What's in a name?

Communication World, April, 1996 by John Freivalds

Many companies naturally spend a lot of effort to produce an excellent product or service. But even with a quality product, international sales can suffer if you give it the wrong name. Companies have to think more globally than ever, for everyone in the world can now download a company's products from its Web site.

Ira Bachrach of Name Lab, an international communication firm that specializes in naming products, services and companies (Acura, Compaq, Geo, Lumina, Zapmail), says, "Unlike natural language, a product or company name derives much of its meaning from the perceiver's experience of the names of similar things."

You likely wouldn't call a refrigerator an "Explorer," or a machine tool "Dove," in English. Yet often when names are elected, companies forget that names given in English with a positive meaning, may not carry well -- if at all -- in other languages.

One high-tech company found this out when it named all its products after Greek gods (Zeus, Jupiter). While these names imply strength in English, they meant nothing in other languages and were hard to pronounce in their English spelling. In addition, with an expansion of their product line, they were running out of Greek gods. They eventually went to numeric designations for their products.

Then there are the names that carry negative connotations or prove embarrassing. Kellogg's "Bran Buds" sounded like "burned farmer" in Swedish. "Dainty" soap came across as "aloof " in Finnish, and "dim-witted" in Farsi.

But Americans are not the only culprits. Initially, Mitsubishi sought to sell its four-wheel-drive utility wagon as the Pajero until they learned it meant "straw man" in Spanish; it was renamed the Montero, "Mountain Man." One firm tried to sell a de-icer in the U.S. by the name "Super-Piss." The Spanish potato chip "Bum" did not do well for the same reason. Nissan also sought to sell a sports car in the U.S. in the early '70s called the "Fair Lady." It later sold better as the 240Z.

Good names can change a product's fortune. New Zealand farmers struggled for years to sell a small fr-uit in the U.S. market called a chinese gooseberry. Sales went nowhere until a San Francisco greengrocer gave it the name of "kiwi fruit."

So what is the world's most perfect product name, which not only is easy to pronounce in many languages but also carries a positive connotation in most? "Omo" laundry detergent produced by Unilever. The name is flawless because it sounds like "mother" in many languages and designates a household product.

The mechanics of naming

When we name children, all we do is sit in the kitchen and go over the names of relatives who we would want to honor by naming our children after them. For pets, naming involves the way they took or something out of our past, like a favorite toy we had when we were four years old.

Naming products has become quite a bit more complex. In coming up with a name for the old Bell Labs division of AT&T, San Francisco-based firm Landor Associates went through 700 different names before they came up with "Lucent Technologies."

Morphemes

This sounds like a drug, but it is actually a key component of "constructional linguistics." Like all En lish nouns, roduct and company names are constructed of linguistic components called morphemes. According to Bachrach, "Morphemes are the semantic kernels of words. The "van" in advantage is a morpheme that means front of, top of, or leading edge of wherever it appears." Name Lab has codified nearly 6,200 morphemes in the English language.

Structure and legitimacy

The way we perceive names derives from the names of similar things. New soap names, for example, tend to fall into the Dove-Ivory-Zest-Dial syndrome of one- or two-syllable words. And medicines follow the pattern of Anacin, Bufferin and Excedrin.

So if you come up with a name of a product, it has to be perceived as legitimate in view of what similar products were called in the past. Thus Fastin might be a lousy name for a sports car, but a good name for a diet pill.

Function

In any naming process, hundreds of potential names are eliminated by some of the steps already mentioned. Others face the ax when it's time for the gauntlet of "speechstream visibility, notational visibility, phonetic transparency and multilingual function," said Bachrach. (I wonder if my parents went through the same process when they named me while they sat at the kitchen table one night.)

Speechstream visibility is the probability that the name will be recognized in a normal spoken stream of English. More important is whether a word is phonetically transparent -- meaning whether or not it is easily pronounced and remembered?

Finally, it makes sense to eliminate names that do not sound well or make sense in other languages. My Latvian parents did not know the error they were making when they named me Janis (pronounced Yawnis), for in English it is a common female name.

How to avoid problems in international naming

Any international marketer should take the following steps to avoid embarrassment or, worse, no sales as a result of a bad name: