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128 From design to brands 10 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE EXTRAS Read the article to check. b How companies name new products The name is important. It’s the first thing with any product you use or buy or see. You are bombarded by thousands of names every day. In this daily barrage, only the names that are most catchy and trip off the tongue can survive in your memory. So it’s no surprise that companies – especially large ones like Sony or Procter & Gamble – hire naming companies. That is, there are companies that come up with names for things. Cars, lines of yoghurt, smartphone apps, small businesses, sodas, movies, and even theories have all been named by professionals. Now, we’ve all come up with names before – for pets, children, bands, or blogs. But when it comes to designing a name for a business or a product, there are a number of additional factors to consider. Case study: Photoshop Elements (pse) The word ‘Elements’ took a lot of work. Photoshop was looking to market a less expensive version of its software, which it wanted to market as having all the capabilities of regular Photoshop but without many of the ‘bells and whistles’. Adobe hired Oakland-based naming company Catchword to come up with something. Catchword went through a month-long exploration of every word that might apply: ‘essentials’, ‘basics’, ‘light’ etc., but they all sounded compromising. Finally, they came up with ‘Elements’, which implies both simplicity and necessity; the parts that are basic but important. (The company Catchword , by the way, got its name from the guiding words at the top of the dictionary pages. Those are the ‘catchwords’.) The naming business There are really only a handful of businesses that deal exclusively in names, and their services can cost thousands of dollars. In addition to coming up with names, they also determine which names are available for trademark, which URLs are available, and they conduct linguistic checks to ensure that the potential names are pronounceable, unique, and appropriate in languages around the world. Linguistic checks can be vital: Catchword was once naming a toy and one of the names they had come up with for it turned out to mean ‘a small device that doesn’t work’ in Japanese. So they ruled out that option. Types of product names At one end of the spectrum you have descriptive names , which just describe what the thing is – like Raisin Bran and Shredded Wheat . Descriptive names can be great because they’re self-explanatory. But they are also hard to own. In fact, neither Raisin Bran nor Shredded Wheat is trademarked. Anyone can make a cereal and call it raisin bran or shredded wheat. The other big drawback to descriptive names is that they can be limiting. Descriptive names contributed to the downfall of a lot of specific start-ups in the 90s, like estamps.com , which had trouble expanding services beyond its name. All the way on the other end of the spectrum are so-called arbitrary names , which don’t tell you anything about the product or service. Like Apple . Arbitrary names allow for flexibility – in Apple’s case, the name allows them to make anything. Arbitrary names can also be completely made up. These kinds of names are called ‘ empty vessels ’. Names such as Hulu , Exxon , and Kodak mean nothing on their own, and were largely chosen because they are short, unique, and sound appealing. Arbitrary names and empty vessels are easy to trademark, easy to get the domain name for, and are usually effective in languages around the world. Drawback: They are hard to market. You have to put a lot of money behind these kinds of names to tell people what they mean. You would have no idea what Amazon sells or does if it didn’t have the budget to tell you about all its services. Most names fall somewhere in between the two poles of descriptive and arbitrary names. These are ‘semi-descriptive’ or ‘ suggestive names ’ – like Microsoft , which kind of says ‘software for microcomputers’, but not explicitly. Microsoft is a ‘ coined word ’ – a word that doesn’t exist in an English dictionary but is made up of familiar words, word parts, or sounds. Spotify , Nespresso , and Netflix are also coined words. Nur zu Prüfz ecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv