Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.insight From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: What's in a Date: Mon, 26 Oct 92 11:27:05 EST Message-ID: \HD What's in a Name? \BY Tom Dunkel \CR INSIGHT SUMMARY: Ever wonder where companies get all those wacky and wonderful names for their products? Say hello to the naming industry. It may sound easy, but coming up with trademark names for things is a lot more difficult than you'd think. A number of companies get top dollar for performing the service. TEXT: If Frank Delano had been a professional carpenter, maybe he would have built a crib when his daughter was born. If he'd been a musician, he might have written her a heartfelt lullaby. As it was, he spent three months selecting her name: Sonia Delano. Perfect. It rolled off the tongue. It had an exotic ring. It even looked good in a variety of typefaces. People normally pay Delano anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000 for such linguistic acumen. The name's his game. He is chairman of Delano Goldman & Young Inc., a boutique firm of "naming specialists" who work out of a modest apartment building on Manhattan's East Side. Without the services of Delano Goldman and a handful of other companies that share this quirky niche in the marketplace, millions of consumers might be reduced to crudely pointing at merchandise and mumbling at salesmen, "Uh, I wanna buy that red car. You know, the one with the big engine." Instead, we have the Oldsmobile Achieva, Biuric antigout medicine and Chambrel retirement communities, all Delano Goldman creations. To laymen, this sounds like the world's cushiest way to make a living. All it takes is a piece of paper, a pencil and a working knowledge of the alphabet. But think twice before running outside and hanging up that naming specialist shingle. "Look at it this way," says Dave Bucher, director of trademark examining groups at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "We have a registry now that's growing in terms of size. If there are 750,000 or 800,000 live registrations out there and another 150,000 pending registrations, you're talking about something approaching a million trademarks. . . . It's difficult to come up with a good mark that's gonna be a winner right out of the gate." Nobody knows that better than the hired guns struggling to hit the brand name bull's-eye. "It's harder to develop a name because so many suffixes and prefixes are taken. And in between there's not too much choice either," says Elinor Selame, who along with her husband, Joe, runs BrandEquity, a product naming and design company in Newton, Mass. She has reason to complain. The Patent and Trademark Office recognizes 42 classifications of products. In the pharmaceutical category alone there are more than 600 registered and pending trademarks beginning with the prefix "pro." Coming up with an original, unclaimed name that can stand out amid such clutter is no easy task, especially when you generally have no more letters to work with than a Scrabble player. Distilling the essence of a product into a few dewdrops of language requires the succinctness of a poet - a great poet, in Delano's opinion. "We're modern-day Shakespeares. That's what we are," he says, noting that the English bard is credited with coining some 1,700 words. Were he alive today, that talent would serve Shakespeare well as a naming specialist (and who knows, possibly pay off in Tempest All-Weather Topcoats or Lady Macbeth's Out, Out Damned Spot Remover). A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. True. But Shakespeare forgot to mention what effect the change might have on the flower's sales. What something is called has become as crucial a manufacturing consideration as color, price and packaging. Hence the pressured what-do-we-want-our-name-to-convey? corporate brainstorming sessions. Hence the hiring of high-priced consultants, who, in addition to their phonetic expertise, offer computer-quick trademark searches and sophisticated market tests of potentially winning brand names. Hence Achieva, Biuric and Chambrel. "You're not just throwing a lot of stuff up on the wall and then tossing a dart at it," insists Gus Buenz, Oldsmobile's director of public relations and a member of the in-house team that honed in on the Achieva name. "There's a tremendous amount of thought and research that goes into the selection of a name for a new product, primarily because you've got a tremendous amount of money invested in that product and you sure as heck don't want to screw it up." A few years ago the Wall Street Journal estimated that companies typically spend at least $20 million to unveil a new product. In the case of the Olds Achieva, the new product was actually replacing an old product: the Calais , an automobile whose name never conjured up much of a marketable image. Just who or what is a "Calais"? The city in France or the French word for callus? Achieva might not be a genuine word, but at least it connotes "a feeling of energy, some vitality," according to Buenz; just the subliminal message Oldsmobile wanted to send to its target audience of affluent 25- to 40-year-olds interested in an entry-level luxury car. Something apparently clicked. Since its introduction in January, Achieva has become one of the top-selling cars in Oldsmobile's eight-model stable. Yet there is no telling how much naming figures into that success. No one believes that a clever word can ever make up for a mediocre product. However, a good name can lure first-time buyers and, with luck and time, evolve into an all-important symbol of quality and reliability. "Certainly, the Ivory name, the Ivory brand, is far more valuable than the ingredients," observes Charles Brymer, referring to Procter & Gamble Co.'s venerable soap. Brymer is president and chief executive officer of Interbrand Inc. , a New York-based company with offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and six cities overseas. In addition to churning out names like "Amati" (Mazda's new luxury car), by happenstance Interbrand has become something of an appraisal expert. When British food company Ranks Hovis McDougall was faced with a hostile takeover in 1988, Interbrand was hired to assign a dollar value to its collective brand names in an effort to show shareholders that the takeover bid was too low. Since then a number of corporations - first in Europe, lately in the U.S. - have felt compelled to tally their intangible assets. Interbrand crunched the numbers for Grand Metropolitan when it bought Pillsbury in January 1989. The value of Pillsbury's family of brand names (which includes Burger King, Haagen Dazs and the Jolly Green Giant) was set at roughly $3.2 billion. The name for the current state of affairs in the brand naming business is "flux." A new era in trademarks was ushered in three years ago when U.S. patent laws underwent a controversial revision. Prior to 1989, a company was supposed to have a product literally in production and shipped across state lines before it could file for trademark protection of the name. That burdensome procedure gave way to a more liberal "intent-to-use" standard, which grants preproduction trademark rights for up to three years. Critics feared that the more relaxed rules, long the norm in Canada and Europe, would lead to a veritable trademark gold rush, as companies scrambled to stake claims on the best names, thereby strategically keeping them out of the hands of competitors. Delano thinks that, indeed, some stockpiling has occurred. To prove his point, he places two copies of the Patent and Trademark Office's weekly Gazette, a compilation of the most recent brand name applications, side-by-side on his desk. A December 1991 Gazette lists 962 registered "marks." A noticeably fatter Gazette from September 1992 has 1,949. "Some of these weekly Gazettes are over an inch thick," he says. "Before the change they were maybe a quarter-inch thick. [Intent-to-use] is causing a tremendous amount of trouble for all kinds of companies trying to find available names." There's no question that the numbers are up; roughly 50 percent since the new law took effect. It is expected that 123,000 trademark applications will be filed this year. Many of Delano's colleagues, not to mention lawyers at the Patent and Trademark Office, disagree that the mushrooming can be blamed on the intent-to-use provision. Rather, they argue, larger economic forces are at work. The number of products and companies inevitably grows. Also, services, as opposed to products, are now being registered; witness IBM and Sears applying for trademark protection of "Advantis," their Interbrand-dubbed computer networking service. Furthermore, the emergence of a true global market and, more specifically, the integration of the European economy have generated something of a cross-cultural trademarking frenzy. Brand names that have psychological currency in many countries are suddenly quite the rage. "People are not making car brands for one country," says Ira Bachrach , president of NameLab Inc. in San Francisco. "They're making them for the whole world." Bachrach's shop concocted the name "Acura" for Honda. The word doesn't mean a thing. What matters, though, is that it doesn't look or sound strange, imbuing Acura with a kind of universal acceptability. "When they start selling Acuras in Afghanistan," explains Bachrach, who studied linguistics in graduate school, "even though your native language is Arabic, you'll recognize that as a brand name rather than a natural word. It's short. It's dense. . . . It begins and ends in the same letter, like other brand names you've seen in English, like Xerox or Kodak." Once upon a time the process was a lot purer and simpler. The name of the product and the producer were often one and the same. Thus, Heinz, Ford, Borden, Kellogg and Hershey entered the corporate lexicon. Occasionally, contests were held to see whether employees could think of a suitably snappy name - a gimmicky exercise that's become passe. ("The worst thing you can do is run a contest in a company," says Joe Selame. "What happens is you make 300 enemies and one friend.") But the business world experienced a metamorphosis after World War II with the advent of the Chemical Age and a boom in new product development. "In the fifties and sixties you had things like Rinso and Oxo and so on," says Selame. "O's were very popular. In the toothpaste area there was Ipana and Pepsodent, names that kind of sounded marketing-oriented - and they were. Because radio was a big thing. The way it sounded through the radio was important at that time. Today the way it looks is just as important because of television. Today we have a different mode of thinking in names." All this fuss about names is a blessing for consumers, says Roy Parcels , president of Dixon & Parcels Associates Inc. in New York, a marketing and design company that formally opened a Name Power subsidiary (a registered trademark, naturally) four years ago. "The generic world would be very uninteresting," observes Parcels, who makes a brand-nameless existence sound as uninviting as life without oxygen or skin. An indistinguishable parade of products would clamor for attention on store shelves. There would be no incentive for manufacturers to improve their wares; nobody to complain to when you buy a stale loaf of bread. Sounds a lot like the old Soviet Union. Dixon & Parcels's fingerprints are on the name Essroc, the North American division of a French cement company. It is responsible for Bunny Bites chocolate candy, Wagtime chew sticks for dogs and Pastapazazz snack food. Five people lend a hand in name creation at Dixon & Parcels. In most cases, they must have a "winner" ready for a client in 30 days. But development time keeps shrinking. Parcels remembers that in the 1970s, before the Patent and Trademark Office discovered automation, the process of simply clearing a brand name took six or seven months. Computers now do preliminary checks in as little as four hours. Data processing has had an impact on more than work flow. Ads placed in trade papers by no-frills suppliers promise 200 product names for $200. The names are spewed out by computer, a practice that understandably makes naming specialists cringe. Delano Goldman has its own ways of serving clients short on time or money. The firm has begun stockpiling a list of several hundred prescreened product names, a kind of creative take-out service called Names-to-Go. The prospective clients are companies that need a product name in a hurry and are willing to pay premium prices for convenience. For the frugal-minded there's NameInput, a raw list of about 100 potential names that Delano Goldman will compile for $7,900. Strictly ideas for the hopper. No trademark approval guaranteed. For its everyday clients, Delano Goldman operates in a fashion similar to its competitors. Meetings are held with company execs to discuss what the product name should convey, then the consultants go home and bat around ideas among themselves and a few staff members. "You don't go to schools for this," admits Delano. Inspiration can come anywhere. He has skimmed horse racing tout sheets and browsed through bookstores in search of a catchy phrase. Eventually clients are presented with a short list of names for market testing. Phone surveys, mail questionnaires and in-person interviews are used. Dixon & Parcels has been known to pay doctors for an hour of their time in order to get inside opinions on contending names for pharmaceutical products. All naming consultants purge their lists of any names that carry unpleasant connotations. Delano Goldman spent $300,000 designing a software program that runs a multilingual background check. The computer nixed "Caprino," a name Delano had in mind for a cappuccino-flavored liquor. It means goat dung in Italian. The folks at NameLab take a more esoteric approach. Ira Bachrach's five employees include two with doctorates in linguistics. His degree is in electrical engineering. Obviously not the type of guys to consult the Daily Racing Form for leads. They prefer to pore over the 6,000-odd morphemes that are recognized as the semantic building blocks of all language. "You tell us what you want to say," explains Bachrach, "and the three of us will, by hand, extract from this table of morphemes every morpheme that bears in any way upon each of the messages you write, by denotation, annotation, simile or metaphor." By rearranging, sifting and juggling morphemes, Bachrach will finally form a couple of appropriate "international proprietary neologisms." Simply put: Words that aren't words. Like Acura. Compaq computer. Nissan Sentra. As Bachrach says, "Basically people hire us to make new language." But not everybody in the naming community is addicted to morphemes. Frank Delano, for one, is a phonetic traditionalist. He has trouble just warming up to the letter K. He's baffled that someone would call a perfume Knowing. "I could never understand how a sophisticated marketer like Este'e Lauder would name a product that starts with K. I don't think you can find a nice word in the dictionary that starts with K." He ticks off a few examples: "kill, kick, knock, knuckle." Knever mind, Frank. Este'e Lauder has no complaints. (Knowing's sales rank in the top four among the perfumer's 10 fragrances.) Besides, dictionary words might soon wind up on the linguistic scrap heap. We may well be witnessing the birth of a peculiar new language of global commerce. Capitalism's very own Esperanto. Acura. Amati. Taligent. With England, France, Germany and much of the rest of Europe falling into an uneasy economic embrace, a miniexplosion of naming activity has detonated across the Atlantic. There's a crying need for semi-international proprietary neologisms. The morphemes are flying at NameLab. Business couldn't be better. Funny, though, how Ira Bachrach uses an old-fashioned brand name to express delight. "Europe," he says impishly, "is buying Mercedes for all my employees." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM