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.

Comments

[tanita]

This less well named business caught my attention the other day: Indulgy.

Not only does it appear to be a Pinterest knock-off, but the -dulgy prefix brings to mind both dull and ugly...

[H. S. Gudnason]

Cincinnati is also the corporate home of the Western-Southern Insurance Company.