DO look at your competitors, and see what language they use.

DON'T imitate or emulate someone else's intellectual property.

Revise and refine until your position and your promise are unique.

DO find names you like, from many companies both within and outside your market.

Also find names you don't like, and try to figure out why.

DON'T start naming until you have prioritized the criteria to evaluate potential names.

DO come up with hundreds and hundreds of names.

Many will be bad.  That's okay.

DON'T try to evaluate the names the same day you have created them.

Instead, wait a few days; try some different directions, let all the options

settle in your brain.  Then pick 6 to advance, for legal due diligence.

***************************************************************

As seen in the Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-inbox4oct04,1,6767477.column?ctrack=1&cset=true

IN BOX

By Karen E. Klein

product in your niche?  Top-of-the-line consulting expertise at bottom-line prices?

List words that you'd associate with your brand and string them into clever combinations.  Humor,

alliteration and simile can elevate a slogan from dull to memorable.  Ideally your slogan shouldn't

be more than six or seven words long.

When you have a couple of possibilities, look at your competitors and identify those that have a

similar brand "promise," suggested branding expert Steve Cecil, founder of WhereWords.

"You want to avoid inadvertently duplicating someone else's intellectual property.  Revise and

rewrite until your position is unique," he said.  Talk to an attorney for further information on

intellectual property protection.

Get feedback from employees and associates before you decide on a slogan.  They may see

problems that you haven't.

If your effort goes nowhere, you've got a larger problem, Cecil said.  It might be that you haven't

adequately identified your company brand and need to build a foundation before you put on the

second floor.  What's your company's vision?  Its mission?  Its value proposition?  If you're not

sure, you need more than a slogan.  Cecil recommended two books, "Building Strong Brands"

and "Managing Brand Equity," both by David A. Aaker for further information.

Why does a brand matter so much in business?  It's the only way you can define your company

in the eyes of the world -- and your customers.  "Utter fortunes rest on the difference between

'computer editing' and 'desktop publishing,'" Cecil said.

******************************************************************************************  

As seen in the San Mateo County Times

http://www.insidebayarea.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=2888354 

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 my marriage.

     Your wife is a writer too?

No, I'm married to the nurse you hope you get if someone ever takes you to the Stanford Emergency

Department.  After 22 years she's seen it all and when she has a bad day, it usually means somebody

didn't make it; when I have a bad day, the worst of it is usually no more than a bruised ego and some

hurt feelings.  While her job is both physically demanding and critically important, mine is neither. 

     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."

When corporate strategists are befuddled over what image they want to portray for their companies, they often turn to Steve Cecil, a resident of San Carlos who has a knack for creating nine-letter novels and six-syllable sagas -- all in the name of brand identification.

Like a word detective, Cecil, 47, will do some initial research via telephone so he will have the ability to pop out something in the neighborhood of 300-word samples for his clients. The result has turned the former journalist into a branding professional and short-form copywriter, creating names, key lines and phrases for high-profile clients such as Adobe, Best Buy, Kodak, Pepsi and numerous others. He works with larger naming firms and ad agencies on a regular basis and as an independent contractor with a select group of clients.

The secret to his success: "My brain thinks in pictures that come out as words," Cecil said. "I'm like a dog in the backyard, going through 30-40 different holes -- and if there is an idea there, I'll get it. A good list is about 300 samples."

A native of Santa Cruz and an English major while at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Cecil was editor of the school's newspaper.

He started his career as an aspiring journalist, landing a job at the Saturday Evening Post shortly after graduation, working as an editorial assistant and performing proofreading duties. He also tried his hand at headline writing, producing revised story names -- called slugs in the biz - - as he saw fit. Post-it notes had just been invented and Cecil recalled using the yellow sticky notes for his pithy headline ideas. His efforts were rewarded, and Cecil was soon promoted to sports editor (in spite of the publication having no official sports department) so that he could cover and write an article about the Masters Golf Tournament. A shared byline resulted in a promotion, allowing him to work on other Saturday Evening Post publications.

Ultimately, Cecil found himself working as a kind of generalist, performing varied duties from writing articles to selling ads. He then landed a job selling regional advertisements to national magazines. The job eventually brought him back to the Bay Area, with a territory from San Jose to San Francisco. He pulled

out a map and looked for towns between the two cities, ultimately settling in San Carlos.

"The point where I decided to focus on naming, versus being a kind of generalist, was one day when I was coming back from a call," Cecil recalled. "The car in front of me was a Camry. It started to become clear to me that the word 'Camry' could really be translated to mean 'my car.' I wondered if they knew that. Of course they knew that."

"Back then, there weren't many naming companies," Cecil said. "As an editor, I had enjoyed publishing that changed other people's words for the better. I knew that I was in the right industry. I was in the right airport, but not parallel to the runway."

What happened next was serendipitous: Cecil responded to an ad in a trade magazine for a naming contest. He won the competition and began his second career. He said that the work sometimes involves clandestine e-mails sent to him asking him to position things that are only vaguely described.

"I might be told that it's a luxury condo where all of your needs are satisfied -- when really it was an SUV that is so well-appointed that you could live in it. I have no ego about any of this. I don't care if they tell me the wrong thing," he said.

A recent job was finding a new name for a bank in the North Bay that wanted to change its image to meet broader business needs. Thanks to his efforts, Novato Community Bank is now Circle Bank. Another success story was an Oregon soil-excavation firm called LandTech Solutions, that wanted a name that sounded smart, but didn't reek of being a business that took itself too seriously. Cecil renamed the company DirtLogic.

In working with his clients, Cecil adopts the persona of "Ranger Steve" and takes turns with various hats while giving his in-person presentations. The 6-foot-4, 270-pound master of neology (a newly invented word or phrase) said that his work is akin to being a docent in leading corporate clients to a better understanding of words and meaning.

"I wear different hats, like the Nike hat, and tell great fable-like stories," Cecil said. "We explore where good names come from. There are one, or two, of 40 different ways to name things. There are alphanumeric names and products that are named after people. Starbucks came from the book 'Moby Dick. ' Listerine was named after (founder) Joseph Lister. You couldn't name a product with your own names these days."

Cecil said that companies often come to him with a narrow idea, and they want him to be more descriptive.

"The namer is a verbal chemist," Cecil said. "We combine and recombine words -- looking for just the right nuance, or glancing blow. I do this in real time -- and sometimes I talk the group into a cul-de-sac."

Kim Petrini, CEO at Circle Bank, called Cecil's work fascinating and educational.

"The bank was in the process of undergoing a repositioning," Petrini said. "I wanted to not only change its name but to change its image to cross geographic boundaries. Not only are there no geographic ties, but the name is short enough for people to remember. And when we see the sum product of a circle, we see that it's never ending. It really gave the board a new perspective on what goes into creating a name -- and the importance of creating a name.

"It certainly is an interesting conversation piece. The origin of the name Circle Bank always comes up."

When he's not racking his brain for new word combinations, Cecil is a husband and father. His wife, Sandy, is an emergency-room nurse, and the couple have two children, son Alex, 18, and daughter Samantha, 12.

While the workload is heavy, Cecil said that, on average, it usually only involves working with one client per week.

"I can only do this about once a week," he said. "It's exhausting, as you can imagine. It's also exhilarating. It's a challenge not to be in the same phase with each client at the same time, switching between strategic and creative. It's hard -- like getting the hiccups. Once you've got them, you just ride them out."

Cecil added, "I spend all day on the telephone and I never meet most of my clients. I couldn't really recommend that anybody do what I do. I don't think anybody could survive 24 hours in my head."