Fritinancy Fashion Week continues with the story of a venerable retailer, a mysterious ad, and a clever tagline/hashtag.
The September 2015 issue of American Vogue contains 832 pages, and on only two of those pages do we see women who aren’t whippet-thin. The women on those two pages are photographed in silhouette against a gray background, and although the spread appears to be an ad, no brand is identified – there’s only a date (9.14.15), an enigmatic hashtag (#PlusIsEqual) and web URL (plusisequal.com), and “It’s time for change. Be part of it.”
I was interviewed by Businessweek for “Zen and the Art of Startup Naming,” about the proliferation of “zen” names (Zendesk, Zendrive, Zenify, etc.). For more, see my Pinterest board of Zen names.
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Zen names notwithstanding, it looks like Y is the new Z. Last week I wrote about names that substitute Y for I, and I just recently I discovered a new double-Y name, Swayy. It’s a startup that “brings you the best content to easily share with your audience and followers, based on their interests and engagement.” Is the name meant to be pronounced with a plaintive ayy? Or is it just another case of “We rejiggered the spelling to get a cheap domain”?
Speaking of Sway(y), here’s your rhumba interlude.
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And speaking of trends, will we ever see the end of the -ly naming fad? Evidently not, if Evidently is any evidence. The Toronto-based “creative content agency” (their phrase) also hops aboard the “you deserve it” bandwagon with this statement on its Facebook page:
There’s an asterisk after “We produce the engaging content your brand deserves”; the clarifying footnote reads “Deserves, in a good way.” Yes, “deserve” can flip its meaning—“Shame on you; you had it coming” or “You’re a winner!”—as I noted in my June column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Ads We Deserve.”
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I love a name with a good story and a clever double meaning, which is why I’m so pleased by Rich Brilliant Willing, “America’s premier contemporary lighting and furniture design manufacturer.” The company was founded in 2007 by three RISD graduates whose surnames are—pay attention now—Richardson, Brill, and Williams.
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Another name that pleased me: she++, “a Stanford-based community for innovative women in technology.” The name is a pun on the programming language C++. I love the logo, too.
Read more about “plus” in branding in my April column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”
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Finally, here’s your bad name of the week: Twibfy, a dopey and nearly unpronounceable name for a company that calls itself “an inspirational platform.” (Translation: Pinterest wannabe.) You won’t find the name story on the Twibfy website, but on Twitter a company spokesperson said it’s an acronym (!) for “The World Is Beautiful From us to You.” (Random capitalization and awkward syntax sic). When you search for “Twibfy,” Google asks whether you mean “Twiggy.” That spells twouble. (Hat tip: Catchword.)
My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus, “Shall We Plus?”, looks at the evolution of “plus” from preposition, adjective, and noun into a verb. Full access to the column is restricted to subscribers; here’s a sample:
Enterprise Rent-A-Car is also positive about plussing — although “Plus Your Life,” the slogan for the “enhanced Enterprise Plus loyalty program,” is ambiguous.
The phrase makes marketing sense only if we understand “plus” to be a verb meaning “improve.” At first glance, though, it's easy to think it means “And your life.” That was Washington Post copy editor and usage-guide author Bill Walsh's mocking interpretation: he tweeted a photo of one of the “Plus Your Life” ads and commented, “If you're willing to die for Enterprise Rent-A-Car.”
Read the rest of the article, which includes more examples of verbified “plus” from marketing and – a surprise to me – government.
A few observations about the new marketing campaign for the Bay Area’s Sutter Health medical group.
Outdoor ad, Van Ness Avenue at Filbert Street, San Francisco.
First, who says “with child” in 2013? Even on Downton Abbey, set between 1912 and 1922, characters were constantly saying that so-and-so was “pregnant.” (The casual use of the word was almost certainly anachronistic: the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us “pregnant” was a taboo word until the mid-1950s. “Expecting” and “in the family way” were far more common.)
“When you’re with child, we’re with you” is earnest but clunky: “with child” and “with you” aren’t really parallel here.
But what will puzzle most people about the ad is the slogan: “We Plus You.”
It isn’t intended as a mathematical statement, with plus as a conjunction: “We plus you equals good health,” or something like that. No, plus is clearly a verb here: “It’s how you plus us, and we plus you.”
“Because you plus us … and we plus you.”
I remember some talk about to plus a couple of years ago, when Google launched its social-media service Google Plus. To give a stamp of approval to something on Google Plus, you click a “+1” icon. Users started referring to the action as “plussing.”
But it turns out Walt Disney had Google beat by almost 70 years. According to How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, a chatty/motivational 2004 biography that refers to its subject by his first name, Walt Disney emphasized “the plus factor” to his artists and designers:
Sometime during the 1940s, Walt coined the term “plussing.” Normally, the word “plus” is a conjunction, as in “two plus two equals four.” But Walt used the word as a verb—an action word. To “plus” something is to improve it. “Plussing” means giving your customers more than they paid for, more than they expect, more than you have to give them. … He began by plussing Mickey Mouse with sound, then plussing the Silly Symphonies with color. Walt plussed the skills of his artists by sending them to art school at his own expense. Walt’s relentless quest for excellence kept him at the leading edge of his industry—and left his competitors, well, nonplussed.
Sutter Health may be using “plus” in this “improvement” sense. Or maybe it’s saying “You complete me.”
“We Plus You” isn’t the only bit of peculiar wordplay in the Sutter Health campaign. Here’s a full-page print ad in the March issue of San Francisco magazine:
“We specialize in You-ology.”
You-ology? Right down the hall from Your-ology, where you can get that prostate exam.
