Fritinancy

Name in the news: Haven

A nonprofit company founded in January 2018 by three billionaire business titans – Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase) – and headed by a non-billionaire-but-not-doing-badly-at-all celebrity doctor, Atul Gawande, yesterday announced its name: Haven.

Connecting the dots?

 

Haven is being called a healthcare venture, but it’s not a care provider. It’s neither a hospital nor a clinic. Nor is it an insurance company. For now, it will be headquartered in Boston (a New York office is in the works) and serve only the employees of the three founders’ companies.

So what is it?

Here’s what Gawande, a practicing surgeon who is also the author of Being Mortal and a regular New Yorker contributor, says on the Haven website:

Let’s get personal

I’ve been noticing a mini-trend in corporate naming: personal names. The names are usually (but not always) female, and they’re often a little old-fashioned. At their best, they add emotional appeal, humanize a company – especially a technology company whose actual workings may be opaque – and make a brand seem like a friend or family member.

Here are some of the personal names I’ve been tracking:

“X When You Want It”

Is it the frequency illusion or a genuine trend? Hard to say. I do know I’ve been seeing and hearing variations on the “X when you want it” sloganclone lately.

Here’s an ad for the Chevy Volt:

 

“Electric when you want it, gas when you need it.”

That’s also the tagline being used on Chevy’s underwriting credit on KQED-FM, my local NPR station.

Things could get interesting if Zipcar, the car-sharing service in the US, Canada, and the UK, adds Volts to its fleet. Zipcar’s slogan has been “Wheels when you want them” since at least 2006.

 

 

San Francisco-based Esurance, which is owned by insurance giant Allstate, has used “People when you want them. Technology when you don’t” as its slogan since June 2010. The slogan appears on the website and in all ads.

 

The campaign is called “Techie Feely”; the photos above depict Chad (on the left) and Sanjeev, who represent, respectively, “Feelies” and “Techies.”

I don’t have a grand theory about the popularity of “X when you want it/them,” but it looks to me like the latest iteration of the “YOU” ads that have been around for a couple of years. I wrote about that trend in November 2009 and in February 2010.

Nomics

This headline, for an article about Tiger Woods’s foundering golf-course business, appeared on the front page of the New York Times business section a couple of Sundays ago. (The online headline is more search-engine-friendly.)

 

 

“Tigernomics” made me think, of course, of Year of the Tiger Names. But it also reminded me that “-nomics” continues to be the go-to suffix for every trend in search of a pseudo-scientific reason for being.

Here, for example, is a banner I snapped last month at discount retailer Loehmann’s in San Francisco:

 

Dictionary-type syllabification: very scientific!

 

Loehmann’s introduced the Loehmannomics sale during 2009’s Recession Spring and has repeated the event each March.

And there’s more:

• Insurance company GEICO, which employs a Cockney-talking animated gecko in some of its TV spots, ran print ads last fall touting “Geckonomics 101: A Primer on How to Save Money Car Insurance.”
• Socialnomics is the title of a book published in 2010 (subtitle: “How Social Media Transforms the Way We Do Business”) and a related blog.
• “Happynomics” surfaced in 2007 after Deutsche Bank published a paper on four strains of capitalism: “happy,” “less happy,” “unhappy,” and “Far Eastern.” (Huh?) The term was revived last month when British Prime Minister David Cameron decided to create a national happiness index.
• Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage and Dirty Dishes, by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson, was published earlier this year. There’s a blog, too.
• Nieman Journalism Lab coined “newsonomics” in a recent headline about the New York Times’s new paywall.

Back in August 2007, The Economist’s advertising columnist, David Kiley, asked (or stated—the headline ends with a period) “Is ‘–onomics’ the new ‘-Gate.’” His subject: Emotionomics, “a new book by a marketing guy named Dan Hill.” Kiley hadn’t yet read the book:

But the mere title makes me think I’d be smart to tack “onomics” onto my next book. It’s an obvious attempt to catch some wind from the prop wash (a pilot’s term to describe the wind forces you encounter when flying behind another plane) of “Freakonomics.”

Since that article was published, Freakonomics has sired a sequel book, SuperFreakonomics; a blog; a movie; and—not a joke!—a pair of pants. That’s some prop wash!

Recall, however, that Freakonomics wasn’t a wholly original coinage. The -nomics trend goes back to Nixonomics, invented in late 1969 as “an umbrella term for the economic policies of President Richard Milhous Nixon.” (Source: World Wide Words.) Nixonomics begat Reaganomics, Clintonomics, Bushonomics, and Obamanomics. (Two authors have written books titled Obamanomics. The subtitle of the one by John R. Talbot, published in July 2008, is “How Bottom-Up Economic Prosperity Will Replace Trickle-Down Economics  in the Obama Presidency”; the subtitle of the one by Timothy P. Carney, published in November 2009, is “How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses.”)

The hyperproductive -nomics suffix has also given us ergonomics (coined around 1950), burgernomics (coined by The Economist in 1986 to describe an informal index of purchasing power parity), and Enronomics (“a fraudulent accounting technique that involves a parent company making artificial paper-only transactions with its subsidiaries to hide losses the parent company has incurred through business activities”).

What do you predict the next -nomics will be?

UPDATE: In a comment, Joel Makower drew my attention to Vespanomics, “the ecological, economic, and personal satisfaction one achieves after buying a Vespa scooter.” We can tell that Vespanomics is Real and Serious because the definition includes syllabification and random diacritical marks: VÉS PÁ NÄM ÍKS.

On the Brand Trail: Portland, Oregon

When I travel, I turn into a brand anthropologist: I gawk at, and photograph, names and signs that locals take in stride. Last week’s brief trip to Portland via Coast Starlight was no exception.

1.

TheStandard (yes, one word), a division of StanCorp Financial Group (of course), is an insurance company that may or may not be based in New York—the website is maddeningly vague. I’d never heard of it before last week.

What caught my attention was the tagline: “Positively different.” The blue flag emblem suggests the “banner, pennant” definition of standard, but the word has multiple meanings, and I couldn’t help being slightly puzzled: Isn’t the whole point of a standard that it’s positively the same at all times?

2.

Food carts are at least as big a phenomenon in Portland as they are here in the Bay Area, with one major difference: Here the carts are nomadic; you need to follow them on Twitter to figure out where they’ll be heading next. In Portland, the carts are permanently parked along a couple of busy downtown sidewalks.

A small sampling of the dozens of food carts on Alder Street.

This takes a lot of the serendipitous fun out of the whole affair; but, on the other hand, it’s in keeping with Portland’s polite, orderly vibe. (Such courteous drivers!)

One cart’s name reminded me that I haven’t written about “Mr.” businesses in a while. (See my May 2008 post, “Mr.-y Spot.”)

As the Food Carts Portland blog notes, “Shouldn’t it be Senor Taco?” Good question.

3.

I saw a second Mr. in Southeast Portland; a friend was driving so I couldn’t shoot the sign, but I later found it online.

I’m sure top hats are a big hit with today’s prom-goers.  

Mr. Formal operates stores in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Arizona; its slogan is “Tuxedos for All Generations.” Isn’t it cute the way the cross-bar on the F resembles a bow tie?

4.

Finally, at the Portland Art Museum—the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest—I spotted this sign.

Photography is verboten, but the very nice security guard made an exception for me.

It seems to me that if you go to the effort and expense of building a center of modern & contemporary art, you could at the very least spell contemporary with all its syllables. And maybe spell out “and.”

I do, however, like the way the museum’s logo highlights “art”:

Yes, it’s another cartouche museum logo!

Read my March 2010 post about brand sightings in another very polite American city, Minneapolis.

Names in the News: Qliance

I urge you to read David Goldhill's provocative article in the September issue of The Atlantic, "How American Health Care Killed My Father." The author is a business executive (and, not for nothing, a Democrat "concerned about America’s lack of a health safety net") who did extensive research and concluded that our current health-care system is not worth preserving in any form:

We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government’s role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

But because this is a naming and branding blog, not a policy blog, I want to focus on a brand name mentioned briefly in the article: Qliance. Goldhill offers it as an example of a "nascent ... consumer-centered system"¹:

Qliance Medical Group, for instance, now operates clinics serving some 3,000 patients in the Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, areas, charging $49 to $79 a month for unlimited primary care, defined expansively.

Qliance is an interesting coined name with an interesting pronunciation problem. Because the /ql/ consonant blend is "unnatural" in English, my first inclination was to interpret the Q as a K and to read the word as though it were spelled Clients. That almost made sense, although I doubted any health-care organization would be quite so transparent about its raison d'être.

Then, because I'm reasonably hip to invented words and their quirky spellings (I'm responsible for a few of them myself, after all), I backtracked. Perhaps, I thought, the name is pronounced as though the Q were a separate syllable: Cue-liance.²

I found no pronunciation cues on the Qliance website. So I was left with plenty of Q's. I set out to find some A's.

 

The Trouble with "Reform"

Vanity Fair contributing editor James Wolcott finds fault with the sloganeering of the Democratic Party:

Are you telling me that with all the money pumped into consultants and pollsters, in a country whose media culture is built on advertising and catchphrases, that with all of ambitious little beavering minds who have studied the art and science of persuasion (and know Lakoff "framing" backwards and forwards, chapter and verse), that with all of that the architects and backers couldn't come up with something more inspiring and memorable than "health care reform"? Where's the creativity, the missionary zeal, the visionary spark? First of all, "reform" is one of the most boring fucking well-meaning meaningless words in the language. It's a word that carries no juice, no buzz, no friction, no color, no nothing.

Why is it that Republican consultants can coin something as cunningly diabolical as "death tax" (as a substitute for inheritance taxes) and sell the hell out of it, or contrive the "Contract with America," yet health reform is packaged in a plain brown wrapper with all the pizazz of a corporate restructuring plan. It should have been called something upbeat and flagwavey like "The American Health Freedom Act," guaranteeing health coverage and available, affordable insurance for all.

Other terms used by Wolcott: dead-dick policy term, fish-smacked, poison spitballing, rightwing pesticide spray tank, and Hitler in high heels.  Read the column.

Hat tip: JordieW.