Fritinancy

“Does This Name Make Me Look Fat?”

This post is for all you name-it-yourselfers out there: you sole proprietors, partnerships, small businesses, and zero-budget nonprofits.

Let’s assume that, on your own or with the help of a pal or two, you’ve come up with a few business names that you think are pretty good. But you’re not absolutely certain—and you’re so exhausted by the creative effort you can’t tell which name to choose.

So you do what comes naturally. You start asking around.

“Take a look at these names,” you say to your sister-in-law as she’s dropping off the kids at your house. “Are any of them any good?”

“Which name do you like best?” you ask your golf buddies over beers at the clubhouse. “Don’t hold back!”

“I’m starting a business but I can’t reveal anything about it yet,” you tell your dog-walker. “Just let me know what you think of these five names.”

Finally, you ring my doorbell and ask my opinion. And I give it to you straight: Stop. Right. Now. Stop asking your friends whether they like your names.

Why? Because the answers you’ll hear will be irrelevant at best and depressing at worst.

 

Take a Letter

Over at DuetsBlog, trademark lawyer Steve Baird has been keeping an eye on single-letter branding. Among his findings: Gatorade has slimmed down to “G,” Amazon is using lower-case “a” for its gift cards, and “the lodging industry appears headed toward serving up a regular bowl of alphabet soup.”

Once you’re aware of the trend, you start noticing examples everywhere. Here are three recent sightings of my own.

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B Hotels & Resorts, an “upper-upscale” hotel chain (Travel Weekly’s adjective), was launched last week at The Lodging Conference. The South Florida company will acquire and convert existing companies rather than build its own. Corporate VP Christopher Tompkins used to work for the W hotel chain (a Starwood brand); he stresses that B is no mere copycat, but it's hard not to see certain parallels. According to Travel Weekly:

Like W . . . the brand plays off its one-letter name. Where W has adopted a “whenever, wherever” motto, B uses its one-letter name with all of its programs. “B green,” for example, emphasizes its environmental consciousness, “B activities” its fitness program and “B indulge” its spa.

According to HotelWorld Network, other brand extensions will include “B in Touch” (complimentary Internet access), “B Active” (fitness centers), and the B’stro (dining).

Cute wordplay, but wouldn’t “upper-upscale” be better conveyed by an “A”?

(Hat tip: Diane Prange.)

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Disney Institute was created in 1986 to teach “Disney’s brand of business excellence” to the leaders of non-Disney businesses. Recent ads use the D from the familiar Disney logo (originally Walt Disney’s signature) as a prefix.

  Fortune magazine, July 26, 2010.

Don’t ask me to explain that photo. Business guys thinking inside the box? Running around with their heads cut off?

And I wonder about the headline, too. Should we interpret it as “De-think”? That’s a little D’pressing.

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GapBody Fit, which uses the letter G in its product nomenclature, is a sub-brand of a sub-brand.

 

 

Gap Body—a line of women’s underwear and personal-care products—has been around since 1998. The new sub-brand, which launched earlier this month, is “a chic new sport collection built for speed, flexibility, and balance,” according to the Gap email I received—in other words, an attempt to claim some territory from yoga-chic retailers such as Lululemon. (And, possibly and puzzlingly, to cannibalize sales at Athleta, a women’s fitness-wear company acquired by Gap* for $150 million in 2009.) Although the line includes tops and shorts, the identifying G prefix applies, so far, only to stretchy bottoms: gfast, gbalance, gstretch, and gflex.

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My own letter grade for these efforts? B as in B-ware. Single-letter brands are open to misinterpretation: See, for example, Drake University’s “D+” ad campaign, which earned failing marks from nearly everyone who saw it. Single letters are also (a) hard to find in online searches and (b) bereft of emotional benefits. Finally, as Steve Baird observes, “It is not easy to own a single-letter as a trademark, at least one that enjoys any meaningful scope.”

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The Times article to which I link contains a paragon of Buzzwordish, from Gap’s chairman and CEO: “This strategic acquisition complements our brands perfectly and allows us to leverage our new online platform to expand into this significant retail sector.” 

Word of the Week: Pencast

Pencast: Online publication of a handwritten manuscript, usually along with the corresponding audio file. Also a verb: to publish a pen-written text with audio.

Pencast was formed through imitation of podcast, coined in 2004 to mean “online publication of a digital media file”; the word appropriated the pod of iPod even though it isn’t necessary to use an iPod or any other digital media player to create a podcast. (Podcast and webcast are essentially the same thing, although podcast is now the more popular term.) The original –cast compound, broadcast, was first seen in print in 1767, when it referred to the spreading of seed. It became associated with radio in the early 1920s; simulcast (to broadcast simultaneously on radio and television) first appeared in 1948. (Source: Etymology Online.)

A blogger known as Mandarine claims to have coined pencasting in an April 2007 comment on Emily’s Blog in which he lamented the declining use of fountain pens:

Maybe I will post scanned manuscript articles (halfway between blogging and podcasting, let's call it pencasting) to use ink again.

The following year, an Oakland company, Livescribe, changed the implications of pencasting when it introduced the Pulse smartpen, which incorporates a camera and an audio recorder. The pen could record, say, a classroom lecture, and link it to notes taken on special paper. The pen sold well, at about $130 each, and this year Livescribe began selling a more advanced model, the Echo, for about $170.

Smartpen recordings are useful for the notetaker’s personal use, of course, but they can also be used for sharing information online: in other words, for pencasting.

Here’s how Clive Thompson explained it in “The Pen That Never Forgets,” an article about Livescribe’s classroom uses that appeared in the September 19, 2010, New York Times magazine:

Having a pen that listens, the students told me, has changed the class in curious ways. Some found the pens make class less stressful; because they don’t need to worry about missing something, they feel freer to listen to what [seventh-grade math teacher Brian] Licata says. When they do take notes, the pen alters their writing style: instead of verbatim snippets of Licata’s instructions, they can write “key words” — essentially little handwritten tags that let them quickly locate a crucial moment in the audio stream. Licata himself uses a Livescribe pen to provide the students with extra lessons. Sitting at home, he’ll draw out a complicated math problem while describing out loud how to solve it. Then he’ll upload the result to a class Web site. There his students will see Licata’s handwriting slowly fill the page while hearing his voice explaining what’s going on. If students have trouble remembering how to tackle that type of problem, these little videos — “pencasts” — are online 24 hours a day. All the students I spoke to said they watch them.

Follow the “little videos” link to see some of Mr. Licata’s pencasts. You can also view (and hear) pencasts on the Livescribe website.

Road Food

Add bustaurant and broach coach to your foodie vocabulary. “Busing Tables, and Diners Too” in today’s online Wall Street Journal, explains:

The Bay Area's newest food trend is bustaurants, gourmet restaurants built into buses complete with kitchens and dining rooms. While this region didn't invent the bustaurant—that mantle in the U.S. goes to a double-decker in Los Angeles named World Fare—the Bay Area has evolved the concept and is now home to two such moveable feasts, which attract equal parts adventurous diners and bus-loving kids.

The featured meals-on-wheels are Diamond Lil, “a converted silver 1957 Greyhound that takes up to 16 diners on private mobile eating adventures or caters for larger parties where the bus becomes part of the entertainment,” and Le Truc, a 36-foot former school bus whose already excellent name would be even more puntastic—truc is French slang for “thingie” or “whatchamacallit”—if the cuisine were Vietnamese. (It isn’t, if I’m reading Le Truc’s Twitter feed correctly.) From the WSJ article:

Blake Tally, co-owner of Le Truc, says his bustaurant counters a stereotype, however undeserved, that mobile food operators serve greasy, cut-rate food. “People stigmatize the ‘roach coach,’” says Mr. Tally. “We are a ‘broach’ coach. People are easily going to be sitting there eating and forgetting that they are in a bus.”

Is broach a portmanteau of bus and roach? Might be best to shelve that one.

Bustaurants face several challenges unfamiliar to their stationary counterparts, including motion sickness and sliding tableware. But probably not to this extent:

Via Kottke.org, which reports:

On August 1, the Pacific Sun ran into a heavy storm 400 miles north of New Zealand, hitting 25-foot-tall waves and 50-knot winds. Its 1732 passengers weren't prepared to endure the madness that ensued. Absolutely crazy.

(Hat tip for the WSJ story: Betsy Burroughs.)

Seeking Proofreaders

This full-page ad from Thor Equities appears in today’s New York Times on Page 11 of the business section.

The large green text beneath “693 Fifth Avenue” reads:

Imagine recreating the facade of the former Takishamaya building in the image of your brand; that’s the opportunity presented by 693 Fifth Avenue.

Whoops: The name of the Japanese retail store chain, which was founded in 1829 and until June of this year occupied 693 Fifth Avenue, is spelled Takashimaya, not “Takishamaya.”

And here’s the kicker, in the closing paragraph:

I’m having a seizure.

P.S. As long as I’m making changes, I’d circle the semicolon in that paragraph I quoted above. A colon or a period would be make the statement more powerful.

Names in the News: Co:

Co: is a new New York “brand innovation studio” launched this month by Rosemarie Ryan and Ty Montague, who had formerly been co-presidents for North America at the global advertising agency JWT.

The colon is part of the name; the website is cocollective.com. (I discovered the URL in an AdAge article; good luck using a search engine to find “co ad agency.”)

New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott wrote about the new agency last week:

The name — perhaps one of the pithiest for any agency — is meant to suggest the Co: business model by evoking words like co-creation, collaboration and co-venturing.

Why stop there? I expect the lunchroom will offer co:ffee and co:coa; that art directors will produce co:lor co:mps; that co:pywriters will submit co:ncepts; that top executives will fight over co:rner offices; and that unpaid invoices will be sent to a co:llection agency. Let’s hope no one ends up in co:urt.

Because that wouldn’t be co:ol.

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Yes, the blue colon (co:lon?) is Co:’s logo.  And yes, they apparently expect us to use the colon in the name even when it’s followed by an apostrophe. (For an example of a semicolon in a logo, see my post on Encore Careers.)

Word of the Week: Dark Patterns

Dark patterns: User interfaces designed to trick people into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience (UX) consultant who has a PhD in cognitive science, coined dark patterns for a presentation he gave earlier this month at the UX Brighton Conference. Brignull explained the concept on his blog, 90 Percent of Everything:

Normally we think of bad design as consisting of laziness, mistakes, or school-boy errors. We refer to these sorts of design patterns as Antipatterns. However, there’s another kind of bad design pattern, one that’s been crafted with great attention to detail, and a solid understanding of human psychology, to trick users into do things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. This is the dark side of design, and since these kind of design patterns don’t have a name, I’m proposing we start calling them Dark Patterns.

Brignull’s examples include low-cost airlines that put insurance in your basket without asking; social-networking sites that “purposefully make it hard for you to shrink your social graph or move your content into private realms (I’m looking at you, Facebook)”; and systems that require you to log in “using a long-forgotten password” in order to unsubscribe.

Dark patterns are not the same as “outright scams,” Brignull writes. The latter are “clumsy and easy to identify.” Rather, dark patterns are “techniques used by above-board products and services that trick users into doing things.”

Brignull’s slide presentation for the UX conference can be viewed on his blog and also here. You can follow Brignull on Twitter at @harrybr.

In the three-dimensional world, slanty design—a term coined by British interactivity researcher Russell Beale—is somewhat analogous to dark patterns. Slanty design is “design that purposely reduces aspects of functionality or usability”; however, its objectives don’t necessarily include siphoning cash from the user. For example, a cone-shaped disposable cup that discourages the user from leaving it on a table is a slanty design that promotes a social good.

UPDATE: In comments, Nancy Frishberg links to two related publications, Chris Nodder's blog, Evil by Design, and Nodder's article for the MIT Sloan Management Review, "Usability for Evil."

Usability

Back in May, E*Trade annoyed me with its “tech-tosterone” ad. Now it’s setting my teeth on edge with this:

 

New York Times, Sept. 14, 2010, page A15

“Useable”? I’m afraid not.

I consulted three dictionaries and Garner’s Modern American Usage*, the authoritative dispute-settler in matters of style. All agree: it’s usable, not useable.

Yes, you’ll see useable in some dictionaries, but that’s because dictionaries don’t judge, they report. If an error is common enough, a dictionary may include it, but not as the preferred choice. Garner, however, toes the prescriptivist line:

usable. So spelled—not useable. See MUTE E.

Flip back to the MUTE E entry and you’ll read four paragraphs of clear explanation. Here’s the most relevant passage:

In AmE [American English], the rule is to drop the –e before a vowel. But the almost universal exception to this rule is to keep the –e if it’s needed to indicate the soft sound of a preceding –g- or –c-, as in change, changeable; hinge, hingeing; trace, traceable.

There’s no g or c in use; ergo, no e in usable.

Still not convinced? Let’s pit the two words against each other in a GoogleFight.

 

 

The people have spoken! E*Trade, are you listening?

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* That’s usage, not useage.

September Linkfest

Some of what I’ve been reading this month:

 

“Sure, slogans should be as short as possible,” writes veteran marketing man Al Ries, “but there's a trade-off. Slogans should be long enough to contain some words that knock on the right side of the consumer's brain. The emotional side of the brain as opposed to the left side, the logical, analytical side.” Read more at AdAge.

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An A-to-Z of naming schemes, with lists for Aztec gods (I can’t wait to name something Chiconahuiehecatl), bunnies, curries, and much more. The authors write: “The purpose of these naming schemes is to name network computers, but it [sic] can also be used to name projects, variables, streets, pets, kids, or any other project where unique names and rememberable [sic] names are required.” Via Anthony Shore.

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How six tech companies got their names. I knew about most of them (in fact, I’ve written about Asus myself), but the Go Daddy and Fark stories were new to me. (Via On the Button.)

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In honor of New York Fashion Week—pardonnez-moi, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—Charles McGrath gives us his version of fashion week phone sex. Cracked me up. (Via Maud Newton.)

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One more for Fashion Week, from the perennially fabulous Nancy Nall: “The Dresses Speak,” in which NN reveals the only adjectives a fashion writer needs to know.

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I’d rather be keelhauled than ever spend a single minute at Burning Man, the annual desert spectacle that combines many of my least-favorite things, e.g., 130-degree heat + no running water + public nudity + experimental art + nonstop music + “recreational” drugs + wacky costumes + forced socializing. But I did enjoy this Burning Man glossary, which provides a glimpse into a subculture that many people (my next-door neighbor, for one) seem to relish. Two definitions may help you understand why I choose to avoid the playa: “Fire jumping: A technique of jumping over a burning fire, sometimes with negative results when two opposing jumpers collide in mid-air,” and “Nose Tators: Playa dust nostril plugs that form during the event.” As film mogul Samuel Goldwyn reportedly said, “Include me out.” (Via Fashion for Nerds, who is a Burning Man fan and participant. But hey, I don’t judge.)

Coke with a Splice

A comma splice, that is.

 

 

The ad appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last Sunday. It’s an opening salvo in Coca-Cola’s Live Positively campaign, an expensive-looking effort to convince us that Coke is all about healthy living and being “part of the fabric of our communities.”

So much money, so little proofreading.

Here’s my gripe: The second sentence in the headline is an example of a comma splice—also known as a run-on—in which the comma is called upon to do the work of a period. 

Now, I know that a comma splice usually cobbles together two complete sentences, and I know that “Except fun” isn’t a complete sentence: it lacks a verb. Nevertheless, the comma here is just plain wrong. What’s called for is a period to lend emphasis and finality to the fragment: “Except fun. Try to have lots of that.”*

This isn’t merely about “rules.” It’s about effectiveness. The run-on headline is insipid; breaking it up with a period gives it a pulse. The energy builds up to fun, the most important word in the headline, instead of dribbling away in a fog of inconclusion.

It’s painful enough to see badly punctuated copywriting in small businesses’ ads. It hurts like a decayed tooth to see it from a major brand like Coca-Cola.

As penance, perhaps Coke would like to underwrite National Punctuation Day. It’s next Thursday, September 24.

UPDATE: Thanks to Twitter pal McGeesOrg for two timely links about comma splices: "Oh, the Splices You'll See!" on Stan Carey's blog, and "Comma Splices: How to Identify and Fix Them" on The Snarky Student's Guide to Grammar.

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* Skilled writers know how to use sentence fragments like this one for drama or emphasis, or to answer a question. See this brief tutorial for examples of sentence fragments used for special effect.