Sometimes, I miss the weird names of the dot-com era.
They haven’t completely disappeared, of course, particularly in the pharma (think of George Lucas rejects like Zoloft) and infotech spaces—sciencey-sounding words like Cognitivity. (That’s an e-learning company, by the way. Based in California, natch.) Anyone else remember a Minneapolis dot-bomb called wwwrrr.com? I think it was pronounced “whirr.” Those were giddy days.
Companies still shank the naming process from time to time. But overall, the goal these days seems to be: Your company’s or product’s name shouldn’t induce sniggers or head scratching. Neither should it disappear into one of the marketplace’s many crevices.
But how can you do both?
This past week, I chatted about product naming with Aaron Keller, managing principal at Minneapolis design firm Capsule, which has done several naming projects. Some of its recent ones include RoamEO, a pet tracking device made by locally based White Bear Technologies; Storganize, a St. Louis Park storage and organization company; and HealthEast’s Cerenity senior care services.
In considering a proposed product or company name, “a lot of naming firms will look at all the typical things—the meaning, the cadence of a word, the number of syllables, international meaning,” Keller told me. But some firms, including Capsule, also “take a visual aspect of it.” The patterns of letters on the page can bring to the product additional meanings, or suggestions of meanings: “How something appears visually can have a big impact on its memorability.”
During Capsule’s brainstorming, combinations of letters get manipulated; familiar words are scrunched and stretched out. “You have to see beyond what the word is now: ‘How can I manipulate this word to serve my purposes?’” In some ways, “you’re destroying and rebuilding pieces of the English language.”
It’s why it’s not just writers who attend brainstorming sessions. “The more experience you have being a word person, the more constructs you have about what words are, and the more respect for the words,” Keller said. But in the name discovery process, he believes, “You also have to have a disrespect for words.” All that shredding and screwing around can be nearly traumatic for a wordsmith: “‘No, you can’t do that! That’s my favorite word! I love that word! Don’t do that to my word!’”
I read you. That “c” in “Cerenity” does scrape its pointy claws across the blackboard of my writer’s sensibility. But I’ll grant that for many people, its roundness could convey a wholeness that also suggests openness and embracing. And that’s on the page. The word still sounds like “serenity.” You don’t lose that.
The visual is as much a part of our culture as literacy. It’s something a lot of us journalist/writer/wordsmith types aren’t sure what to do with yet. We worry that the visual is starting to smother the verbal.
In any case, a great conversation with a guy who operates in both realms.
A page of word association during a Capsule “name-storming.”
A summary page of proposed names Capsule presented to Wearable Goods, a Minneapolis branding and merchandising firm. It ended up choosing the sharper, edgier moniker Mosquito.
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