Name games: Microsoft by any other name would sell as well

Washington Monthly, March, 2005 by Jamie Malanowski

The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy

By Steve Rivkin & Fraser Sutherland

Oxford University Press, $20.00

It's odd that a book about the naming of products would have so misleading a rifle, but The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy has bait-and-switch written all over it. Ever since Theodore White poked his notebook behind the scenes of presidential campaigns, the magic words "the making of" have promised readers a definitive explanation of how brainy, stalwart, hard-working people accomplish something of importance--in this case, perhaps, how the people at General Mills thought up the name Wheaties or hipsters at Apple conjured up the moniker iPod. The portentous phrase "Inside Story" that authors Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland have stuck into the subhead certainly reinforces that impression. Well, there's no inside stow, In fact, there's no outside story, no beginning, middle, or end. There are not even any characters. It's hard to think of another title that so misses its mark.

The book really should have been called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Naming Products, Along With Much Fort Didn't. It is chock-full of information and examples, indefatigably packaged into types and themes and categories and other time-honored social science boxes that suck the life out of even the most fascinating subjects. The writers--two serious, bespectacled gentlemen sporting distinguished facial hair--tell us that there are so many brand names in America that our landscape is actually ... wait for it ... a brandscape. They apply labels to various types of names: initialized and acronymic names (IBM, Alcoa), allusive names (the Mach3 razor), arbitrary names (Apple), and the coined names currently in vogue (Agilent, Lucent). They write about how names influence--and are influenced by--the other modes of language, and how namers come up with names. "We've taken brand names apart ... auditioned the rhetoric of brandspeak ... circled and perhaps corralled the topic of brand names' symbolism ... sketched the long and short of creating lists of brand name and made name nominees." And so, so much more. They even invoke morphemes and lexemes, and, just as you're inching for the door, they launch themselves into some of the more fascinating lacunae of trademark law. At least they didn't show home movies.

It's not all boring. There are, for example, several pages in which the authors discuss the perils of transporting brand names across linguistic boundaries, pointing out how Volkswagen's Vento means "fart" in Italian, how Estee Lauder's Country Mist makeup means "manure" in German, and how Powergen, the Italian maker of a battery charger, showed its obtuseness when it insisted on dubbing its Web site www.powergenitalia.com. These Porky's-caliber yuks enliven the proceedings considerably.

Amid this wealth of thought and information, Rivkin and Sutherland's central message is that brand names matter. Good names give products memorable identifies and suggest an image to consumers. Brand names are so important that there are people (among them, Rivkin) whose jobs consist of thinking them up. Who among us hasn't sat in front of the television, stupefied by some commercial, wondering, "What genius came up with that?" Chances are, it was a now-significantly-wealthier genius. One of these name-conjurers, we learn, was paid $70,000 for advising US Air to change its name to US Airways. Another farm raked in $75,000 from the Infiniti car company for choosing the letters J and Q to go with the company's J30 and Q45 models.

For all that money and attention, however, it's not clear that brand names really make much difference. Rivkin and Sutherland highlight a number of brand names that they admire, such as Windows, the Microsoft operating system that the authors call "inspired," and others they detest, such as Mirant and Agilent, which do not connect to a brand or product in any way. But Windows wasn't a success because it was called Windows. Windows was a success because of Microsoft's brilliant strategy of becoming the operating system in most of the world's computers just as prices dropped and people galloped to the stores to buy the machines. True, Windows was a felicitous and even elegant choice of a name for the operating system, but does anyone doubt that Microsoft could have called it the Mirant operating system or the Agilent operating system, without anyone batting an eye? Think about that era: We all had to learn a whole lot of new words, many of them illogical and stupid, including Microsoft itself. A rose by any other name is still a rose.

Or take another favorite of the authors': Viagra. Rivkin and Sutherland can hardly contain their admiration for Pfizer's brilliance in naming its love drug. "Because Viagra rhymes with Niagara, it suggests splendid vigor and a natural marvel. It begins with a voiced fricative and suggests speed and power (velocity, vroom).... The sonorant r is voiced and implies the fullness of roundness, resonant-e, and rolling." Be that as it may, let's come down to earth. We're talking about a drug that restores sexual potency to middle-aged men, an item as close to a fountain of youth as civilization has yet invented. Pfizer could have called the drug anything short of Childmolesta and guys would have taken it.