Happy solstice, and a few self-serving announcements:
1. You can now follow me on Instagram, where I post an average of one image a day—never a selfie, and never a “Story,” an Instagram feature I find annoying.
2. Over on Medium, I published “The Sound of a Name,” about the effects and uses of sound symbolism in naming.
3. I’m quoted in Heather Schwedel’s story, for Slate, about why Postmates shouldn’t use “Postmate It” as its slogan.
And some other-serving links:
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Some names I’ve noticed lately, for better or for worse, on my travels in the real and virtual worlds.
I spent a few days in Chicago in late April, where I spotted these Ostrim “sports nutrition meat snacks” on display at a Freshii quick-serve “wellness” restaurant. (Freshii is worth a brief sidebar. The company, which was founded in 2005 and is based in Toronto, has a peppy online presence and a brand-enforcing fondness for double-i’s: A limited-time menu special is called Biiblos – no, I don’t know what that means – and the store payment card is called Monii. “Let’s transfer energii!” chirps the copy.)
As for Ostrim, as far as I can tell, the product name is a blend of ostrich and trim, probably because the original “meat snacks” were made from ostrich. Today, though – 22 years after the company’s founding in Greensburg, Pennsylvania – Ostrim snacks are equally as likely to contain beef, elk, chicken, or turkey. Moral: Don’t box yourself in with a name that can’t grow with your company.
Also: Consider how your name might be misinterpreted.
Sounds like bone support and weight loss all in one - with surprise ostrich.
— Jessica Stone Levy (@BeautyMarks) April 28, 2018
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Two global companies, both in the Chicago area, announced the names of spinoff brands yesterday. That’s two opportunities to observe that it isn’t only small, underfunded startups that make bad naming decisions.
Exhibit A: Health-care company Abbott Laboratories will name its new pharmaceutical company AbbVie. According to the Abbott press release, AbbVie “is derived from a combination of Abbott and ‘vie’, which references the Latin root ‘vi’ meaning life.” Richard A. Gonzalez, who will become the chairman and CEO of the new company, explained: “The ‘vie’ calls attention to the vital work the company will continue to advance to improve the lives of people around the world.”
“Vie” and “vital”? So AbbVie must be pronounced with a long I sound in the second syllable, right? Wrong! The first sentence of the press release has a phonetic cue in brackets: “Abb-vee.”
Which leads me to repeat a general rule of naming: When you have to provide a pronunciation guide, you’re acknowledging that your name is confusing. Not a promising start for a business.
AbbVie has another liability: that pile-up of plosives consonants [see comment from @kirinqueen] in the middle of the name. It’s difficult to say “AbbVie” without stuttering—and all that occlusion suggests a slow, sputtering business.
Exhibit B: Kraft Foods, which calls itself a “global snacks powerhouse”—it’s the parent company of Oreo, Cheez Whiz, Jell-O, and many other brands—is splitting into two companies, a North American grocery foods business and a global snack foods business. This week it announced that the snack business will be called Mondelez International.
Perhaps you had this initial response: “World of lesbians?” Or maybe it was just me.
My second inclination was to start humming “On the Road to Mandalay.”
But no. Once again, the press release has to come to the rescue: the name, we’re informed, is to be pronounced “moan-dah-LEEZ.” Indeed, in the headline, there’s a macron—a short horizontal line—over the second E, indicating a long-vowel sound. (There’s no equivalent hint for the O in “Mon-.”) The macron appears nowhere else in the press release, nor does it appear in the many news stories about the name announcement.
Another general rule of naming: If you need diacritical marks to clarify the pronunciation of your name, it isn’t clear enough on its own. A corollary: Print and online media won’t bother to use your fancy accent marks.
I am unsurprised to learn that this name resulted from an employee contest. More than 1,000 employees around the world submitted more than 1,700 names, according to the company. (If Mondelez was the best of the bunch, I don’t want to think about the worst.*) According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the “inspiration” for Mondelez came from two submissions, one from Europe and one from North America.
A third general rule of naming: Employee contests may be good for morale, but they rarely result in effective names—unless your employees are professional name developers.
The Kraft press release provides some background:
“Monde” derives from the Latin word for “world," and “delez” is a fanciful expression of “delicious.”
(I love this comment on WSJ.com: “Mondelez Industries – Isn’t that where George Constanza claimed to work as a latex salesman?”**)
Fortunately for us consumers, “Mondelez” won’t appear on packaging: it’s a corporate name only. The grocery unit will be named Kraft Foods Group.
These aren’t the first instances of Abbott and Kraft making dubious name decisions. I recently wrote about two confusingly named (but not competing) Kraft Foods brands, Velveeta and belVita. And in 2009 I wrote about the Abbott Labs drug Humira, which the company insists is pronounced “hu-MARE-ah.”
Thanks to Deborah Schneider of the Kineo Group in Chicago for tips about both stories. Both Deborah and I are quoted in an article about the new names published in today’s Chicago Tribune.
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* UPDATE: According to Alan Brew, who blogs at Name Droppings, one of the also-rans was Tfark. That’s “Kraft” spelled backward.
** It was Vandelay.
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My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, The Ündeniable Ümlaut, is now online. In it, I take a look at rock dots (Blue Öyster Cult, Motörhead); the frozen-dairy umlaut (Häagen-Dazs, Freshëns, Yogen Früz); the flexible umlaut (YogaMöm); the restaurant umlaut (Füd, Seäsonal); the Brooklyn umlaut (Bed|Stü); and miscellaneous diacriticals (Børn Shoes, Melōränge melons).
Access to the full article is restricted to subscribers; here’s a täste:
Most sources trace the American fad for gratuitous umlauts back to Blue Öyster Cult, the rock band founded in 1970 in upstate New York. According to the band’s Wikipedia entry, the music critic Richard Meltzer suggested the umlaut “because heavy metal is Wagnerian.” Motörhead followed suit in 1975 (“I only put it there to look mean,” the group’s lead singer said of the umlaut); the double-umlauting of Mötley Crüe, formed in 1980, is said to have been inspired by the label on a Löwenbräu beer bottle. These “metal umlauts,” or “rock dots,” were spoofed in 1984 by the parody band Spinal Tap, whose Gothic logo contained an umlauted N.
Read the rest of the column! And for even more on umlauts, read my previous posts on accented brands.
UPDATE: John McGarvey, a copywriter in London, has informed me via Twitter of a UK dessert brand called Gü Puds (that’s pud as in “pudding,” British for “dessert”; pud has a very different meaning in American English). Yep, it’s another yummy smiley umlaut:
The company explains the name (punctuation sic):
Back when we were born in 2003 – we thought long and hard for a suitable name for our decadent treats. We began by playing around with the word goût – French for taste. However, gout in English refers to an unsightly disease of the foot; not at all appropriate for puds! We eventually came up with Gü (pronounced ‘goo’) – which evokes the gooey oozing nature of our puddings.
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Less than 24 hours after I published a post about güd products from Burt’s Bees, I spotted two more brand names with umlaut-spangled, smiley-face U’s.
Füd—it’s pronounced “fōōd,” the website helpfully offers—is a vegan restaurant in that cradle of carnivorism, Kansas City. “The mentality of the Midwest is, green is garnish,” owner Heidi Van Pelt-Belle told A.G. Sulzberger of the New York Times.
The umlaut is garnish, too.
Then there’s Yogen Früz, which opened in Toronto in 1986 and now has 1,200 fro-yo “retail concepts” around the world.
In the AMC Metreon 15, San Francisco.
If you see an echo in Yogen Früz of fellow frozen-dessert purveyors Häagen-Dazs and Frusen Glädjé, it’s probably not coincidental. All three brands employ gratuitous accent marks; in the case of Frusen Glädjé (which has been defunct for almost 20 years), the superfluous mark is the acute accent.
Yogen Früz takes that smiley U very seriously: it’s always depicted in a contrasting color, and it often stands in for “you.”
The company has created a “ucard,” possibly for frequent fro-yoers. Hard to say exactly.
The “Yületide” promotions were cute-bordering-on-cloying.
The latest twist: “Ü Serve” locations that let you “explore your inner ‘Yogurtista’.”
Enough already! I’m füll.
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Let’s say you’ve spent a lot of time and money developing a name that’s distinctive, legally available, and a good match for your naming brief. You can still end up with a less-than-desirable name if you neglect to ask these important questions.
1. How will it look in lower-case spelling? A name like IfByPhone or PopUpEdu depends for clarity on intercap letters. On Twitter and other applications, however, the name may appear in all lower-case letters—ifbyphone, popupedu—with a potential loss of intelligibility and pronounceability.
2. How will it look in black and white? Color can transform your company or product name into a sharp-looking logo. But for some applications—press kits, white papers, email—you won’t have the benefit of color. If you rely on color to make your point, as the Big Ten athletic conference did in its recent logo redesign, you risk losing your message. (I’m not saying that Big Ten is necessarily confusing anyone, but a smaller organization that attempts a similar strategy may be asking for trouble.)
3. How will it read in the newspaper? Speaking of black-and-white, print journalism isn’t dead yet. No matter how stridently you insist on accent marks or punctuation in your name (Aol. and Yahoo!, I’m talking to you), the business reporter on deadline is unlikely is share your obsession.
4. How does it sound on the telephone? Or in everyday conversation, for that matter? I've written previously about the counterintuitive pronunciation of Virgance. Here’s an even more-boggling example: μTorrent, a popular file-sharing client, is spelled with the Greek letter μ (mu), which is commonly pronounced mee (in modern Greek), myoo (in English), or micro (in scientific measurements). But μTorrent’s URL is utorrent.com. The program’s Swedish creator, Ludvig Strigeus, “usually” pronounces the name as “you torrent” but has also suggested “microtorrent,” “mytorrent” (my, pronounced mee, is Swedish for μ), and “mutorrent” as possible pronunciations. For a consumer-facing company or product, this much word-of-mouth confusion would be catastrophic; it’s not exactly wonderful for μTorrent, either. (See also #3, above.)
5. Do you have a misleading or undesirable acronym? I’m currently talking with a prospective client, a startup, whose working name is a three-word idiom that ends in a word starting with “U.” Reduced to its initials, the company looks like a university. That’s misleading, but it could be much worse: the initials could be a real WTF.
6. Finally, do proceed carefully with those qrazy Q-names. I still don’t know whether QRANK is pronounced “cue-rank” or “crank.” And that makes me cranky.
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In yesterday's New York Times business section, an article headlined "Coke Struggles to Keep Up with Nimble Rivals" included this sentence:
Under Mr. Isdell, Coke is now trying to be a more spritely buyer.
That adjective should be spelled sprightly. The word is an odd example of English orthography becoming more complex rather than simpler over time: the noun form is indeed sprite, from Latin spiritus, "a small supernatural being; an elf or pixie." Sprite has been around since 1303, according to The Online Etymology Dictionary. But the adjective (and it is an adjective, despite that -ly suffix) became the more Germanic-looking sprightly around 1596, and that's the only accepted spelling to this day.
And, yes, Coca-Cola does own Sprite, the lemon-lime beverage introduced in 1961 as a competitor to 7-Up, so I did wonder briefly whether there was a little in-joke going on at the Times. But the misspelling is so common that I think it just slipped past the copy desk.
As long as we're in the bottled-beverage aisle, did you notice that Coca-Cola has just acquired "Energy Brands, known as glacéau," the makers of Vitamin Water? Glacéau is a clever enough portmanteau of the French words for "ice" and "water," but the totally superfluous acute accent is a dead giveaway that no one there parlay-voos. (In fact, glacéau is headquartered in Queens.) And the lower-case "g" is going to have copy editors gritting their teeth, and reaching for bottles of the hard stuff, for years to come. As for "Energy Brands, known as..." is that like "My name is Theodore but call me Beaver"? No clue. (For more on "hyperforeignism," read the ever-acute Mr. Verb here and here.)
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