Fritinancy

Best New Brand Names: The TippingSprung Survey

Want to create a product name that scores with branding professionals? Then make it short, simple, and direct; ignore conventional spelling rules; and make it a real word if you can.

Those are among the conclusions of a naming survey released last month by New York branding agency TippingSprung, which asked 1,331 senior marketing and branding professionals to choose their favorite new brand names in ten categories. (The press release doesn't fully reveal the survey's methodology; it appears that respondents chose from a pre-selected list of names.) Among the marketing mavens' preferences:

• Go! - best new discount airline name. Respondents liked the Hawaiian carrier's "brevity, clarity, and direct call to action."
• Spykes - best new cocktail or spirits name (and an example of the "doctored-spelling" preference). A good name wasn't enough to save this misbegotten Anheuser-Busch malt-beverage: Shortly after the product's launch earlier this year, the company yielded to consumer pressure and issued a recall. Parent groups in particular had objected that the 99-cent bottles--which came in flavors like mango and hot chocolate--were clearly targeted at underage drinkers.
• Enjuvia - most consumer-friendly new drug name. Enjuvia, prescribed for relief of menopause symptoms, was the top pick of 25% of survey respondents; Reconcile, an anti-anxiety drug for dogs (yes, dogs), was a close second with 21.9%.

Only one "worst" showed up in the survey results: Ultraviolet Man Summer Pop, a fragrance from Paco Rabanne enhanced with some of the ripest marketing copy around: "Vitamin-filled colors, matte white, silvery metal… Summer Pop unveils a limited edition of Ultraviolet Man inspired by the energy and colors of the Pop Art movement. Absinthe, deep red, white… a festival of masculine hues."

More interesting than the multiple-choice answers are the marketers' open-ended responses to some timely naming questions:

What would you have called the Apple iPhone? Only 20 percent of respondents thought iPhone was the best solution. The others got creative with suggestions like MacBerry, AppleSeed, Cameo, and (my own favorite) Pi. Apple Pi: yum!

What name would you give the world's first truly green car? How about Jade, Leaf, or Verde? G-Machine, Footprint, or EarthShip? Or Muir, named to honor naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir?

Notably absent from the survey: Web 2.0 company names--or indeed any non-consumer brands.

Read the TippingSprung press release.

When Characters' Names Have Too Much Character

Grating, also, after a while, are [author J.K. Rowling's] names. Dickens was the master of polysyllabic mischief with nomenclature -- Chuzzlewit, Tulkinghorne, etc. -- but he knew where to draw the line. Cratchit's first name was Bob, not Casimir, or Cristoforo. Ms. Rowling's names are relentlessly clever-clever, and there's one unsubtle Dedalus Diggle too many, at least to this jaded palate. (Indeed, in all of Dickens, there is only one character whose name appears to be constructed by a heavy hand, and that is Honoria Dedlock, in "Bleak House." She would fit right into the Rowling universe.)

-- From "Generation Hex," a Wall Street Journal essay about the Harry Potter series, by Tunku Varadarajan.

Only one? What about Uriah Heep? And one-eyed Wackford Squeers?

Widgets, Gadgets, and Sporks

The always-engaging Erin McKean filled in for vacationing William Safire at the New York Times's On Language column yesterday, and let's hope she returns for many more visits. (Or even a permanent slot.) Still in her mid-thirties, McKean is chief consulting editor of American Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and editor of Verbatim: The Language Quarterly; she blogs about lexicography at Dictionary Evangelist and somehow finds time to write a second wonderful blog about sewing and clothing, A Dress a Day.

McKean's Times column was about the Oxford English Corpus, 1.8 billion-word database of written and spoken English that reveals how people actually use words in speech and writing. The example she chose to introduce the subject was particularly piquant:

Most thesaurus entries for the word “weapon” don’t include the lowly spork. The T.S.A., at last check, doesn’t include the spork on its ever-changing list of what you can and can’t carry on an airplane. The spork would appear to be the most innocuous of eating utensils, a harmless plastic makeshift, a benighted fork-spoon hybrid. However, if you look at the word spork in the Oxford English Corpus, a 1.8-billion-word database of written and spoken English, and see how people actually write and talk about sporks, you find that 24 percent of the uses of the word spork involve violence. (In fact, some of the most common things to be sporked, far ahead of coleslaw, are eyeballs.)

Ordinary civilians can access the corpus; for more information go to http://askoxford.com/oec.

Meanwhile, over at Dictionary Evangelist, McKean offers another "gee-whiz corpus bit" that didn't make it into the column:

[T]he words widget and gadget are often considered synonyms, but they have different usage patterns in the OEC: you sell, produce, make, and create widgets, but you buy, use, and have gadgets. What that says to me is that when it's at the factory, it's a widget, but when you pick it up off the shelf at the store, it magically turns into a gadget.

Word of the Week: Décolletage

Décolletage: A low neckline on a woman's dress. A French import, the word is pronounced approximately day-cole-TAZH. Note that décolletage is always a noun, while the related décolleté  (day-cole-TAY), meaning "low-cut at the neckline," is an adjective: "A décolleté dress." The literal meaning is "uncovered at the neck."

Both words were in the headlines recently after Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wore a moderately low-cut black top beneath a pink jacket while speaking on the Senate floor July 18 about the cost of higher education. Sharp-eyed Robin Givhan, the Washington Post's fashion writer, was the first to comment: "There was cleavage on display Wednesday afternoon on C-SPAN2," Givhan wrote on July 20 (free registration required). "It belonged to Sen. Hillary Clinton." Givhan called the display "a small acknowledgment of femininity and sexuality." (Judge for yourselves.)

Six days later, Clinton's campaign mailed a fundraising letter saying Givhan's column was "grossly inappropriate."

This has proved to be a story with remarkable legs, so to speak. It was still on the op-ed page on July 28, when New York Times guest columnist Judith Warner wrote, in "The Cleavage Conundrum" (restricted to subscribers):

I’d always thought that, when you reached a certain age or a certain stage in life, you sort of bought your way out of the sexual rat race. You could be a “person of cleavage,” to borrow a Pulitzer-worthy phrase from Ruth Marcus, a Post columnist, but you could nonetheless make it through your day without having to give the matter much thought.

In other news of (a) political fashion, the blog Radar reported on Republican presidential candidate John McCain's supposed "gay sweaters." And Manolo the Shoeblogger scolded maverick Republican Ron Paul for his "disgraceful" footwear.

New Name Beat: 23andMe

If you're a sports fan or a celebrity watcher, you can be forgiven for expecting 23andMe to be a fan site about soccer megastar David Beckham. (He wears jersey #23 for his new team, the Los Angeles Galaxy.)

But 23andMe is something else entirely: the rare company that can speak with authority about its corporate DNA. For about $1,000, this new biotech startup will search your genome and create your personal genetic profile.* It takes its name from the 23 pairs of chromosomes in every human cell--and from its "genetics is about to get personal" assertion.

Perhaps you're wondering why the company isn't named 46andMe. Keep reading.

There's a lot of high-quality DNA in 23andMe's executive team. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-skee), a former health care analyst, married Google co-founder Sergey Brin in May in a secret ceremony on a private island in the Caribbean. The Brin-Wojcicki hookup had a genetic component of its own: the pair were introduced by Wojcicki's sister, now a Google vice president, who sublet her garage to Brin and his business partner, Larry Page, when they were starting Google. (Wojcicki's mother has also worked for Google, as a consultant.) Google has invested $3.9 million in 23andMe--pocket change for Brin and Page, but a big boost for the new company.

23andMe is an interesting name for a number of reasons. Let's start with the most salient: It's distinctive. Unlike a lot of new business names, it's not a meaningless coined word with some superfluous vowels (Orgoo, Squidoo, Meebo, etc.). It doesn't go steroidal with the overused -ster suffix (Friendster, Talkster, Dogster, Napster) or coyly drop a vowel (Flickr, Shifd, Wrickr, Pluggd). It doesn't have the contorted, constructed quality of many genomics firms: BioGenix, Cytomix, DigiGenomics, Xencor, Hypromatrix. Finally, it bucks the dominant "shorter is better" philosophy and dares to be five syllables long, although with only seven characters it appears shorter than it sounds.

23andMe is not alone among recent startups in using a numeral as part of its name. But it uses the number more cannily than most. Names such as 37Signals, 83 Degrees, and Core77 are mysterious to the point of meaninglessness, while 30Boxes (a calendar site), 411Metro, and Compass360--to take just three examples--are transparently obvious.

23andMe's name, however, is justifiable yet slightly enigmatic. The 23 "story" makes sense and reinforces the serious science behind the endeavor. Meanwhile, the rhyme between "three" and "me" adds a touch of lyrical whimsy while acting as a mnemonic device.

The more I thought about this name, the more it appealed to me. There was something about the number 23--something I couldn't quite identify--that made the name stand out. So I did some research and discovered that "23" is a number with a lot of stories to tell.

• Twenty-three is, of course, a prime number, divisible only by itself and by 1.
• It's the smallest prime number that isn't a twin prime.
• According to Wikipedia, "Twenty-three is also the fifth factorial prime, the second Woodall prime, and the second Smarandache-Wellin prime. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1."
• Avogadro's number, used in chemistry, is 6.0221367×10²³.
• In Biblical Palestine, the Sanhedrin had 23 judges.
• In the absurdist, chaos-centered religion called Discordianism (sometimes called "Zen for roundeyes"), all events are connected to the number 23. The digits of "23" add up to 5, which also has special properties to Discordians. (There seems to be a strong whiff of selection bias in these claims.)
• In the 2007 film The Number 23, starring Jim Carrey, a man's life unravels after he reads a book titled "The Number 23."
• Twenty-three was basketball star Michael Jordan's number when he played for the Chicago Bulls. It has since been retired.
• According to an information-sharing company called simply 23--not as effective a name, in my opinion, as 23andMe--you need at least 23 people in a room for there to be a probability of 50% or greater that two of them will share a birthday.
• And 23 has many other associations.

Many numbers come down to us with purportedly magical qualities: three wishes, seven wonders of the world, forty days and forty nights. Twenty-three, though, is quirkier and rougher around the edges, less obvious and therefore more intriguing. It doesn't disclose its meaning at a glance: it draws you in and invites you to investigate further. Substituting "46" for "23" for reasons of scientific accuracy wouldn't have achieved the same numerical/associational magic.

Then there's the "...andMe" component of the name, which warms and humanizes it--and which is why I think 23andMe is a better name than simply 23. I also like that the company chose not to make the name possessive--for example, "My23"--which would have altered the relationship between "me" and "my DNA," which in "23andMe" sounds like an equal partnership.

Even if it had a terrible name, 23andMe would draw attention because of its lucky parentage. The interesting qualities of "23andMe" give it even more credibility. In other words, 23andMe represents the optimal blend of nature and nurture.

Read other posts in New Name Beat.

* Esther Dyson, who is a director of 23andMe, plans to post her genome on the Internet in a couple of months. Read her Wall Street Journal commentary about why she chose to do it.

Memo to Seagate: You're Off. Way Off.

In a recent post about the confusion between your and you're, Grammar Girl pointed to a new ad campaign from Seagate, the world's largest manufacturer of computer disk drives ($9.2 billion in revenues in fiscal 2006). The campaign promotes a new external hard drive called FreeAgent, whose tagline is:

Your On.

That's right: Your (possessive), not You're (contraction of you are).

Grammar Girl was flummoxed, but only briefly:

I've worked in marketing before and I know how many people have to sign off on something like this. So I figured the marketers must be trying to do something funky such as make the word on a noun. As in, Here, I have this on thingy for you. Wow, thanks! I've always wanted an on.

Wanting to be sure, she contacted Seagate, which sent "someone named Forrest Malloy" to respond thus:

"Your On" is spelled this way to indicate that Seagate is your (possessive) access to being "on." In essence, Seagate = On.

This version ties the connection more closely to Seagate (as your access to being 'on') as opposed to the more traditional spelling of "You're On," which places the emphasis more closely on the consumer and away from Seagate itself.

Impressive tap-dancing, Mr. Molloy! Too bad you neglected to check your company's own press release, which reads:

And now, wherever you are, whenever you need it, Seagate Technology (NYSE: STX) makes sure “Your On.”

Which certainly sounds, in context, very much like a misspelling of "You're."

Mark Hachman, blogging about this on Gearlog in April, wrote: "I don't know what the heck this phrase means, but it makes my head hurt."

Which prompted commenter "David" to post on May 1:

As an employee I can tell you that this was caught internally before we went to press. But it was too far gone to stop. When faced with a blunder like this, the only thing to do is pretend it is [a] play on words and hope that you can get away with it.

Oh, really? I'll bet if the mistake had been numerical--in the gizmo's price or capacity--Seagate would have burned rubber to make the fix. But language ... who cares?

(Full disclosure: I have done naming work for Seagate, but not on the FreeAgent project.)

(The "Your On" tagline reminded me of a news-forum post that's been circulating on the internets: "Speak English, Your in America Now." And no, it isn't satire. Read what Linguistic Mystic has to say.)

How Did You Learn Grammar?

Last week I read a sentence about grammar that I'm still puzzling over.

The sentence appeared at the end of a New York Times review of two grammar books for children, The Girl's Like Spaghetti: Why, You Can't Manage Without Apostrophes! by Lynne Truss (who also wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves); and Woe Is I Jr.: The Younger Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English, by Patricia T. O'Conner (who also wrote Woe Is I).

Reviewer Ann Hodgman liked the O'Conner book and disliked the Truss book. She summed up with this paragraph:

Here’s a problem neither Truss nor O’Conner addresses: People who care about punctuation and good grammar don’t misuse them. People who don’t care won’t care. Children who like to read will pick up good grammar automatically. Children who don’t like to read are not going to pick up books about grammar unless someone forces them. And if you want to force a child to read a grammar book ... well, I don’t know what to tell you.

I've highlighted the sentence that gave me pause. For more than a week I've been asking myself: Do children who like to read really "pick up grammar automatically"? Does immersion in books translate into flawless grammar?

In one sense, of course, the question is silly. Long before they begin reading, children have mastered the basic structures of grammar. A three-year-old child whose first language is English knows that "The sky is blue" and "Is the sky blue?" make sense, while "Sky blue the is" does not.

Good written grammar (and punctuation, which is really Lynne Truss's hobbyhorse) is a different issue. So back to my question: Do children absorb and reproduce the principles of correct usage simply from reading good writing?

Here's my own take on it. I was an early and avid reader. I even read--and enjoyed--the grammar books that my father brought home from his community-college English classes. (They had very amusing illustrations.) And from the age at which I could grasp a pencil, I also loved to write--stories, plays, poems, songs, diary entries. But I didn't "pick up good grammar automatically." Well into my college years I still made many of the usage errors that plague beginning writers: dangling modifiers, subject-verb agreement confusion, and so on.

I didn't understand how English sentences were assembled until I learned to diagram them in junior high school. I didn't learn the subjunctive case--didn't even know it existed--until I studied high school Spanish. (Yet another benefit of foreign-language instruction.) I didn't master the finer points of usage until I apprenticed on the copy desk of my college newspaper, where more experienced editors helped me identify them.

Here's the thing: I didn't find any of this instruction onerous or boring. And I don't think I was particularly unusual. Sentence-diagramming gets a bad rap nowadays, but I and nearly everyone I know who actually learned it thought it was fun--a series of puzzles to be solved. Mastering the rules that lead to greater clarity in communication gave me a tremendous feeling of accomplishment and even relief. I didn't have to invent my own rules; I simply had to learn the existing ones.

Everyone acknowledges that if we want to play basketball, or chess, or Worlds of Warcraft, we need to learn their rules. When we learn geometry we memorize axioms. Why is that such a hard sell with the rules of English? Communication is perhaps the most important game we play, the most crucial calculus we perform; it follows that we need some rules to guide us.

And--here's the rub, I think--we also need English teachers who find grammar and grammar instruction fun and beautiful and rewarding rather than a grim chore.

What about you? Did you learn grammar by osmosis, by rote, by enthusiastic study, or by trial and error? Do you think grammar can--or should--be taught? Write a comment and let us know.

Masters of Their Domains

Inside a midtown hotel, Larry Fischer is on his cell phone with a financial backer as his partner Ari Goldberger does quick research on a laptop computer. They are bidding furiously at this auction of Internet domain names, with hopes of snagging megayachts.com. The duo won't be deterred. They want this name.

"$110,000, yes or no? Quick," Fischer barks at Eli, the investor at the end of the phone.

Someone else makes a bid for $120,000. Fischer and Goldberger up the ante, and then again.

Going once, going twice ... sold to Fischer and Goldberger for $150,000.

"You got it," a smiling Fischer tells Eli. Mazel tovs are exchanged.

-- The opening of "Domain Names: 21st Century Real Estate," by Associated Press business writer Adam Goldman

Fascinating stat from the article: "At the end of first quarter 2007, at least 128 million domain names had been registered worldwide, a 31 percent increase over the previous year."

Good Hair Day

What a long, strange, fragrant trip it's been for the Herbal Essences hair-products brand. Originally called Herbal Essence (singular), it was launched by Clairol in the 1970s, on the cusp of the groovy-granola trend. Early advertising beckoned women to "come into the Garden of Earthly Delights"; illustrations on labels and print ads featured a cartoonish illustration of a latter-day Botticelli Venus amid a floral cornucopia.

In 1995 the brand was "restaged" with a new plural name and a variety of fragrances to replace the original herbal one. But by 2001, when Procter & Gamble acquired Clairol, Herbal Essences "had wilted in the face of competition from all sides, including natural and organic hair-care products from major consumer marketers and boutique brands like the Body Shop," according to MediaPost's Marketing Daily. A new agency, Kaplan Thayer Group, shook things up with an ad campaign called "Totally Organic Experience," which turned "lather-rinse-repeat" into an invitation to multiple hairgasm. Kind of made you wonder just what kind of herbal essence the creative team was smoking. (Watch a couple of old spots here.)

In 2005 P&G decided to reinvent Herbal Essences once again. The company hired a Cincinnati branding agency, LPK, to do 18 months of consumer research. The result (citing Marketing Daily again): "a new brand strategy tailored to attract the 'spontaneous, optimistic, altruistic, experiential' Gen Y female." The logo was redesigned, products got catchy new names like "Body Envy" and "None of Your Frizziness," and shampoo and conditioner bottles were given curvy, "nesting" shapes. This creative presentation, apparently from LPK, sums up the changes. The case study on LPK's web site says the agency "leveraged intimate materials knowledge to strengthen the core idea of fusion through an innovative, patented color blending system that only reveals the true, vibrant color of the product when in use, creating unexpected consumer delight even after purchase." (Even after purchase? Isn't that when the delight is supposed to happen?)

With writing like that, we can be grateful that LPK wasn't responsible for making the TV commercials that grew out of the new Herbal Essences image. Instead, P&G handed off that job to Leo Burnett Sydney, which created this genuinely delightful spot that's been airing a lot on U.S. TV lately.

It's unusual enough to see a shampoo ad in which the lead character is a biker chick afflicted with helmet hair. But the best part of the commercial comes at the end, when the woman--now with clean, lustrous tresses--hands off her Herbal Essences to a burly, scowling male biker who sports a grimy pigtail. In the final seconds we see a smiling Biker Guy running in slow-mo, his cascading locks bouncing on the shoulders of his leather jacket: a perfect send-up of the classic hair-care money shot. Even better: two other Biker Guys lift their sunglasses in amazed appreciation.

By the way, thanks to Go Fug Yourself--which finds amusement and agony in the fashion faux pas of the rich and clueless--I now know what to call Transformed Biker Guy. He's a Manpunzel. My man-word dictionary continues to grow.

Word of the Week: Forer Effect

Forer effect: The tendency of people to rate statements about themselves as highly and uniquely accurate, even when the statements are vague and could apply to many people. (Newspaper horoscopes are the classic example.) Also called the personal validation fallacy, the phenomenon is named for psychologist Bertram R. Forer (1914-2000), who gave identical personality evaluations to a group of students and asked them to rate their evaluation on a scale from zero to five. The average score was 4.26. The experiment has been repeated many times; the average remains about 4.2.

Hat tip to Nancy R. Callahan of Nancy's Baby Names, who introduced me to the term.