Fritinancy

Brands of the decade: 2010–2019

Ten years ago, when social media and blogging were still new and a rational person was in the White House, I did something ambitious and presumptuous: I published a list of the Brands of the Decade.*

And now it’s time to do it again.

To qualify for my highly subjective top-12 list, a brand had to meet these guidelines:

• Founded during the second decade of the 21st century or shortly before or
• Had a significant impact on the way we do business or live our lives during this decade or
• Consistently made headlines during the decade (for better or worse).

Because I’m a name developer, I gave a little extra weight to brands with interesting or influential names.

A message to sticklers: Yes, I know that actually a decade begins in a year ending in 1, not 0. SORRY.

In alphabetical order, then:

Word of the week: Sonder

This was going to be a short entry following up on a 2011 post I wrote about the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, an online lexicon of invented words created by John Koenig (the first syllable rhymes with pain). Koenig went on to achieve extra fame through his 2016 TED talk and a subsequent TED Radio Hour feature.

Then I started doing a little casual digging, and … hoo boy.

Here’s the tweet from Karen that sent me down the rabbit hole.

I am just an extra in the movie that is your life. https://t.co/l2QwqmoPUg

— Karen Wise (@wisekaren) May 8, 2019

And here’s John Koenig’s definition of sonder, which he coined in 2012:

The awareness that everyone has a story – that all the random passersby you see around you have an emotional life just as rich as yours, even though to you they’re just an extra in the background

And here’s Koenig’s lyrical short video about sonder.

 

 

March linkfest

NASA has renamed a facility in West Virginia after Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose story was told in the book and and subsequent film Hidden Figures. Johnson, who was born in West Virginia, will turn 101 in August.

Katherine Johnson. Source

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You can help name some newly discovered moons of Jupiter, but only you follow some restrictive rules. The name “must be 16 characters or fewer, preferably one word. It can’t be offensive, too commercial, or closely tied to any political, military or religious activities of the past 100 years.” And that’s just the beginning. (Hat tip: Chris Labarthe.)

April linkfest

Good news for liberal-arts majors: “Behind Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are not just software engineers. Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools.” (“The Next Hot Job in Silicon Valley Is for Poets,” Washington Post.)

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A small hotel group, Small Luxury Hotels of the World, is “ditching photos entirely in its new campaign and running text-only ads that flatter the target market by suggesting they'd never fall for typical tourism marketing anyway.” (“This Hotel Group Is ‘Unadvertising’ Its Properties with Intentionally Dull, Text-Only Ads,” AdWeek.)

 

 

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Names in the News: Illegal Pete’s, Mirai, Pineapple

In Fort Collins, Colorado, a Mexican restaurant chain called Illegal Pete’s is being targeted by immigrant-rights groups that say the name is derogatory and offensive because of “the i word,” as in “illegal immigrant.” The chain’s owner, Pete Turner, opened the first Illegal Pete’s in 1995; he told the New York Times the name “was inspired by the name of a bar in a novel and by his late father, also named Pete, who had a rebellious streak.” “I never intended it to be about undocumented immigrants,” Turner told the Times. “Never. Not once.” Turner, who calls himself a pro-immigrant liberal, says he gave serious consideration to a name change. But in early November he announced, in a long letter on the company website, that he’d decided against it. Readers’ comments have been almost unanimously supportive.

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This week Toyota announced that it would start selling a hydrogen fuel cell sedan in 2015 (sticker price: $57,500). The futuristic car has a name to match: Mirai, which means “future” in Japanese.

Mirai nameplate via Toyota blog.

 

The name sounds good to non-Japanese ears, too. Mira means “look” in Spanish, “aim” or “objective” in Italian, and “watch intensely” in French. In Sanskrit it means “ocean,” a fitting association with hydrogen. And in the Slavic languages mir means peace.

For a different take on “Mirai,” see linguist Victor Mair’s post for Language Log. A pertinent passage:

[O]ur English word “future” is firmly rooted in an Indo-European belief that it will come to pass / be / exist. The Sinitic term, in contrast, is more skeptical, and indicates an uncertainty about the very possibility of that which has not yet arrived. It seems to me that, if we accept the philosophical implications of the term, mirai / wèilái will keep receding and never quite arrive.

Toyota Mirai via AutoBlog Green.

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Print magazines, once dismissed as dead-tree relics, are proving to be pretty hardy after all. California Sunday, an independent monthly (for now) that’s distributed with the state’s biggest newspapers, made a splashy debut October 5. Now Airbnb, the lodging-rental company that’s out to disrupt the hospitality industry, has launched Pineapple, a quarterly publication for hosts (who may choose to share it with their paying guests). According to a New York Times article, the 128-page winter 2014 issue carries no advertising and contains features on San Francisco (where Airbnb is headquartered), London, and Seoul.

Why Pineapple? For centuries—since Columbus’s second voyage, according to some accounts—the fruit has symbolized hospitality and luxury. Pineapple names and images are common in the hospitality industry, and pineapple tchotchkes abound.

Pineapple welcome flag, MadAboutGardening.com.

 

 

 

Pineapple Hospitality, a Bellevue, Washington-based chain of boutique hotels.

 

 

A different Pineapple Hospitality: distributors of “green” amenities for hotels.

 

 

 

“It Couldn’t Please Me More” (The Pineapple Song) from the stage version of Cabaret (cut, sadly, from the movie). So rare! So costly! So luxurious! I searched in vain for a clip from the original Broadway show, in which the immortal Lotte Lenya played Fraulein Schneider.

 

March Linkfest

“We’ve turned learning vocabulary into an addictive game,” says Vocabulary.com, which this week announced its new app (iPhone and iPad only, for now). Vocabulary.com’s chief technology officer, Mark Tinkler, told Fast Company that some people play “over 10 hours a day. It’s crazy.”

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The name of the 131-year-old Orient-Express—the subject of a Paul Theroux travel memoir and an Agatha Christie murder mystery—will no longer be attached to hotels and restaurants. The new name, Belmond, was developed by AgencySacks and “is derived from Latin for beautiful and world,” according to Belmond’s chief marketing officer, Ralph Abruzza. Read an interview with Abruzza about the name change—which will not affect the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express train—and a backgrounder that includes the brand-launch presentation. News to me: Belmond, né Orient-Express, owns New York’s ‘21’ Club. (Skift)

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Moriarty. Mordred. Voldemort. Mordor. Morlock. What’s the deal with “mor,” asks James Harbeck: “Is there something to the syllable that suits it for melancholy, darkness, and villainy?” (The Week)

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Is Netflix responsible for the rise of “queue” in American English? (New Republic)

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You’ve probably heard about Facebook COO Sheryl “Lean In” Sandberg’s campaign to ban the “bossy” descriptor for girls and women. Perhaps you’ve tangentially wondered, as I did, why cows are frequently called “Bossy,” at least in the U.S. There are two theories, and “no matter which of the two theories you pick, you end up in Latin.” (World Wide Words)

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In China, LinkedIn is “Ling Ying” (literally “lead elite”) and BMW is “Bao Ma” (“precious horse”). How branding consultancies manage the Chinese language gap.  (Advertising Age, via Marjanne Pearson.)

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From Pandemic to Yellow Top: 41 brand names given to drugs in “The Wire.” (Mental Floss, via Wordnik.)

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And speaking of fictional drug names, here’s a great big old Wikipedia list of them. (I wrote about one of those names, Ablixa, last year.)

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Languages that have contributed to English vocabulary: a nifty historical infographic (Lexicon Valley)

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If you must do naming research, here’s how not to do it. (Tip: Never ask “Is this name easy to say?”) (Lexicon blog)

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I attended my first roller derby match a couple of weekends ago, and couldn’t believe my ears when the announcer said that Fatal Dreidel would be skating for the Oakland Outlaws. Not only is that her actual nom de derby, it turns out there’s a whole subgenre of Jewish derby pseudonyms, including Mayhem Bialik, Yom Tripper, and Hebrewno Mars. (Jewniverse, via Diane Fischler.)

For more on derby names, see my May 2011 linkfest and law professor Dave Fagundes’s “Talk Derby to Me” (great title!), on “intellectual property norms governing roller derby pseudonyms,” published in 2012 in the Texas Law Review.

That’s a More

Wherever you turn in Ad Land nowadays, some innocent modifier is being shamelessly nouned. Here’s today’s example: Mr. More, Embassy Suites’  “embassador,” in a recent ad for the hotel chain. 

  

“More more than a mortal man can handle.”

 

According to a press release, Mr. More is “a quirky ‘bleisure’ (business + leisure) traveler who’s always looking for ‘more of more’ and ‘less of less’.”

(And no, Embassy Suites didn’t invent “bleisure”: The word-blend started showing up in the UK a few years ago and is being used by at least one New York hotel that isn’t Embassy Suites.)

The Embassy Suites campaign started in 2012, a leap year, with the theme “366 Days of More.” (The campaign ended last week.) Nounified more also showed up in “our insane devotion to always giving you more of more” and “a more-tastic amount of more.” The ads were directed by Roman Coppola, son of Francis Ford.

Now, more, like good, is sometimes a real noun, as in “The more you read the more you know.” Note the definite article, though. Embassy Suites’ more isn’t that kind of more; it’s a nounified modifier.

The insurance company Safeco has it both ways with more:

 

"It’s like a museum. I’m afraid to touch anything.”

The tagline in these ads is “Some people want more out of life. We insure the things that make more possible.” “More out of life” is an idiom that functions as a noun (the object of want); while in make more possible, more functions as “moreness.” Or maybe “more more-tastic moreness.” Who knows.

Watch more Safeco spots at AdWeek.

(Hat tip to Ben Yagoda for the Safeco ad.)

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.

A Man Walks into a Cliché…

No, really: That’s the name of the bar.

 

Harrah’s Club, Stateline, Nevada. Photo by Larry&Flo.

 

So very elegant. And exciting. And “knowledgable.”

I’m not detecting a shred of self-aware irony here.

Photo by Jeffry M. at Yelp.

Let’s eavesdrop on the brainstorming session that led to Cliché:

“Think upscale, dude. Think hip ultra lounge.”

“Also knowledgable.”

“Don’t you mean knowledgeable?”

“Whatever.”

“French would be good.”

“Oh yeah. They have those cool accent marks, don’t they?”

“Awesome, dude.”

“Something Frenchy, yet familiar. Really, really familiar.”

“Like exactly what you’d expect in a casino that’s in Nevada, but not in Vegas.”

“Where everybody knows your name.”

“And everything looks just like everyone’s idea of a Nevada casino.”

“Hey, I’ve got it…”

If you prefer your clichés to include flashing lights and unclad young women, Harrah’s has a weirdly named attraction for you, too. Behold the VEX Nightclub.

Does nobody over there own a dictionary?

According to a case study on the Philips Color Kinetics website, the club’s design involved “the latest in LED lighting technology,” especially on “the club’s signature Go-Go dancer catwalks.” The LED sources are controlled by something called a Video System Engine and a DMX system, so maybe—I’m trying to be generous—VEX is some sort of abbreviated acronym.

Or maybe the dancers just pout a lot.

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Hat tip to my knowledgeable friend Vicky for telling me about Cliché.

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.”