As seen in the San Mateo County Times, 7/25/5

Monday Q & A

Writer Finds His Game in a Name

San Carlos resident Steve Cecil has, appropriately, a gaggle of names to describe his job: branding professional, neologist, copywriter and nine-letter novelist, to name a few.

The former journalist recently chatted with staff writer Tara Ramroop on his love affair with words, and how his ideas make the jump into the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office.

     How did you first realize you were good at this kind of stuff?

I was maybe 8 or 9 years old when it dawned on me that I had beaten all the grownups at Scrabble.  But even though it was clear I had a knack for language, I was a slow reader (often times more interested in the words than the sentences).  Numbers and math were always a struggle and even today I'm tempted to round off phone numbers, but letters and words came easily and writing became as intuitive as thinking.

     Have you always had a love for words, books or word puzzles?

Vice versa, actually.  Words love me, and go out of their way to please me.  Sometimes all it takes is a deft pun or witty Spoonerism to make my day.  I can't imagine a world without metaphors, similes and colorful language, like "tough as a two-dollar steak" or "nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs."  We play word games on car trips, like Rhyme Thyme, in which the 2-word answers to the 2-word clues must be homonyms (i.e., obese feline = fat cat).  Of course I own dozens of dictionaries (English, Latin, Sanskrit, slang, etc) and many more volumes on such topics as grammar, syntax, rhetoric and etymology.  I've worked hundreds of puzzle books and have had 5 of my own published.  But language, like bread, grows quickly stale, so I cook up new verbal confections fresh daily just like Krispy Kreme.  

     What are some names you've come up with?

When First American Credit Corp. wanted to signal their commitment to assisting non-traditional homeowners in emerging markets, I listened carefully and named the new lending program ANTHEM (a very patriotic word which I made stand for: Assisting Non-Traditional Homeowners in Emerging Markets).  A soil excavation company called LandTech Solutions wanted a new name that didn't take itself so seriously, so I renamed them DirtLogic.  Sometimes companies don't want to change their names but are forced to, like when the United States Patent and Trademark Office found the name Project View "too descriptive" for the Portland-based construction reporting company.  Because lenders, developers and builders loved the name I tweaked it only slightly to become Progress View (which the USPTO promptly approved and no one else seemed to notice).

     How many of your name creations are currently adorning products nationwide?

As a full-time verbal branding professional and short-form copywriter, I've handled between 20 and 50 naming projects each year for the past 10 years.  About half my work is day-labor to the trade, where an ad agency or PR firm will email me a creative brief and I'll ideate against it and then email them a list of potential name candidates.  The other half is direct-to-client, in which I assume a greater leadership role to facilitate the engagement.  Either way, I usually must sign a Confidential Non-Disclosure Agreement which prohibits me from revealing details of the assignment, sometimes even after it becomes public.  But I've named everything from shoes to shampoos, from soft drinks to software, from start-ups to spin-offs; I've concocted monitor monikers and appetizer appellations.  I once named a town, and even helped a state come up with a new slogan.

     Take me through the process; how do you decide the right name for a business or product? 

Naming is iterative, which means you have to be wrong a lot to be right at all; but it's also non-linear, which means you have to keep being wrong in new ways.  Even then you may wander past the solution, unless you have first taken the time to prioritize the criteria against which to evaluate alternatives.  For example, imagine a new cola that comes in a special kind of can that maintains a lower temperature longer, and will be positioned as the "colder alternative."  After analyzing the competitor set to determine which Brand Archetypes are over-or-under-represented, and which Dimensions of Leadership are occupied or vacant, creative exploration might begin with an inquiry into What is cold?  What things are cold?  What places are cold?  Who thrives in cold?  For me these directions would lead to names like "D32" (alphanumeric), and like "Brrrr" (onomatopoeic), and "PhaseChange" (descriptive), and "Fairbanks" (a toponym), and "Celsius" (an eponym), and "Colcola" (a neologism), and "PolarCola" (compound).  I aim for 150 names that first half-day session, and another 200 during the second half-day session, making connections to the brand promise through literature, logic, science, humor, and philosophy.  

     Aside from having a catchy name, what's a key element of product naming?

Trademark law is what sucks the fun out of the process for most companies, and I usually get called after their internal Naming Committee has tried to name something themselves (and of course, the name they wanted wasn't available).  The USPTO recognizes 46 separate international classes (the first 34 are for Goods, the rest are for Services) which explains how you end up with a Delta Faucets (class 11, environmental control apparatus) and a Delta Airlines (class 39, transportation and storage) not to be confused with Delta Dental (class 36, insurance and financial).  Within each class there are 4 types of names ranging from Descriptive (the weakest) to Suggestive (strong) to Arbitrary (even stronger) to Fanciful (the very strongest of all).

     Have you done this work professionally for any other businesses?

Yes I anchored the West coast office of an East coast branding firm, and later built the verbal branding division of a top Silicon Valley PR firm.  Previously I was in magazine publishing for a national advertising group that included Time, Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, but the constant travel started to take a toll on me. 

          You started out as a fellow journalist; how and why did you make the turn over to branding?

Fun is where you find it, and I find it in words.  One day I was stuck in traffic behind a Toyota, and my brain anagrammed MyCar out of Camry.  Did they know that?  I decided they must've.  Is that where the name came from?  No it comes from "kanmuri," the Japanese word for "crown."  Suddenly I was that 8-year-old boy again, playing Scrabble with car names; Mustang is Guts Man, Integra is Granite, Pontiac is Caption.  It turns out that naming is the kind of writing you do when you care more about the words than the sentences.  I tell people I write nine-letter novels.

     What do you think of boring old newspaper names (Times, Record, Standard)?

Class 16 (paper goods and printed matter) is well-populated with Tribunes, Heralds and Journals, in addition to those you mention, which are indistinguishable from one another without their geographic disclaimer.  Such descriptive names do much of the heavy lifting in the category, but it is the exceptions to this rule that represent the strongest intellectual property.  The Wall Street Journal for example manages to transcend that thoroughfare in Manhattan where the stock exchange is located (which would make it a Descriptive mark).  In the process, Wall Street has become synonymous with "investing," (which makes the WSJ a stronger, Suggestive mark), even as The Street has emerged as a synecdoche for "the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street."

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