1.      How important is a brand name?  Not every company has a logo, and not every product needs a slogan; but every company has an identity and every product needs a name.  And because some names are “better” than others, the question becomes: how important is it to have a really good name?  Plenty of companies succeed despite having horrible names (like Siemens or Monsanto), because of sustainable competitive advantages; even more companies fail despite having clever names (think Petsmart or Napster), because good branding will not survive bad management.

2.      How do you know if you need a new name?  Names are like babies, anybody can make one; even on accident.  Like babies, names are sometimes free – but they are never cheap.  They both take a ferocious amount of time and energy and money to care for until they can take care of themselves, and even then it’s not worth it unless someday they can take care of you.  So maybe you don’t need a new name.  But you ought to be able to list specific advantages your name helps you achieve, and you need a new name if you can’t.  Your name ought to help you differentiate from your competitors, and you need a new name if it doesn’t.  Your name should be attracting and winning new customers for you, and you need a new name if it isn’t.  Your name should not be working against you in any obvious ways, and you need a new name if it is.

3.      What are some names you like, and why; also some names you don’t like, and why?  I enjoy some deconstructed names like Acura and Cisco and Expedia, but not Solutia which sounds sluggish; I like lucid neologisms like Pixar and Snapple, but not Kazaa which is impenetrable; I get a kick out of foreign words like Zima and Kijiji and Camry, but not Akamai which is cockamamie; I love names from literature like Starbucks and Nike, but not Inktomi which is icky; I like the tension found in compound constructions like SnapFish and SlingBox and Industrial Light & Magic, but not RedHat which is random; I like the reduplication in YouTube, but not Hulu; I’m a big fan of Latinate marks like Lucent and Xerox and Diageo, but not Telesis; phonetically identical approximations like Google and Segway seem to work, but not Cingular which must be spelled; I respect highly contrived yet authentic linguistic confections like Haagen Dazs and Verizon, but not Aquafina ; I’m fond of acronyms like Tivo and even GEICO, but not IKEA or AFLAC; I like contractions like Intel and Nabisco and Adidas, but not Skype because “explaining is losing;” in general  I am disappointed in alpha numeric names like J30 and on principal I do not like initializations like GE and IBM and ATT, although AOL is OK, but I especially hate TIAA/CREF.  What makes Amazon a good name?  Yes it conveys vastness and immensity and origin and ecosystem and awesomeness, but it’s also one of the few words with an A and Z in it.

4.      What’s the process you take clients through?  Naming is some of the funnest hard work there is, but it doesn’t come easily for a lot of people; so I create an atmosphere of mutual respect and creative collaboration, and teach people how to handle ideas and hook them into concepts.  Together we work to discover the genuine, authentic “aboutness” of your brand promise; next we account for competitors, trying to find some elbow room in that increasingly crowded house called “your category.”  But the goal is to get above & beyond “what you make and do,” and to prioritize the criteria we’ll use to evaluate the names.  Next I ideate profusely, creating hundreds and hundreds of candidate names, connecting to the brand promise through nature and through music and through philosophy and through science and through literature and through religion and through humor and through sarcasm and through logic and through fantasy and through art and through magic and through sports, using metaphors and similes and analogies and rhyme and all manner of constructive linguistics.  Then I deliver the long list in the order conceived to preserve the train of thought, and facilitate your brainstorming along with me.  After a few days deliberation we’ll shortlist favorites for prescreen against class in the USPTO.

5.      What are some of the biggest challenges companies face when choosing a name today?  Legal due diligence is what sucks the fun out of the process for most name teams, along with the availability of top level domain names.  I get a lot of panic calls from companies who have worn themselves out brainstorming and none of the names survived legal, so they have to start over and I help them find the confidence to push the re-set button.  I try to understand the client’s objectives, and at the same time I work to set their expectations.  The USPTO recognizes 45 different classifications; the first 34 are for products, the rest are for services.  That’s how you end up with Delta Faucets in class 11 Environmental Control Apparatus, and Delta Airlines in class 39 Transportation and Storage, as well as Delta Dental in class 36 Insurance and Financial and Delta Power Tools in class 9 Electrical and Scientific Apparatus.  They share the nonexclusive use of the mark because nobody confuses a bathtub for an airplane for a dentist for a saw, and Confusion is the basis for all intellectual property arbitration.  Within each class there are 4 types of names, which vary widely in terms of trademark strength.  The weakest are Descriptive marks like General Electric and American Motors and Precision Engineering and Advanced Research and United Technology.  Offering more protection are Suggestive marks such as Puma (you never saw a slow one, did you?) and Oracle (a relational database whose trend analysis and predictive modeling foretells the future like the Oracle at Delphi).  Still stronger are Arbitrary marks; you have a computer that has nothing to do with Apples, so calling it Apple is very distinctive and therefore entitled to more protection.  Strongest of all are the Fanciful marks you can’t find in the dictionary, like Travelocity and Sony and Napster.  Now imagine an Exclusivity Continuum stretching horizontally; on the far right are completely distinctive names like Joost and Kazaa which get registered easily because no one ever thought of those letterstrings before.  On the far left are names that are also easily registered because they are so well represented that no one owns them exclusively.  For example, Microsoft was not the first to use Vista and Nike was not the first to brand around Air – but each came to own the word through media tonnage.   It’s much harder to get the dot.com than it is to get the trademark because all the dictionary words have already been registered; in fact all 5-letter combinations and 99.9% of all 6-letter combinations have been registered, so be prepared to buy a parked page.

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