Fritinancy

What Fresh Hell Is This?

This is a name that cries out for an Abbott and Costello routine.

 

 

“This Technology said Comcast is using its dynamic ad insertion service, which lets the MSO deliver targeted ads in both linear and on-demand content.” – FierceCable, December 9, 2013

Which technology? This Technology.

This—sorry, This—is a sorry name for reasons that should be obvious: It conjures no image, it suggests no benefit, and it’s likely to confound your search engine.*

Perhaps, as Dustbury suggested, it’s an anagram. You figure it out.

Here’s an idea: a three-way merger between Nau (the performance-clothing company), Here (either the Nokia mapping service or the PayPal credit-card service), and This.

That’s right: NauHereThis.

This Technology tip via brother Michael. Post title via Dorothy Parker.

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* Which isn’t to say you can never use This in a name. Compare, for example, This Into That, the name of a small business in Berkeley that transforms old books into clever and useful objects such as clocks and key holders.

Here a Here, There a Here, Everywhere a Here Here

Have you heard? Nokia has rebranded all of its navigation products with a single name: HERE.

The official story, in flawless brandbabble:

“HERE is a name that I think signifies what I call an ethos in cartography. HERE is about a sense of location,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive who oversees the company’s location and commerce unit, in an interview at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. (Via TechCrunch, March 2)

I can’t explain why the name is in spelled in ALL CAPS everywhere on the website except in the logo.

 

And here’s more news: PayPal has introduced a new credit-card reader for mobile devices. It, too, is called Here.

 

Eunice Park of the branding agency Catchword gives the PayPal Here name an A-:

“Here” focuses on the target audience and freshly, yet familiarly conveys its benefit: the ability to do business here and now, here and again, here there and everywhere.

However, if you happen to forget, as I did, which company makes the mapping Here and which one makes the payment Here, and you attempt to do a web search simply for “here” … well, you’ll learn some moderately interesting things about here documents and deixis and the Here Lounge in West Hollywood. 

But you won’t get Here, or HERE, from there.

Image via Medium Italic.

Only ONE Star?

Every time I see one of these Macy’s ads…

 

…I expect the rest of the sentence to read “…out of a possible five.”

What Were They Thinking?

Four company names that are not as amusing, meaningful, or intelligible as their creators assume.

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Congratulations to Smorn on exceeding its Kickstarter goal before the deadline. Maybe the founders will set aside some of the excess cash for a new name, because the current one—a regrettable portmanteau of smart and horn—is doing them no favors. I guarantee you that no one will decipher “smart” from “sm-”or “horn” from “-orn.” When even TechCrunch says your product “is cooler than it sounds,” you know the name’s a problem. The product seems terrific; it deserves a smart name, not two unhelpful letters from the word smart. P.S. “Glorp”—for the glow-in-the-dark version—is no better. (For more on bad names that start with sm-, see this post about Smeg and this one about Smencils.)

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If I gave you four chances to guess what Ecwid is, I bet you’d lose—even if I showed you the logo.

European Community Wealth Information Department? Something about equitable? Something in Welsh? Ecological baby buggies for widdle tiny sextuplets?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. This terrible name (for a maker of online shopping-cart software) turns out to be another regrettable portmanteau: a blend of “e-commerce” and “widgets.”

Let’s review: 1) “ec” does not connote “e-commerce” to anyone, 2) “wid” does not connote “widget” to anyone, and 3) “widgets” is very 2005.

Maybe “Ecwid” seemed brilliant in Russia, where the company was founded, but it’s unfathomable, not to mention icky-sounding, in the US. Now that the company has offices in Southern California, it’s time for a deep rethink.

By the way, when I tweeted about the Ecwid name last month, the company responded defensively:

@fritinancy good or bad, it’s unique, and we reap lots of benefits from that. And so do our customers too.

— Ecwid Team (@ecwid) January 30, 2013

Good or bad?

P.S. “Unique” does not translate to “effective.”

*

μBiome uses the Greek letter μ—the symbol for “micro”—in its logo, but the English letter “u” everywhere else (ubiome.com; “uBiome is the world’s first effort to map the human microbiome with citizen science”).

So is the company name pronounced “microbiome” or “you-biome”? Or “mee-biome” (μ in modern Greek)? Or “myoo-biome” (μ in English)? It looks as though μBiome has learned nothing from the confusing example of μTorrent (scroll down to #4).

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When your company is called White Dental Supply and you don’t sell dental supplies, people naturally get confused. No matter how many times you say “We’re an Internet marketing company!” they still ask for floss samples. So you change the name. To Pitooey! With an exclamation mark. Because it sounds like what you do after you brush and rinse? No, because it’s “the language of penguins.”

Of course.

Unfortunately, the CEO speaks the language of buzzword bingo:

The name Pitooey! promotes the strong social media and mobile marketing background of our company. In 2013 we will be pivoting into a new industry with a suite of exciting products and services, and this name change reflects this exciting transformation.

Pfooey.

But that’s a car name!

A few years ago I was hired to name an apple. Not an Apple: an apple, the kind that grows on a tree. This particular apple was a new cultivar that needed a name to compete against Golden Delicious and Pippin and Winesap in supermarkets. My client was the growers’ group that had developed the fruit.

I presented several names, including one I thought was an especially strong candidate: Avalon. The name had an excellent and appropriate story, I told the client. It comes from Welsh afal, which means “apple.” (Etymology doesn’t always matter, but in this case it was too perfect to ignore.) In the Arthurian legends, Avalon is the island where Excalibur was forged. (Power, magic, legend: all positive attributes.) Avalon was sometimes called “the Fortunate Isle.” (Happy apples!) Add to that, I said, the fact that the word rolls deliciously off the tongue.

There was silence on the other end of the phone line. Finally, the client’s spokesman spoke:

“Avalon,” he said tentatively. “Isn’t that a car name?” 

 

Because They Say So

The San Francisco magazine 7x7* brought to my attention a pop-up juice bar that opened in the city over Memorial Day weekend. It’s called Sow.

This is what I pictured:

Sow and piglets via The Pigsite

No, no, not /sau/, insists the Sow website.

 

See? It’s Sōw, with a macron over the O to tell you to pronounce it as a “long” vowel. Or to confuse you further.

And because most city folks won’t know a sow from a sōw from a hole in the ground, there’s a dictionary definition:

verb /sō/ plant (seed) by scattering it on or in the earth

That’s mildly interesting, but so what? A dictionary definition doesn’t make me want to patronize the shop. Besides, while the “planting” concept might make “Sow” an apt name for a nursery or a community garden, the connection between “scattering seed” and “drinking fresh juice” is fairly remote. (From what I’ve read—on the Kickstarter page, for example—Sow doesn’t grow its own fruits and vegetables.)

Another quibble: Nowadays, if a non-farming person is at all familiar with the verb form of “sow,” it’s probably as part of an idiom. And that idiom is a shady one: sow discord, sow rancor, sow rumors, sow one’s wild oats. 

As for the macron, here’s something I wrote in 2008 about Grāpple, a brand of grape-flavored apples:

Basic naming rule: If you have to rely on diacritical marks like the macron over the a to clarify pronunciation, your brand name isn't working. Additional hints (“Say Grape-L”) only make you seem more desperate.

That observation applies to Sōw, too.

We recently saw some fancy macronizing with Mondelēz, the new name of Kraft Food Inc.’s global snacks business. The macron over the second E is there to tell you—force you—to pronounce the name “moan-de-LEEZ.” But even the company’s original press release dropped the macron after the headline, and a more recent press release dispensed with it altogether. So go right ahead and say “MAHN-de-lezz” if you please. Or mahn-de-LAY. I won’t turn you in to the brand police.

(As Tate Linden of Stokefire, a branding agency, said in a tweet about Mondelez: “Any name that requires the Latin Extended character set gets a FAIL in my book. How many people can type an ē?”)

Let’s extract the juice from this critique:

DKNY? LOL!

So I’m browsing the accessories section at the Nordstrom Rack in San Francisco and I see a display of handbags with a “DKNY” sign on top. Naturally, I expect the merchandise in the display to be from Donna Karan New York.

 

 

Surprise! Those bags in the foreground? They all had this tag:

 

KDNY by Kelsi Dagger. For the dyslexic fashionista?

 

Yes, it’s the 2012 version of Donna Karan’s nightmare.

The difference between DKNY and KDNY isn’t just the order of the initials. DKNY handbags are leather; KDNY’s are “pleather” (technically PU, short for polyurethane). A DKNY bag retails for $300 to $400; a KDNY bag costs about $100.

There are 42 live trademarks for DKNY in the USPTO database, zero for KDNY.

Of course, there are times when you might prefer an inexpensive plastic bag, as my Twitter friend Kevin pointed out.

 

 

Unsatisfying Subject Line of the Day

This email from Saks Fifth Avenue arrived in my inbox this morning.

 

 

An exclusive Tory Burch event that will “leave me wanting more”? Sounds like an invitation to disappointment. To leave someone wanting more means to under-deliver. Saks, however, is trying to say something quite different: “When you see the new Tory Burch collection, you’ll want more clothes!”

How can I be sure? Here’s the footer on the email: 

 

 

An email subject line may seem like a minor detail, but remember: it’s the first message a customer sees, and it can make the difference between opening an email and sending it directly to Trash.

This isn’t the first time I’ve suspected that Saks is employing copywriters who aren’t entirely comfortable with American English vocabulary and idioms. See my November 2009 post about “opportunistic.”

Oy-veda

I snapped this sign in my neighborhood last month:

 

It looked like good news. Although there are already 73* nail salons on the local commercial stretch, not one of them is a flagship for a major beauty brand like Aveda.

True, Aveda isn’t major major like Olay or Lancôme; Cosmetics Business doesn’t rank it among the top 50 global beauty brands. But it’s a serious contender. The company was founded in 1978 and is based in Blaine, Minnesota; it’s known and respected for plant-based beauty products sold in Aveda stores and in nearly 7,000 salons in 24 countries. I hadn’t heard of Aveda products for nails—only hair and skin—but maybe, I reasoned, I’d just missed the memo. After all, the typography of the sign sure looked a lot like Aveda’s all-caps sans serif font.

 

Aveda Dry Remedy hair products.

A sidewalk sign near the Coming Soon storefront offered a free pedicure to the first 500 people who signed up at AvedaNailSpa.com. (Don’t Google it; the URL no longer works.) What the heck? I signed up.

A couple of weeks later, here’s what I received in my inbox:

And Speaking of -LY Company Names

The creators of FounderLY would have done well to look up the definitions of “to founder.”

I’m thinking specifically of “to fail utterly, collapse.”

Via TechCrunch.