind boutique in San Anselmo (Marin County). But don’t look for a Goodwill sign on the storefront: the shop will be called Georgi & Willow.

The new store will sell men’s and women’s clothing and housewares “curated” (vogue word alert!) from other Goodwill stores in the Bay Area. A message on an interior wall will let shoppers in on the store’s connection to the parent organization.

Of course, the initials of “Georgi & Willow” are another clue. But there’s more to the name story, according to the San Anselmo-Fairfax Patch:

The boutique’s title [sic] combines the names of two fictional Marin County women. … Organizers have developed an elaborate Georgi and Willow backstory, with details including how the two characters met - they became friends at a young age and went to Sir Francis Drake High School.

The Georgi & Willow Twitter profile reveals a little more about the characters (punctuation sic):

Georgi is sophisticated, well-traveled, with a dressy personal style while Willow is a natural, practical, trail lover!

The boutique concept is new, but this isn’t Goodwill’s first foray into creative naming. Back in 2007, I wrote about William Good, a joint venture between Goodwill and Nick Graham, founder of the men’s-underwear company Joe Boxer. That collaboration—which didn’t involve brick-and-mortar stores—seems to have quietly dissolved.

The Georgi & Willow name recycles a well-worn retail and fashion trend: the “X&Y” formula. I wrote about many of those compound names—Judith & Charles, Elizabeth & James, Rag & Bone, Soia & Kyo, et al.—in a May 2010 post.

In a video on the San Anselmo-Fairfax Patch site, Georgi & Willow brand director Tim Murray tells the story behind the name. 

Georgi is the glossy, sophisticated, well-traveled, beautiful woman who, frankly, other women are a little jealous of from afar, but when they meet her she's so personal [sic] she makes them feel like they're the only person in the room and they really come to lover her. She's a real people person. She cares very much about giving people second chances, which is why she is supporting the local Goodwill chapter through George & Willow. 

Willow, on the other hand, is that very practical, earthy Marin County woman who would rather be hiking on Mount Tam [Tamalpais] and gardening than doing anything else. She has her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she doesn't wear any makeup or fingernail polish, and what she really cares about is the environment.

Hat tip: Diane Fischler.

Names in the News

In their annual meeting last week, Kraft Foods shareholders approved Mondelez as the corporate name for the company’s business. The new name, which is pronounced moan-dah-LEEZ and signifies “world of deliciousness” (or something like that), was chosen through an employee contest.

Armin Vit reviewed the logo for his Brand New blog:

It’s no secret that I don’t like hate the Kraft Foods logo — see spots 6 and 5 in 2009’s Worst list — so I was very skeptical about anything good coming out of the same company. Even more so with a weird name like Mondelez and its, like, totes ridics pronunciation. I have to say: I’m extremely surprised by how nice the new logo is. It’s bouncy, it’s flowy, it’s perfectly kerned, and it even manages to tie in to the Kraft Foods logo with those two teardrop shapes.

Teardrops … or ketchup splotches? Or the bleeding edge?

Read my original post about the Mondelez announcement.

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Microsoft has figured out what the world needs now: a new social network. Its entry into the market, So.cl, launched on May 20, while business and tech reporters were still distracted by Facebook’s IPO. The name is pronounced “social,” says Microsoft, but I can’t help reading it as “SoCal.” (The .cl domain is Chile’s country code.)

 

Microsoft makes us smile!

Anyone can join So.cl, but according to a ZDNet story the target market is students and academics. The So.cl FAQ says the network “helps you create rich stories (posts) by making it easy to assemble and share collages of web content.” The site is powered by Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. (Via Duets Blog.)

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AdFreak, the AdWeek blog, reports that a Texas-based chain, Pizza Patrón, is giving away a free large pepperoni pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish on June 5. Predictably, that got the English-was-good-enough-for-Jesus crowd all riled up. Well, let them eat Domino’s. Anyway, I was more interested in the respelling, ransom-note style, of “pizza” as “picza” in the promotion.

Yes, I know there are only four days left.

 

“Picza” is in fact how “pizza” is pronounced by many native speakers of Spanish, because it’s a more natural consonant blend in that language. And “pizza” isn’t the only example of that pre-sibilant pronunciation shift: In 2009 I wrote about a Pepsi-Cola campaign in Argentina in which “Pepsi” was changed to “Pecsi” in advertising and signage.

As for Pizza Patrón, for more than 25 years the chain has catered to the Hispanic community. The company’s slogan is “Más Pizza. Menos Dinero”—more pizza, less money—and its web content is 100 percent bilingual.

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Via the KidCrave blog, here’s a follow-up to my postlet in the May Linkfest about the latest baby-name data in the U.S.: 102 of the most unusual baby names of 2011. And by “unusual” I do mean “insane.” Five babies named “Aunesty”? Another five named “Honestii”? And six named “Onesty”? Six named “Dearria”? Five named “Peniel”? I rest my case. (Via @eponymia.)

Say Hi, Boo!

Britain’s Yell Group, which publishes Yellow Pages directories but prefers to call itself “a leading provider of digital services within the emerging local eMarketplace for consumers and SMEs”—aren’t you glad you asked?—will henceforth be known as Hibu.

 

 

The name was developed by global branding giant Landor after a five-month exploration. What does it mean? Nothing.

Here’s how the Telegraph reported the news:

Mike Pocock, chief executive, said the company needed to find a new name because it was “viewed as a dinosaur”, but admitted that hibu was “just a word” with no real meaning.

“Don’t read anything into it...It doesn’t have any pure meaning behind it,” he said. “It needed to be short, easy to pronounce and to sound edgy and innovative. It doesn’t mean a lot by itself, but if you turn the clock back, neither did Apple [sic] and Google or Yahoo!”

Or, say, Hulu.

As Yell Group, the company had a clever if vestigial linguistic connection to “Yellow.” It also had a lot of debt. It undertook the rebranding, Pocock told the Evening Standard, because “Yell had low awareness online, especially among those aged under 35.”

Hibu—the company prefers to spell it with all lower-case letters, but they aren’t the boss of me—is pronounced “high-boo.” Despite the don’t-read-anything-into-it directive, the marketing department has labored mightily to do exactly the opposite. This is from the Our New Brand page of the corporate website:

What’s the thinking behind the brand identity?
In addition to being consumer oriented and a symbol in its own right, we wanted our identity to tell a story. We have developed a new positioning for the organisation – ‘connecting communities’. Communities are built on the connections people make and people are connected at the heart of the hibu logo. The identity utilises typography with soft shouldered edges like the human body and coloured dots represent the people behind the identity, diversity, connections and conversation. By using bold lower case typography with soft edges we project a human and approachable company.

Aha—dots are people! And here I was reading it as yet another happy smiley umlaut.

UPDATE: Twitter friend Ian Preston notes that in French, hibou (ee-boo) means “owl.”

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Thanks to Benjamin Lukoff of the American Name Society email list for the tip.

All the News That's Fit to Drink

I was amused by a story in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle about Local Edition, a new “speakeasy-style bar” that opened last week in the basement of San Francisco’s Hearst Building. That basement once housed the San Francisco Examiner’s printing presses; publisher William Randolph Hearst himself lived in the 12th-floor penthouse when he wasn’t entertaining movie stars at his mansion in San Simeon.

Hearst Building, 3rd and Market streets. The 1909 façade was redesigned in 1937 by Julia Morgan. Photo source.

 

There are ironies aplenty in the Local Edition story, starting with the fact that W.R.—The Chief—was no fan of Demon Rum. Here’s a snippet from a Snopes article:

Hearst was not a drinking man. He tolerated the activity in others, but even then—only so far. Weekend visitors to his fabled castle in San Simeon quickly learned that they were allowed maybe all of two pre-dinner drinks, and that one of the fastest ways to get dumped back at the train station was to be caught boozing in the mansion, on the grounds, or even in the privacy of the individual guest houses.

Nevertheless, Hearst’s great-grandson, Steve Hearst, is an enthusiastic participant in the new venture, according to the Chronicle account:

Captivated by a concept near and dear to his heart, Steve Hearst gladly loaned artifacts from his family archives, including a 1920s projector presented by Louis B. Mayer to W.R. Hearst, who developed the world's first newsreels.

But the real rolling-in-his-grave item concerns one of the $9 cocktails on the menu. According to Serious Eats, it’s made with “reposado tequila, fresh lemon, Cocchi Americano, vanilla syrup, black pepper, and sea salt tinctures, and is shaken with a basil leaf.”

It’s called the Rosebud.

Name in the News: Oikos

Seven people were killed and three injured yesterday when a man opened fire in a classroom at Oikos University, a small Christian college in Oakland. The shooter, who was arrested a short time later in nearby Alameda, is reported to be a 43-year-old former nursing student at the college who was “upset” over his recent expulsion from the school. (Local news report here.)

The story was appalling enough—and yet also, of course, familiar enough here in the gun-totin’ US of A—to make national headlines. My own first reflex was to wonder why I, an Oakland resident, had never heard of Oikos. And then I wondered about the name.

Oikos University was founded in 2004 by a Korean minister, Jongin Kim, who continues to serve as the university’s president. It is affiliated with a Korean-American church, the Praise to God Korean Church; its website is published in English and Korean. Its sole campus is in West Oakland, across the 880 freeway from the Oakland Coliseum complex. On the “welcome” page of the school’s website, Dr. Kim writes that the school’s main goal “is to foster spiritual Christian leaders who abide by God’s intentions and to expand God’s nation through them.” The school offers degrees in biblical studies, nursing, ministry, music, and Asian medicine.

“Oikos” is neither English nor Korean; it’s a Greek word that translates to “home” or “domain.” Oikos is one of the roots of economy (literally “home management”) and ecology (“study of habitats”). But in Christian doctrine it has a different specific meaning. Dr. David Jeremiah explains it on Christianity.com:

Every Christian has a web (an oikos) of familial and social relationships. And by following its twists and turns, every Christian will encounter those who do not know the Gospel—but who need to.

Who is in your Oikos? A Greek oikos, or household, was not only a nuclear family but also relatives, close friends, and nearby servants’ families. Our oikos includes those with whom we share kinship (blood or marital ties), interests (work, recreation, community), and proximity (neighbors, coworkers). Every Christian shares some space with people who have not heard the Gospel or seen it lived out in an authentic way.

Since I’m a secular Jewish verbal-branding person, the only Oikos I knew about until yesterday was the Greek yogurt, whose website explains the name thus:

We think it’s a great name for our Greek yogurt because it reminds us of a time when people’s homes were intimately connected with nature and most foods came from household gardens and family herds.

I do know just enough about Christianity, however, to recognize that the shooting of ten students on a Christian university campus—“a slaughter,” according to the Oakland Tribune—is a sad and grisly way to begin Holy Week.

Big Companies, Bad Names

Two global companies, both in the Chicago area, announced the names of spinoff brands yesterday. That’s two opportunities to observe that it isn’t only small, underfunded startups that make bad naming decisions.

Exhibit A: Health-care company Abbott Laboratories will name its new pharmaceutical company AbbVie. According to the Abbott press release, AbbVie “is derived from a combination of Abbott and ‘vie’, which references the Latin root ‘vi’ meaning life.” Richard A. Gonzalez, who will become the chairman and CEO of the new company, explained: “The ‘vie’ calls attention to the vital work the company will continue to advance to improve the lives of people around the world.”

“Vie” and “vital”? So AbbVie must be pronounced with a long I sound in the second syllable, right? Wrong! The first sentence of the press release has a phonetic cue in brackets: “Abb-vee.”

Which leads me to repeat a general rule of naming: When you have to provide a pronunciation guide, you’re acknowledging that your name is confusing. Not a promising start for a business.

AbbVie has another liability: that pile-up of plosives consonants [see comment from @kirinqueen] in the middle of the name. It’s difficult to say “AbbVie” without stuttering—and all that occlusion suggests a slow, sputtering business.

Exhibit B: Kraft Foods, which calls itself a “global snacks powerhouse”—it’s the parent company of Oreo, Cheez Whiz, Jell-O, and many other brands—is splitting into two companies, a North American grocery foods business and a global snack foods business. This week it announced that the snack business will be called Mondelez International.

Perhaps you, like I, had this initial response: “World of lesbians?”

My second inclination was to start humming “On the Road to Mandalay.”

But no. Once again, the press release has to come to the rescue: the name, we’re informed, is to be pronounced “moan-dah-LEEZ.” Indeed, in the headline, there’s a macron—a short horizontal line—over the second E, indicating a long-vowel sound. (There’s no equivalent hint for the O in “Mon-.”) The macron appears nowhere else in the press release, nor does it appear in the many news stories about the name announcement.

Another general rule of naming: If you need diacritical marks to clarify the pronunciation of your name, it isn’t clear enough on its own. A corollary: Print and online media won’t bother to use your fancy accent marks.

I am unsurprised to learn that this name resulted from an employee contest. More than 1,000 employees around the world submitted more than 1,700 names, according to the company. (If Mondelez was the best of the bunch, I don’t want to think about the worst.*) According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the “inspiration” for Mondelez came from two submissions, one from Europe and one from North America.

A third general rule of naming: Employee contests may be good for morale, but they rarely result in effective names—unless your employees are professional name developers.

The Kraft press release provides some background:

“Monde” derives from the Latin word for “world," and “delez” is a fanciful expression of “delicious.”

(I love this comment on WSJ.com: “Mondelez Industries – Isn’t that where George Constanza claimed to work as a latex salesman?”**)

Fortunately for us consumers, “Mondelez” won’t appear on packaging: it’s a corporate name only. The grocery unit will be named Kraft Foods Group.

These aren’t the first instances of Abbott and Kraft making dubious name decisions. I recently wrote about two confusingly named (but not competing) Kraft Foods brands, Velveeta and belVita. And in 2009 I wrote about the Abbott Labs drug Humira, which the company insists is pronounced “hu-MARE-ah.”

Thanks to Deborah Schneider of the Kineo Group in Chicago for tips about both stories. Both Deborah and I are quoted in an article about the new names published in today’s Chicago Tribune.

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* UPDATE: According to Alan Brew, who blogs at Name Droppings, one of the also-rans was Tfark. That’s “Kraft” spelled backward.

** It was Vandelay.

Names in the News

Items that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks:

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HotelChatter spots a recent trend in hotel naming: single-word brands “that hardly even communicate that these are hotels where you can spend the night.” The newest example they cite is Even (which does, actually, suggest evening activity); others include Public, Edition, and Commune. “Commune”? As in, “Tonight it’s your turn to make the lentil-millet stew”? (Via Name Wire.)

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I can’t pass up another opportunity to write about Fifth Third Bancorp, the Cincinnati-based bank whose name is legendary in verbal-branding circles. (It’s the result of a long-ago merger, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still make jokes about it.) This week the bank revealed its new tagline, which exhibits a refreshing element of wit rarely seen in financial marketing: “The Curious Bank.” The bank’s chief marketing officer claimed the tagline had something to with “our DNA” (yes, it’s that old biological determinism again!), but he isn’t fooling me. “Fifth Third” is a curious name in the funny-peculiar sense, and if the people who work there are curious in the asking-better-questions sense, so much the better. In taglines, unlike in other corporate communications, a little ambiguity is a good thing.

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MATTER is a new online magazine with an unusual focus: each week it will publish a single piece of long-form journalism about science or technology. If that sounds to you like an iffy proposition in an era of tweets and sound bites, consider this: the magazine was fully funded on Kickstarter, to the tune of $75,000, in just 38 hours. As a lapsed journalist myself, I’m eager to see what the editorial team (based here in the Bay Area) will produce. I’m also enthusiastic about the name, which works—like most good names—on multiple levels: it simultaneously suggests reading material, the physical sciences, and “to be of importance.”

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Speaking of good names—and of focus—the ambitious new camera called Lytro began shipping this week. Lytro looks like no camera you’ve ever seen, and its technology is equally innovative: it allows you to focus after you’ve captured the image. (Read a New York Times Gadgetwise post that called the camera “astonishing”; see a diagram of how it works.) The name is brilliant—far better than the drearily descriptive original name, Refocus Imaging. “Lytro” suggests “light” and “nitro”—as in exploding old ideas—and the slightly tweaked spelling makes it feel revolutionary but not difficult. Even the letterforms contribute to the name’s effect: the sharp angles of the L, Y, and T are balanced by the lenslike O (subtly emphasized in the logo). Great work by Anthony Shore of Operative Words, who was hired by Sequence Branding of San Francisco to do the naming.