New sightings in categories I’ve written about previously:
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“Plus.”
Edward Banatt (@ArmaVirumque) recently tweeted a photo of a verbified “plus” he’d seen in the wild:
The menu is from the fast-casual restaurant chain Chili’s, which uses “Plus Up Your Steak” throughout the franchise.
Commercial verbifying of “plus” began at least 70 years ago with Walt Disney; “plus up” has a specific, non-Chili’s meaning in governmental budget negotiations. Read more.
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“Hero.”
Camera company GoPro has been advertising its new Hero3 models. (I’d missed the Hero1 and Hero2, which may not have been promoted as aggressively.) The company’s tagline is “Be a Hero,” which is slightly awkward. (“I am a camera”?) Tip: Never use your product name generically.
The Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, maker of Noah’s bagels, exhorts customers to “Be the Office Hero”:
Also spotted: TradeHero, a stock-trading app; and the unrelated Screenhero, “an app that turns any Mac or PC into a completely collaborative environment,” according to a TechCrunch report.
Read more about “hero” worship in branding.
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Comparatives.
You know about Dumberer. Now there’s Smarterer: “over 900 crowdsourced assessments tests to help thousands of recruiters and job seekers around the world quantify any skill in minutes.”
More neo-comparatives here, here, here, here, and here.
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“Zen.”
I recently encountered the term “annoyvation,” one of whose definitions is “an innovation born of a small annoyance.” TicketZen fits into this category. As its home page puts it, “Parking tickets suck. Paying them doesn’t have to.” (Good idea, fuzzy syntax, what with those confusing -ings.)
For more on the Zen of brand naming, see my Pinterest board and “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming” in Bloomberg Businessweek, in which I’m quoted.
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“ -Licious.”
Jessica wrote in her Beauty Marks blog about Samplicio.us (“Simply Better Surveys”). Mr. Verb wrote about “the hilariously named” Englicious, which “aims to be a complete online resource for teaching English grammar in UK secondary schools.” And scientist/educator Marc D. Hauser’s new book about human cruelty is called Evilicious.
More -licious names here (and follow the link in that post for still more -liciousness).
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Dictionary definitions.
Last week I received an email from Democrats.org with the gratuitously syllabified “com•pro•mise (v.)” in the subject line.
And yet in both the featured quote and the call to action “compromise” is a noun.
Read more about dictionary definitions in advertising and branding in my Visual Thesaurus column “Branding by Definition.”
"Annoyvation"? Or is it "an oy-vey-tion"?
Posted by: Jessica | October 17, 2013 at 05:52 AM
Re: Be the Office Hero
The confusing thing for me here is that "hero," in some US dialects, means "submarine sandwich," and this is what I originally thought of when I saw the word "hero" combined with bread -- before I realized these were bagels.
On the awful "annoyvation": God please make it stop. Will this portmantrend ever die out?
On "plus up": why do people think using bureaucratic political jargon makes something fun and appealing?
Posted by: Rawley | October 20, 2013 at 02:22 AM