Bad Brand Names: Infegy

I'll say this about Infegy: the language of its website is readable. Most of the punctuation is correct. (We'll ignore the over-capitalization problem for now.) Much of the writing is clear, compelling, even graceful.

The name? Not so much. The opposite, in fact.

Here's the official story (emphasis added):

In late 2006, while working for an interactive advertising agency, Justin Graves, now Infegy's CEO, had a vision to develop a system which could collect as much of this social content as possible and analyze it on-demand to garner a wealth of insight in to consumer thought and opinion. Justin left the agency to begin development work on this concept, and shortly after he partnered with Adam Coomes, Infegy's President, for his expertise in Web and business development. Infegy, a combination of the words Information and Strategy, was officially founded and work on the project now known as Social Radar was well under way to becoming the powerful yet elegant solution it is today.

Yes, it's yet another Bad Portmanteau.

What's the problem? For starters, information doesn't shorten to inf-. The abbreviation is info-. Without that o, we're adrift in ominous linguistic territory, surrounded by the sinister semantic shades of infect, infest, infidel, inferno, infamy, infertile, and inferior.

The in- prefix further confuses matters. It can mean within or interior (as it does in ingenious, inherent, intrinsic). But it can also mean not or without: consider insane, inconsiderate, indecent, inconsistent. With Infegy, we have no clear markers to tell us which in- is in.

Then there's feg in the middle of the name, which suggests a hybrid of feh and fug. Ugh.

Finally, Infegy shares the primary shortcoming of many portmanteau brands: information plus strategy does not equal a distinctive benefit. It (sort of) tells me what you do, not (a) why you're different from other information strategists and (b) why I should care.

It's not too late to turn on that light bulb and come up with a better solution.

Comments

[tanita]

Oh, dear. The first thing the name brought to mind was in effigy. As in, "to burn in effigy?" So, maybe not so promising a name there...

[NextMoon]

Great post, Nancy. Not only do you find the most interesting examples, but your analysis is always spot-on.

I agree with Tanita: Although my eyes saw "infegy," my brain read "effigy." (But then, I am just slightly dyslexic.)

[Jessica]

I'm thinking a liver infection, as "fegato" is liver in Italian. Maybe that's just because I have an Italian friend visiting.

[Adam Coomes]

Gee, thanks Nancy. :P

I think our name is short, unique, and easy to remember. But, then again, no one has been inspired enough to write a blog post about how great our name is.. so what do I know?

[Nancy Friedman]

@Tanita and @NextMoon: Thanks--I should have thought of "effigy"!

@Adam: Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[Seth]

Agree with first commenters... I thought it was an iPhone app marketed to shy (or perhaps butane-deprived) but technologically adept rabble-rousers who want to burn their local potentate in effigy, virtually!

[Jeff]

I'm glad someone has the time for this kind of boring and hopefully sarcastic analysis. I hope you caught my sarcasm too.

[Nancy Friedman]

@Jeff: I'm glad you had the time to read it. No sarcasm.