Naming for global power.

So, you have super products, super technologies, an excellent team of people within your super corporation, but do you have a super name? Let's hope you do. Few corporations have unique global names - the large majority have either highly diluted or confusingly similar ones.

Come the millennium, only the very best corporate names will dominate the global marketplace. Weak, confusingly similar, or nearly identical names will not survive the power of electronic commerce. The duplication factor alone will bury most names in complex global listings. How will customers or shareholders find them? Today, a globally protected, unique and memorable corporate name is the single most important issue of corporate communication.

The Duplication Factor

Those who are deep in the alpha-numeric soup of electronic commerce can really appreciate the problem. Fishing for information on the 'Net is not as easy as it sounds. The chart on page 34 indicates the number of hits on the Internet for some of the root prefixes and suffixes used in all kinds of business and product names in commerce today.

Naming corporations in the upcoming virtual society will be very fluid. Zillions of wireless images and messages race against each other on fluid screens. This frantic process could well gobble up today's names like a giant bowl of cereal, every single minute, while a small number of elite global corporate names will dominate the entire world.

Origin of the Problem

Creating names by using a highly creative focus group session can only cause long-term problems. Today, in the age of specialization, naming requires a special treatment; therefore one cannot expect successful results from a long list of casually created names. Even large and powerful ad agencies and graphics shops with extensive experience in design and marketing may seriously lack the necessary experience in creating names.

The concept of putting together a long, creative list of names is also deadly because agencies hire too many freelancers, sometimes for a buck a name or a thousand names for a thousand dollars. These long lists of names from various freelancers are shifted from project to project, causing immense duplication and leading to chaos. Weeks of frustration and tens of thousands of dollars are spent on legal searching. Too often, the result of this name hunt is either a new, completely unpronounceable or a highly confusing name. Finally, in the desperate hour, some unlikely candidate name gets selected and the frustration and confusion carries on. Remember, just as a good name can ring cash registers, a poor name is the fastest way to oblivion.

Effect of Electronic Commerce

The electronic world has made it possible for us to live, almost simultaneously, around the globe in more than 200 countries and using more than 2,000 languages and dialects. No longer can a new technology, product, service or corporation call itself something simple, casual, folksy, funny or even silly, and hope to be understood and respected around the planet.

The instant globalization of a name brings new challenges. As recently as 10 years ago, at the dawn of corporate globalization, the Coca-Cola Company had to change its name in China when it was discovered that its phonetic equivalent, "KeKou Kela," meant "Bite the wax tadpole." To overcome this problem, the name was recomposed in a Chinese equivalent that now reads "make man mouth happy." Consideration of international languages in global business presents a growing obstacle in the launch of corporate product and service names. "Nay" is "yes" to Greeks. The American "yeah" means "no" to Japanese. To the British, phoning long distance is a "trunk" call, a "sister" is a nurse and "cereal" is cooked porridge and not cold flakes out of a box. A simple laugh, "ha, ha, ha," means "mother" in Japanese, while "Ohio" is good morning. In Russia, "look" means "opinion" and "socks" is "juice." In France a simple sign of "sale" conveys a meaning of "dirty." The Chinese word "mai" said in a certain style means to "buy" and in another style to "sell." When enunciated together, "mai" and "mai," then means "business."

The key languages are divided into 12 important families with 50 lesser ones. Indo-European is the largest family in which English is the most important category. Based on usage by population, following is the list of major languages in descending order: Chinese, English, Hindustani, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Bengali, Mahli and Italian. Unless implications are carefully analyzed, these languages can very quickly translate a name into sensitive signals, messages of love and hate, insults and profanity, ethnic slurs and other connotations.

Naming Strategies

Naming is not simply a creative exercise, it's rather a highly strategic undertaking to drive the corporate name as a weapon in the marketplace. In late 1987, then-CEO John Akers of International Business Machines (IBM) was reviewing the product menu at a meeting and scanned a list of vague acronyms and numbers, initials with dashes and slashes, upper and lowercase, piled one after another after another.

"We have terrible names!" exploded Akers, "If I can't understand what these products do, how can we expect our customers to understand?" Thus began a major new effort to create brand and corporate consistency at the giant conglomerate. When I was called to help, IBM - then the U.S.' most profitable company - was taking almost four person-years to develop a single mark. Something had to be done. First, I introduced a detailed system and procedures that were adapted to IBM's very specific needs. Information about specific trademarks and corporate data also was organized online. I and my associates then trained selected IBM employees to operate what had become IBM's own Naming Reference Center, or NRC. Today, it handles more than 1,200 product-related naming issues each year.

In 1993, I was called by IBM Canada - the second-largest IBM operation in the world outside the United States with some 11,000 employees. This subsidiary is recognized as a leader in the field, with its own independent innovations, technologies and standards. As part of the spin-off, a new corporate name was needed, and the company went through the normal routine - internal naming contests, focus groups and lists from agencies - you name it!

By the time I arrived, 1,500 names already had been rejected by the naming committee for being too long, too short, too narrow, too difficult, etc. Good ones were available in the U.S., but not worldwide. A lot of time and energy had gone into this intense exercise.

We had in-depth briefings with the CEO and senior management, including their legal counsel, and within two weeks, we developed the name Celestica as a final candidate. We were able to quickly obtain full support from the CEO, legal counsel and everybody including public relations, advertising, and their corporate identity team, all of whom cheered for its success. The name was released worldwide, with international press conferences.

So, out of the blue, into the top ranks of micro-electronics manufacturing, Celestica, a multi-billion dollar enterprise with more than 75 years' experience manufacturing for IBM, was launched with a logo depicted as a fireball.

Some time ago, KPMG had a major C.A.S.E. product for the global market, which was divided into two distinct stages of application: A front-end system and a back-end system.

Some kind of umbrella name was necessary, but one that also had to stand on two pillars, which imposed phenomenally difficult demands. For instance, one did not wish to call it something like Trees, and then Flowers; then the fourth or fifth generation of products would run into further naming problems, Fruits and Fruitflies.

After several briefings and presentations, we applied a corporate name for this U.S. $100,000 software product: Zerotime. It was a good name, and for numerous reasons: "Zero" is a word understood in some 100 countries and several hundred languages; the word "time" is understood equally widely.

Furthermore, the name could be registered quickly, and protected in 120 countries around the globe. Not surprisingly, Zerotime took off. And what of the "front-end" and "back-end" sub-products? Here we had been inspired by the images of goldfish and silverfish, and our final decision was Goldrun and Silverrun. (After all, computers do not walk, do they? But they do run!)

With Goldrun and Silverrun, the modulation concept was captured. And furthermore, both words fit in well with the umbrella name, Zerotime.

Are Silly Names Here to Stay or What?

Today, corporations, big and small, are still playing the dangerous name game.

Following are some key examples of confusingly similar names:

Some companies chase Intelligence in names:

Intelliquest, Intellifax, Intellimouse, Intellisoft

Being too brainy:

Eggheads, Netheads

Video conferencing naming lingo:

CU-SeeMe, UC-Me, ICU 

Hard working names of show business companies:

DREAMWORKS, GAMEWORKS, IWERKS

Some names just confuse everyone:

ZI, ZDNet, UUNET, NTV, MMX, Be, BeOS

Some names are just tuity-fruity:

Intuit, Intuity, Genuity

So don't be surprised if you hear the likes of: "I'm Charles Macintosh, vice president of operations at The La-La-Land Inc. Before that I was at Yahoo, and presently we are trying to compete with Dumb & Dumbers Inc. and The Motley Fool on their Intuity products."

Every decade or so, a new trend begins in corporate nomenclature - sometimes it works .'and sometimes it really goes berserk. In the '70s, when Apple Computer came out, Big Blue and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, Honeywell, as they were called) all were thrown off by this weird tuity-fruity name. But then Apple's success was followed by the copycats of the period. Thus came the hi-tech companies, Pineapple, Banana, Cherry, Apricot, followed by the animals, Centipede, Lizard, Alligator, Scorpion, Fox, Lynx, Mouse and so on. Today, none of the copycats are around, except Apricot Computers, which is a small company in Europe, and a mouse left on every desk.

Quick success generates excitement, joy and sometimes humor, but prolonged success demands sobriety and becomes a serious game. No matter how small a start-up, or how big a blastoff from either a basement or a garage, once successful, sooner or later, the business crash lands on Wall Street. This formal business scene demands a powerful name image, clear corporate identity, with proper attire and required attitudes for the global markets.

Three Golden Rules of Naming

1. Don't lean under someone else's umbrella; you'll still get wet.

Don't be a copycat. It is very bad to copy or borrow from an established identity. A look-alike, sound-alike name, resembling the personality of a powerful, established, legendary name will be fruitless in the long run. Stay clear of legendary names.

2. Creativity is a spark of genius. Over-creativity can cause fire and damage.

Don't get too creative. Do not twist, bend, stretch, exaggerate, corrupt or modify alpha-structures to their extremes in naming. It may result in difficult, confusing, unpronounceable and only silly names.

3. Work locally, name globally.

Do not short-change. No matter how small or local the project, think of the future and think of this small planet. A name is only good when it is free and clear to travel around the globe, without encountering translation problems or trademark conflicts. Think globally.

Naseem Javed is president of ABC Namebank International, New York City; URL: http://www.abcnamebank.com. He will be a featured Expert of the Week on CW Online Nov. 15-30.