Funny Business: The Game for Namers

Namers of the world, rejoice! I bring tidings of great joy, for unto you a game is born. And the name of that game is Funny Business.

Funny Business, “The Hilarious Game of Mismatched Mergers”, challenges players to give names to companies that have merged. The funny part of Funny Business is that the mergers are of incongruous businesses. What name would you give to diner that merged with a hardware store? Or a fruit stand and a cruise line?

What It Is

Four to eight players compete to give the best name for two businesses that have come together. Two “business cards” are drawn for each round of play, each card features a type of business and a list of related words to inspire a name. For example, the business Comic Book Store includes action figure, edition, graphic, superhero, strip, villain, et al. The names each player comes up with can include those words but don’t have to.

Game Play and Voting

Each player anonymously writes down their one best name on a card and the cards are shuffled. A “Boss,” who rotates between plays, reads each name aloud and players secretly vote on their favorite one. The Boss may not vote on their own name, but other players may. After voting, the votes are tallied and points are awarded according to who gets the most votes (2 points), who voted for the winning name (1 point), and the Boss earns double of any points he or she earned in the round. The voting system is ingenious, ensuring that players are not incentivized to vote for their name, but to vote for the best name. Or, at least the name they believe will earn the most votes.

The Verdict

My greatest surprise with Funny Business is not that the game exists (though: hallelujah!), it’s seeing how amazing names are developed by every non-professional-namer I’ve ever played with. The last game I played was swept by my nine-year-old niece.

Funny Business is a fantastically fun game. It’s great for adults and kids – the box suggests age 12 and up, but, in my experience, younger precocious kids can hold their own. And, at less than $8 bucks discounted on Amazon, you really have no choice but to run to your local Amazon (it’s not far!) and grab a copy of Funny Business to play this holiday season.

Have fun!

Wanderful: The Story Behind the Name

“Mickey Mantle needs a new name.”

That’s how I first heard about the assignment, when a colleague told me about his client named Mickey Mantle and his yet-unnamed interactive children’s book company.

To name a publisher, imprint an imprint, title a maker of titles; this would be a dream assignment.

The resurrection of an old brand would be the inception of this new one. Living Books, the products that created the category of highly interactive children’s books, was dormant for years. Broderbund was the original publisher and in a series of acquisition/mergers/spin-outs and ownership changes, Living Books ended up as the property of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Despite a decade of great success, new stories in the Living Books series were not released, and the software languished without updates to newer operating systems for PC and Macs.

Mickey Mantle, once Broderbund’s VP of Engineering/CTO and now an entrepreneur, struck a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to re-publish the Living Books series, which includes about 20 individual stories each by a variety of noted authors, including Mercer Mayer (Little Monster), Marc Brown (Arthur), Jan and Stan Berenstain (Berenstain Bears), Dr. Seuss and others. For today’s kids, the assets from the original CD-ROM titles, like  graphics, animations, sound and music, would be used directly by a new technology platform developed by Mickey’s team running on iPads and iPhones, Android mobile devices, and current Mac and PC computers.

Once again, Living Books would live, but it would have to do so under a different name. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt allowed the Living Books content to be re-published so long as the Living Books name remained theirs. That required the new publisher to use a new moniker but could include an attribution that the stories were “originally published as a Living Book by Broderbund Software” and the display of a small Living Books logo accompanying the attribution. The new name would have to coexist and contrast with the former one.

The original Living Books logo

I interviewed the founders of the company: Mickey Mantle; his wife, Natasha Krol, a PR and marketing veteran; and Mark Schlichting, an expert in child education and language development, a children’s book author and illustrator, the creator of the hysterical, award-winning Noodle Words app, and the original creator of Living Books.

I learned from them that Living Books and its reincarnation were richer, deeper and far more interactive than other e-books. Every page of every title features a multitude of tappable elements. With a dozen or more things to do on each page, children linger longer. Their attention, knowledge and imagination are strengthened as a result.

The new brand had two key facets: education and play. Because education is sometimes framed as work – homework, schoolwork, et al. – I first believed these ideas stood in opposition. Indeed, the pedagogical foundation of Living Books 1.0 was rigorous enough that thousands of schools incorporated them and accompanying teaching aids into their curricula. Even today, some schools keep legacy Macs or PC systems around just to retain access to Broderbund’s wunderkind series.

In our discussion, Mark explained to me that play actually enhances learning. If kids have fun while learning, they will engage more deeply and eagerly with the materials. The new brand and its name would have to convey that these interactive books are both educational and fun in order to appeal to kids, parents and educators.

The new name would also have to stand out in the absurdly crowded iTunes and Android marketplaces (500,000 apps and counting). Presented with a list of hundreds of interactive book choices, the brand name needed to leap off the screen to catch the attention of a busy parent or impatient child.   

I wrote name objectives that assimilated and synthesized the interviews and background research into one page. With the criteria for name development and selection established, creative development could commence.

Quoting Maurice Sendak, who passed while this naming project was in development: Let the wild rumpus start!

The Internet was my creative playground. I discovered inspiration researching children’s words, vocabulary acquisition and development, “Dolch” words, fairy tales, games, verbs, exclamations, and children’s word play. Foundational words like fun, happy, laughter, tickle and learning were fed into corpora engines, word lists and other online naming powertools like Wordnik, Sketch Engine, and OneLook. Specialized children’s sites like Lanternfish supplemented my longstanding resources, as did primary research with my nieces and nephews. Watching the kids, who age from 4-7, play with a beta version of Living Books on my iPad demonstrated its power; they threw themselves into the stories and played with rapt attention.

Here’s a list of some of the creative searches I did online. Please consider this list a handy resource for your naming projects:

action verbs
animal sound verbs
baby talk
cvc words
double letter words
first verbs
first words
frequentative
fun words
funny laughter words
happy-happy joy-joy
i am talking
idioms for kids
idioms in education
laffterglow
language acquisition
language development
the first words that children learn
learning words
list of verbs
meanings pictures sentence list
movement-fast
movers and shakers
my dogs words
my little ponies
of imitative origin
onomatopoetic
phrasal verbs list
place names of distinction
potionbook
punkin words
rhyming words
songs
sounds
stragglers
that’s funny
time to be cute
verbs
verbverse
wander
wander rhyme
wonder
wonder rhyme
wordplay is child’s play for punsters
words my 19 month old daughter says
words used by or to young children

I also used Sketch Engine quite a bit. Here are some of the terms searched for this project. Bear in mind that Sketch Engine requires a paid subscription (well worth it!) and thus links will work only after you've logged in:

fun

book

laugh

learn

play

playful

smart

tickle

wander

wonder

These lists illustrate how different resources can be used to delve into one idea, and the surprising sources of inspiration that can come up when you’re freely exploring (my little ponies!). These offer glimpses into a naming mind.

 

The stories in Living Books are playful and multidimensional, and I strived to create names that were, too. Making frequent use of a specific creative technique – letter substitution – generated scads of such names. It’s the same method I used to name Fanhattan and BrainForest.

The words wonder and wander, being one letter apart, were already mingling. I researched all English words that contain wonder, and respelled those results with an a. Thus, wonderful became wanderful.

Wanderful is packed with paradoxes. It brings together many ideas, yet is perfectly simple. It is a new word that feels familiar. It is as surprising as it is comforting. Wanderful describes the books, full of joy and the invitation to explore. It describes the free-form play afforded by Living Books’ expansive and non-linear interactivity. It describes whimsy and curiosity, delight and enrichment.

After preliminary screening, Wanderful was presented along with 30 other candidates. The client team deliberated and chose Wanderful plus a few backup names for full legal vetting. Upon clearing, Wanderful was adopted as the final name.

The wonderful Wanderful identity designed by Wild Out West

The Wanderful icon, now available at an iOS app store near you!

It might be coincidence, or maybe zeitgeist, that the day before Wanderful was announced in June, the New York Times Sunday Review featured this passage in an article about presence and happiness:

“In a modern world, when can we come closest to our original, thought-free happiness? Well, the Harvard psychologists noted that, after sex, the two activities during which we are most fully in the present, are conversation and exercise. Rousseau saw this as well; but forget the treadmill: he lost himself in mountains and valleys and, while walking, conversed with himself. Indeed, ‘Reveries of the Solitary Walker’ is a manifesto on the benefits of wondering while wandering.”

The Wanderful brand launched ahead of the books themselves. Starting today, Wanderful Storybooks will be sold in the iOS app store for $4.99 each. Android and Kindle versions will soon follow

It’s a Wanderful launch party: Mark, Anthony, Mickey

Congratulations Mickey, Natasha and Mark: What a Wanderful world this will be!

Look for Wanderful on the iOS app store, Facebook, Twitter and on their home page.
 

Pause: A Brand For Our Time

One afternoon, an entrepreneur named Ben Tabai called me. He liked my blog, and wanted to know if I was interested in helping him name a new relaxation beverage. The opportunity was so unusual, so exciting, that just developing the name didn’t feel like it would be enough. I proposed that Operative Words also develop the tagline and provide creative direction on the brand identity and packaging. Our mutual enthusiasm sealed the deal.

This project began, as all do, with learning about the product category. I discovered that the emergence of relaxation beverages bears significance. More than just new products on the shelf, relaxation beverages are an inevitable outcome of our times.

Let’s consider their larger context. Advances in technology enable people to be constantly connected. Social networks and societal expectations urge an immediate response to every email, tweet and text message that comes our way. As a result, we have become overloaded and under-rested. It’s no wonder that relaxation beverage sales doubled between 2008 and 2010, and is projected to double again by 2014. Our growing need to unplug is reflected in articles, springing up everywhere.

The names of current relaxation beverages reflect the opposite of our connected world. More analog than digital, the names have a vacation/zen/escape vibe. There’s surprisingly little differentiation:

Dr. Zen’s Liquid Calm
RelaxZen
Serenity Zen
Ichill
Minichill
ViB (vacation in a bottle)
Tranquila
Mellow
R&R

The problem with these names is they are removed from workaday reality of today’s connected urbanites who have the greatest need to disconnect. They don’t reflect the hectic and demanding lives that characterize BlackBerry-next-to-the-bed workers. Aspirations to take a vacation in a bottle or retreat to zen serenity feel more like wishful thinking and suggest promises that can’t be fulfilled.

People who are overworked and always connected do need relaxation. But relaxation should be framed in a real-world and relevant context, not as a pie-in-the-sky, day-at-the-beach fantasy. Therefore, I recommended this new beverage should make relaxation practical and relevant. It should be inspired by, and be a part of, our digital, connected world.

Allow me to take a short detour and provide instructive details about the creative naming exercise that led to Pause.   

In developing creative directions for a naming project, it’s most fruitful to broaden core functions or benefits to more conceptual, expansive ideas. Creative development for this new brand required thinking about relaxation broadly and its context narrowly. Rather than just focus on relaxation, bigger ideas like change, decreasing, cessation and ideal end states were considered, specifically within contemporary and vernacular domains.

 
The ultimate name came up during a creative ‘excursion’ to the ‘world’ of electronics. An excursion is a brainstorming technique that inspires by analogy. I learned about excursions at Lexicon, where I was trained in Synectics problem solving by John Prince, whose father, George Prince, invented Synectics. Excursions are part of the Synectics process and an indispensable part of my creative process. Excursions are related to the ‘cloaked brief’ technique which I described in Creative Names the Easy Way.

Here’s how to use excursions to create brand names: Choose a key attribute or idea that’s essential to the new brand (in this case, change). Then, choose a ‘world’ that’s distant from the actual product category (for example, electronics). From there, brainstorm examples of the key word in that world. For example, change in the world of electronics would lead us to names like Toggle, Switch, and...Pause.

Electronics is an excursion world I came up with, even though there are many already in the Synectics roster. Here’s a list of other worlds to inspire your creative development:

007 Acoustics Agriculture Animals Archaeology Architecture Art Astronomy Biology Bridges Cartoons Celebrations Chemistry Clothes Comedy Computers Cooking Cosmetics Crafts Crime Decoration Dinner Parties Dwellings Economics Education Electricity Electronics

Espionage Exploration Famous People Fantasy Sports Farming Fashion Films Finance Folk Lore Games Gardening Geology Health History Journalism Kitchen Implements Law Machines Magic Mathematics Media Medicine Metalwork Minerals Models Money Movies

Music Myths Noise Nursing Oceans Parenting Physics Plants Psychology Racing Religion Rocks Romance Science Science Fiction Sculpture Shopping Smells Space Travel Textiles Theater Transportation Tribal Customs Vacations War Weather Woodworking

Through excursions and other idea generation techniques, over 900 potential names were developed for this assignment. A shortlist of several dozen candidates underwent preliminary trademark screening. About 30 names were presented to my client. 

Demonstrating keen judgement, the client zeroed-in on Pause. The name was unexpected yet relevant. Pause could be a philosophy, a mandate, and maybe even a movement. Enthusiasm was had by all. 

After Pause was vetted by the client’s legal counsel, the naming was complete. The next step was to develop a tagline. This proved to be more challenging than naming, perhaps because there were more creative possibilities, directions and objectives.

It was the general direction of time that inspired the best work. Take ownership of your time as a specific tagline direction, reflected the day-to-day demands that can make people feel as if their time is not under their control. A related tagline direction, be present now, is a cornerstone of mindful relaxation and de-stressing regimens, and therefore benefited from existing validation.

After two rounds of tagline creative there were plenty of good ideas, but nothing that quite rose to the level of the name. I called a colleague, Daniel Meyerowitz, to talk about the taglines. He’s the best marketing writer I know; I can always count on him to inspire great work.

Upon review, Daniel dismissed anything that sounded old-fashioned or new-agey. The most promising taglines were imperatives, especially those that would incite people to, in Daniel’s words, “reclaim now”. We talked about the power of owning the moment – being present and mindful – as an effective antidote to stress and worry. Then suddenly, I heard myself say, “make now yours”. It seemed like the words spoke themselves through me.

Daniel calmly said, “that’s it, that’s the tagline”. Make Now Yours is a call to action urging people to take control of their time. Relaxation is, as suggested by the tagline, really about coming back to yourself and being the present at this moment. Make Now Yours feels fresh and contemporary and fits with the name. Tagline: done.

Writing for the back of the bottle was also needed. I recall that Ben wrote the first draft, I wrote the second, and Daniel provided valuable direction and advice for this final version:

Sometimes the best way to recharge is to unplug. How? Naturally, with chamomile, lemon balm and wild oats to calm your mind and vitamin B’s and green tea antioxidants to clear your head.

Get back to your productive best with a Pause and a few minutes of downtime: Step away from your work and the screen to let your body and mind reboot.

You’ll be ready for anything and everything when you take control and make now yours.

Writing: done.

With the word work complete, it was time to express the brand visually with a logo and packaging. Ben engaged several designers from around the world who submitted sketches of their ideas. I continued in my role as creative director of the brand by reviewing work, insisting on simplicity, and guiding creative to reflect the spirit of the brand.

The leading logo built on the name by incorporating a pause symbol in the letter u of Pause. It was elegant serendipity: by sheer accident, the symbol was centered perfectly in the word.

Behold: the Pause logo

Like the name and logo, the packaging design for Pause would also have to reflect our wired lives. Ben Tabai, my client, was on the front line, evaluating over 120 initial designs and then sending to me those that passed muster. Ben accomplished an enormous task in time and judgement. In my estimation, the most intriguing packaging candidate had its origins in ISO-like icons and modern vernacular: In the foreground, silhouettes of two people lounged on a bench while around them, in tinted colors, were busy workers on their cell phones and on the move. The silhouettes sat calmly amid the commotion. The graphics depicted a modern-day still life. Here’s an early rendition:

Good, but not quite there.

The design was simplified and polished. Instead of two people lounging, there would be just one. Instead of a bench, the figure sat back relaxing in an office chair. Appetizing imagery of fruit was added. The typography and layout was refined again and again. Packaging design: done.

Get your paws on Pause. 

With the core brand identity and packaging complete, the client brought the brand to life in other media. There’s a website, Facebook presence, and periodic pop-up Pause relaxation stations that give hardworking people a chance to pause, drink Pause, and pause for a chair massage.

Clients get the work they deserve. Judging by the results of the Pause branding effort, Ben Tabai deserves high praise – and sales! – for his strong judgement and hard work. As Ben’s first branding endeavor, Pause precedes what will undoubtedly be an enduring and successful future.   

 
That’s the story of Pause, a brand for our time.

How to create names using the world's most powerful naming tool

 
Words inspire me.

The more words I see, the more inspired I become. So when I create brand names, I want to be overwhelmed by endless lists of words.

Publications and dictionaries offer words in abundance, but they don't offer an easy way of discovering masses of words relevant to specific ideas or attributes, such as those found in a naming brief.

In my experience, a corpus – a large sample of words in context – is the most useful and comprehensive stockpile of words, especially when searchable in a database.

I have several go-to corpus resources, but one favorite: Sketch Engine.

Sketch Engine: The Most Powerful Naming Tool I've Ever Used
Published by Lexical Computing, Sketch Engine has over 60 corpora to choose from. There are seven English corpora, each comprising millions of words from spoken and written sources. The other 50+ corpora are non-English, spanning the familiar to the exotic. If you are looking for a corpus of German, the Polish Bible or Igbo, you're in luck.

Some of the corpora you'll find on Sketch Engine

How to Create Names with Sketch Engine
My starting point for creating names is a review of the name objectives I've developed, particularly the brand's key attributes. To show what Sketch Engine can do, let's pretend we're naming a new brand that should be perceived as strong.

Sketch Engine will provide a deep exploration of the word strong, and inspire names that are differentiated yet relevant.

After logging-in to Sketch Engine – which requires a well-worth-it paid subscription – I click on a specific corpus link to load it. I choose UKWaC, comprised of a mind-boggling 1.3 billion words culled from UK web sites.

Having loaded the corpus, the option to make a concordance is presented by default. Concordances are a great tool for creating natural-sounding compound names because they show how two words have appeared together in a real-world written or spoken context. For example, a concordance of the word "sun" would include beam, burn, flower and moon -- words that commonly appear next to or near the word "sun".

But we're not going to do a simple concordance because another, more powerful tool is available: Word Sketch. A Word Sketch is a like a concordance on steroids. It shows you every word that has appeared next to your query word, organized by part of speech.

Click Word Sketch on the left to get started

Let's make a Word Sketch of the word "strong". Click Word Sketch in the blue box on the left, and you're asked to enter a "lemma". A lemma is the most basic form of a word, as you'd find in the headwords of a dictionary. Enter "strong" in the lemma field and choose "adjective" from the pop-up menu.

After clicking the "Show Word Sketch" button, we're presented with listing tables of the specific words that have appeared near or next to "strong" in the texts of the corpus. Tables are organized by grammatical context and include frequency information about each collocation.

Before studying our Word Sketch of "strong", click "More data" in the blue box on the left to fetch more results. Click it a few more times after the data loads to get even more results. And you do want more results, right?

Part of the Word Sketch of "strong"

Our Word Sketch of "strong" can be used in different ways to create new brand names.

How to Create Compound Names with Word Sketch
To create compound names that include "strong", navigate to the "adj_subject" and "modifies" columns. These words have been modified by the adjective "strong". Combine "strong" with them and you'll have a nice list of natural-sounding compound names:

Strong Tide
Strong Bond
Strong Wind
Strong Link
Strong Force
Strong Lead

You can also consider these words without "strong" as stand-alone names or combine them with other words.

Scroll through the Word Sketch to explore further

The columns "adj_comp_of" and "np_comp_of" include words that naturally precede "strong", giving us potential names – or slogans – like:

Feel Strong
Grow Strong
Stand Strong
Think Strong

How to Develop Symbolic Names with Word Sketch
Our Word Sketch also tells us what symbolizes strong. To see what's "stronger than ___" or "as strong as __", navigate to the columns "pp_than_i" and "pp_as_i":

Steel
Desire
Bond
Fear
Love
Force
Ox
Alloy
Rope
Lust
Glue
Armor

Can your dictionary do that?

Some of these words will combine well with words from other columns, giving us interesting ideas like:

Steel Bond
Tide Force
Alloy Strength
Oxwood 

Discover New Creative Directions with Word Sketch
The column "and/or" tells us what words combine with "strong" in an and/or phrase. This is helpful for finding words that pair with "strong":

Healthy
Durable
Fit
Vibrant
Stable
Tall
Brave
Independent
Thick
Bold

You can use these words as springboards for new creative directions that indirectly reflect "strong". For example, "tall" and "healthy" could be separately explored for synonyms, associations and metaphors that lead to new, relevant names.

A Totally New Thesaurus 
Sketch Engine also features an interesting thesaurus that gives you options Roget never thought of. The results from this thesaurus are generated automatically, so they include words that aren't synonymous yet are related.

No ordinary thesaurus

Click the "Thesaurus" link in the blue box, enter your lemma and choose the part of speech. The results of "strong" offer these interesting ideas:

Real
Clear
Big
Positive
Original

You might find viable names in this thesaurus or springboards for new directions.

Compare Two Concepts Using Word Sketch
Sketch Engine also has a word comparison tool called Sketch-Diff which reveals the intersection of two words. Let's imagine that we're naming a technology brand that should be perceived as strong and fast.

What qualities do strong and fast have in common?

Click "Sketch-Diff" on the left and enter "strong" for the first lemma and "fast" for the second. Then click "Show Diff".

Learn what two words have in common

The result is a an integrated Word Sketch, color coded by the degree to which words collocate with one word or both. Words in red or green collocate with one word, and words in white are common to both.

A Sketch-Diff comparing "strong" and "fast"

Here's a sample of what strong and fast have in common:

secure
loud
fit
flexible
light
tall
connection
growth
response
action
car
flight
flow
time

To create names that reflect both strong and fast, use words from this list as springboards. Digging into the concepts of connection, travel (car and flight), flow, and growth will lead to new names that support or connote multiple aspects of the brand.

In the 20 years I've been creating brand names, I've used a lot of naming tools, but no one resource has been as useful as Word Sketch. Learn how to harness its power and you'll always be inspired.

Bracket: The Story Behind the Name

A name should be worth a thousand words.

That is, a brand name should be able to simplify a complex set of ideas into a single word.

That was the creative challenge Operative Words faced creating a new name for a division of United BioSource, a Medco-owned company that, among other things, helps pharmaceutical companies run efficient and effective clinical trials.

Three key features of my client's organization were factored into name development: people, process and precision.

People, that is the people who work at the company, are responsible for helping solve their pharmaceutical clients clinical trial challenges; their people write the brilliant software that helps clinical trials run remarkably efficiently and effectively; and people are the ultimate beneficiaries of the company's know-how as new and better medicines are launched into the market.

Process is tantamount to the whole category of clinical trials. A clinical trial is a process, so even though process generally would not be differentiating, the articulation of my client's special brand of process could be.

Precision characterizes well-run clinical trials; it reflects research data that is complete and pinpoint accurate; and it corresponds with the carefully defined parameters of valid and projectable product studies.

Creative name development followed these paths. The ultimate name was discovered while thinking about the people who worked at UBC and how they treated their clients. I dived into the notion of support. One of my resources is a great desktop application called Word Menu. It's also available in book form, but the software let's you do things that you can't do with a book.

Word Menu lists words and their definitions in categories. So if you look under 'fish', you'll find a list of different types of fish. If you look up 'action words', you'll find dozens of those. It's quite handy.

Typing in 'support' -- a key attribute of my client -- into Word Menu's search box returned 490 results, each of which was an entry or definition that included the word 'support'. In that list, I found 'bracket'.

Brackets do indeed provide support. But the word 'bracket' says more than that. A good name like Bracket is polysemous, it has many meanings.  Brackets provide support, and, as symbols, they are endemic in clinical trial reports. Brackets are used to indicate subsets; they delineate and thus suggest precision. The word 'bracket' sounds smart and strong.  And, as a real word, it's easy to relate to and understand, unlike some of my client's competitors who have Latinate coined names that are alien and institutional.

Miraculously, Bracket was also available as a trademark.

The denotations and connotations of Bracket are perfect for a company that wants to reinforce precision and support. It demonstrates that a name with many meanings will ultimately fit one company perfectly when presented in a real-world business context.

Bracket illustrates that just one name can be worth a thousand words.

Creative names the easy way

What does a stylish mobile phone have in common with a nightclub?

When it comes to naming, everything.

Nightclubs and phones can share the same abstract characteristics, so they can share the same name. A nightclub can be stylish, as can a phone. They can both be friendly or alluring or opulent or minimalistic. A trademarked name that suggests any of these qualities in a nightclub will do the same for a phone.

This works because trademarks act like adjectives (e.g. Bounty®) that modify nouns (e.g. paper towels). An adjective retains its essential meaning even when modifying different nouns: A clear window, a clear path, a clear thought. (Technically speaking, trademarks are really not adjectives but "attributive modifiers" as Geoff Pullum of Language Log pointed out.)

Homonymous brands put into practice this principle of persistent meaning. The names Microsoft Excel and Hyundai Excel imply performance. Edge tennis rackets and Edge shaving gel are both edgy. Anything called Venus is for women: razors, phones, emollient, etc.

This phenomenon forms the basis for my favorite creative naming technique:

The cloaked brief

A cloaked brief is ostensibly for a product different than the real one, but shares the same desired brand attributes. The idea is to name something else.

Instead of briefing my creative team on our client's hot, new phone, I'll brief them on a hot, new nightclub.

There are, in fact, cell phones and nightclubs named the same. Geeksugar noticed and made a quiz of it; many quizzes, actually, each based on the similarity between cell phone names and the names of energy drinks, 80's TV shows, ladies' razors, Hitchcock films, Britney songs, perfumes and chewing gum.

I've found cloaked briefings effective for naming both companies and products. Done well, they can inspire and energize "creatives" more than straightforward approaches. A detailed and colorful cloaked briefing enables a namer to suspend disbelief. It immerses them in the lie.

Cloaked briefings will:

• Inspire strategically-targeted creativity in you and your team
• Accelerate generation of differentiated and relevant names en masse
  
• Increase the likelihood of securing trademark registration because the names are borne of divergent, out-of-category thinking

How to create a cloaked brief:

1. Establish the key strategic, distinguishing attributes of the thing you are naming (e.g. a mobile phone that's stylish and friendly)
2. Brainstorm categories of other things that embody those attributes (e.g. nightclubs, spas, concierge services)
3. Pick a category that's unexpected and interesting (e.g. nightclubs)
4. Outline a naming brief based on an imaginary yet credible product from that category. The more attributes the imaginary product has in common with the real one, the better. (e.g. name a nightclub in LA that lavishes its guests with attentive service)

The desired attributes should be intrinsic to the cloaked category. Nightclubs are invariably stylish (or strive to be), so that's a good cloaked category for naming a stylish phone. If the phone is rugged rather than stylish, SUVs would be a fruitful creative (mis)direction.

Here's an example from my own experience: On an embedded-technology project, the client said their product will make computers so much more powerful, vibrant and useful that people would be wowed by the experience. Therefore, the new technology name should be as remarkable as the devices that would be powered by it.

How do you inspire remarkable names? Name something remarkable.

A member of my team came up with the brilliant cloaked creative direction to name a remarkable new circus. It would have exactly six of the "World's Greatest" people in it: The world's greatest acrobat, world's greatest magician, world's greatest contortionist, etc. (the number six referred to the six capabilities of our client's product). Every performance would leave spectators agog. Cirque du Soleil would seem lifeless in comparison.

Naming a circus troupe instead of technology? That's like comparing apples and orangutans.

But it worked.

The creative results of the exercise were astonishing; dozens and dozens of names I had never seen on any list made their debut. Having worked on over a thousand naming assignments, that's remarkable indeed.

The names were not just creative, they were also relevant and strategic because they elicited the visceral awe and wonder that defined the brand.

The circus direction was effective because circuses are intrinsically spectacular.

Cloaking is helpful for naming research, too. Asking respondents to rank candidate names against attributes in a cloaked category (instead of the actual product category) can eliminate category bias and increase participants' comfort with differentiated creative. So if you're testing names for a fast microprocessor, tell respondents they are names for race cars or jet engines.

I discuss this and other name research techniques in Decisions, decisions: How to research brand names.

For your next creative naming project, I encourage you to give cloaked briefings and cloaked research a shot.

I'd love to hear back if you've tried this approach and what kind of results you've seen.

Pattern Energy: The story behind the name

When you're caught in a fast-moving stream of thought, just relax and follow the current. That’s what I was doing one May evening, riding a current of ideas creating names for a renewable energy company. Then I typed a word that suddenly stopped the current.

Pattern

I read it and re-read it. Two thoughts came to me:

I've never seen that name before!

It's perfect.

True, I can't be 100% sure I've never seen the name before. I've worked a thousand assignments, but Pattern was -- miraculously -- new to me.

It's rare that I'll think a name is "perfect". As I wrote in my post about brand name research, names aren't born perfect, but become ever-better as identity, messaging, and the entire brand is positively experienced.

But even as an abstract word on the page, Pattern was perfect for this company.

To understand why, I'll first share some background on my client.

Babcock & Brown, a diversified investment firm, was closing down its business, another casualty of the great recession. But their wind and solar power generation and transmission division was prospering despite the red-ink economy.

Green was good for business.

Babcock & Brown was selling off their renewable energy division and the folks in charge of that division asked me to name it.

Their Creative Director, Erin Fortes, invited me to the "fishbowl", a glass-walled conference room, where she, the CEO and others briefed me about what their business does, how it does it, and what makes it different.

Two oppositional themes emerged as differentiators:

The company has amazingly smart people who analyze financial, meteorological and financial data to figure out where to situate and how to finance an energy project.


They are salt-of-the-earth realists who take a pragmatic and hands-on approach to building and operating energy projects. This grounding in real-world construction makes their projects effective at generating a healthy return, not just clean energy.

Brains and brawn. Interesting.

The contrasting concepts made for a challenging naming exercise. On one hand, I wanted a smart name to support their intelligent, analytic approach. On the other hand, if the name was an unfamiliar or highfalutin word it would conflict with their no-nonsense, roll-up-their-sleeves side.

"We don't want a Greek or a new age name," CEO Mike Garland said

No coined names. Nothing tricky.

“We want a solid name for a solid company that’s going to be around in 20 years.”

After the naming brief was approved, I sunk my teeth into the creative.

Entropy fosters my creativity, so as I named this particular May evening, dozens of windows cluttered my laptop screen. Each open window held the tantalizing promise of revealing THE name.

Better yet, each window might reveal a name truly new, one I’ve never seen even after decades of reviewing literally hundreds of thousands of name candidates.

I started my creative focused on the company’s analytic side; words related to thought, problem solving, logic, math, science.

I bounced between inspirational naming resources: Visuwords, OneLook, MRC Psycholinguistic Database, Wikipedia and Word Menu. On this occasion, it was WordNet, a relational verbal database, that captivated me longest.

WordNet is not exactly a thesaurus; among other things, it lets you explore the hierarchical relationships between ideas and words.

This is useful because good brand naming requires looking at key words from every conceivable direction. For example, if a key word is ‘color’, I want endless examples of colors (like ‘crimson’), qualities of colors (like ‘hue’), things that are colorful (like ‘canary’), and other things related, even remotely, to ‘color’ (like ‘deep’ or ‘shrill’ or 'rainbow wig').

I typed ‘analyze’ -- a key word for my client’s new brand -- into WordNet and it responded with 20 different flavors of analyzing (diagnose, explore, audit, et al.).

I followed that into a geometry, architecture, math vein, typing words furiously. And that’s when I saw the name.

Vector…

Contour…

Array…

Column…

Pattern

A-ha!

My client finds patterns in data; they’re better at it than anyone.

They build patterns on land; pretty white windmills, all in a row.

Repeat business and profits, those are patterns too.

As a company name, Pattern is a springboard that’s grounded in strategy. The name would help their marketing:

It’s distinctive

It’s memorable

Its vivid associations can inspire all of their marketing communications

Pattern sounds solid. It has built-in phonetic bookends, what linguists call ‘stops’. The sounds that begin and end the word -- ‘p’ and ‘n’ -- serve to fortify and delineate it. No wishy-washy fricatives here. The word even looks well-defined: With no descenders to break the baseline, Pattern stands solid and even-keeled, even in ASCII.

All of these qualities, along with the inherent staying power of a real word and its timeless meaning, would contribute to the perception of Pattern as a solid brand that will be around for 20 years.

I didn’t stop naming after coming up with Pattern. In fact, I had just gotten started. To ensure divergent thinking, I hired two reliable freelancers, Alexandra Watkins and Marc Hershon, to contribute names.

From the master list of all names, I selected a subset of 188 for preliminary legal screening. Pattern was among the dozens of names that cleared the first trademark hurdle.

I presented about 20 names and the top six, including Pattern, were selected for full legal clearance. Pattern cleared that hurdle, too.

I was overjoyed when Pattern was ultimately anointed by the client as the final name. Though I pat myself on the back for creating it, the client deserves a lot of credit. Without their direction, courage and vision, this name might have been rejected.

The name chosen, Erin hired two designers for the logo, Graham Atkinson and Rebecca Titcomb. I used to work with them at Landor and was thrilled they’d bring the name to life visually.

Erin and I briefed the designers. I wrote for them this story behind the name:

Pattern is a renewable energy company that finds patterns and creates them.

In the chaos of complex economic, geologic and meteorologic data, this company finds patterns where others only see noise. These hidden patterns reveal to their trained eyes, the optimal places, scope, design and conditions for renewable energy projects.

This ability, coupled with their real-world, on-the-ground experience, makes them more effective than competitors at bringing projects to market and providing a healthy return.

When healthy returns repeat, they create patterns in spreadsheets and line charts, and in wave after wave of returning customers.

Patterns are created by what Pattern builds.

In their wind farms, against a landscape backdrop, columns and rows of lean, white turbines line in parallel on furrowed fields.

Patterns are created in the grooves of the brown soil, the green dots of growing vegetables, the connecting arcs of rolling hills and in gently turning windmills that generate clean energy.

Patterns are created by their transmission lines that carry electricity on long, thin strings under a big, blue sky.

Everything worth doing is worth repeating.

Everything that repeats creates a pattern.

Like the circle of life.

Plans well-executed.

Healthy returns.

And renewable energy.

Pattern is a renewable energy company that finds patterns and creates them.

Here’s the logo that the design team created under Erin Fortes’ direction:

That is the story behind the name Pattern. I thought it worth repeating.

Addendum

Following the adoption of the Pattern name, I was invited to create a tagline for the company. The result?

Energy For Generations

I'll point out the two distinct interpretations of the tagline. First: Pattern generates energy. Second: Pattern is here to stay for the long run. They are both messages that resonate with the landowners, financial investors and communities that Pattern serves.

Long may they run. 

Where are the most creative names?

This question was asked by a namer on the LinkedIn VERB forum:

Where do you think the most creative names are? Cars? Internet companies? Racehorses? My personal favorite is Boat Names...and here is a site with 10,000 of them. What are your favorites?

It's an interesting question. Pondering its answer has led me to some interesting observations and conclusions.

First, what's creative? I'd venture that creative here, as elsewhere, means unexpected juxtapositions. So any name will be creative if either:

(1) the name itself is an unexpected juxtaposition of sounds, words or word parts
(2) the name is a real word applied to an unexpected context.

Thus:

It is by virtue of their essence or referent that names are creative.

Browse through a list of products for kids and you'll find lots of names that are intrinsically creative. Rhyme, alliteration, reduplication and letter substitution all lend a fun, playful and off-beat bent. These same techniques are used, for better or worse, as web-based company names.

These child-like brand names are creative by their construction, rather than their context:

Bugaboo
Chuck E. Cheese
Tinker Toys
Etch-a-Sketch
Lincoln Logs
Balloon Lagoon
Cadoo
UmBongo
Juicy Juice
Hannah Montana

Names for web-centric companies, driven by the perceived need for an available dot com domain, can also be creative by construction. Many are...but to a fault.

Joost
BooRah
Meebo
Squidoo
Bebo

I discuss the pitfalls of these types of names in The Washington Post.

Brand names can be creatively constructed without being silly:

Sony
Tivo
Kodak
Pantene
Centrino

Here are some I've developed:

Wanderful (interactive storybooks)
Chemetry (safer, cleaner chemical production)
Lytro (the world's first commercial light field camera)
Brainforest (idea development software)
Flying Spoons (Embassy Suites casual dining restaurant)

I am particularly fascinated by creative names which are not born creative, but become creative when thrust upon a product unexpectedly. Names that are metaphors or borrow from far-flung domains tickle our imagination and offer layers of meaning that simple wordplay can't match.

For example, Sanctuary would be an expected, uncreative name for a spa. But as a name for ultra-powerful security software, Sanctuary is quite creative.

There are entire categories of products that, by their nature, demand creative names. As a general rule:

Products that defy literal or objective description have creative names.

Consider perfumes.

Perfumes are ethereal. Their scent is chameleonic, as variable as skin. Perfumes are subjective. Their names are rarely descriptive. Instead, they boast attitude, exude mystique and incite with provocations.

Perfume names are creative because they are arbitrary. A rose-imbued perfume called Rose would not smell as sweet as one named Eden or Chianti or Renoir.

I think Kane would be an excellent name for rose-scented perfume.

Here are some creative perfume names:

Joy
Opium
Obsession
No. 5
Grey Flannel
Poison
Envy
Happy
Chance
Mania
Flowerbomb (though rather descriptive, this succeeds because it confidently yet imaginately flaunts category convention)

Wines are also ripe for creative naming. Like perfumes, their beauty is subject to the beholder. The relationship of the liquid in the bottle to the name on the bottle is mostly arbitrary.

I like these names:

Conundrum
Earthquake
Lost Vineyard
Lolita
Incognito
Anomaly
Summer in Napa
Frog's Leap (the cork says "ribbit")
Layer Cake (a suggestive name that's marvelous)

I gave a winery the name Scribe. Though in and of itself interesting, it's this name's potential to inspire great packaging, merchandising and promotions that really excited my clients.

Cheeses and cocktails, like wine, perfumes and other hedonic products, also lend themselves to creative names. Cocktail naming holds a special place in my heart. My very first professional naming gig was in 1989 at Waxman Wool Advertising in San Jose, naming cocktails for the Hotel de Anza. Oh, how I'd love to see my first naming list from 20 years ago.

Like other things that defy description, band names are invariably creative. I recently bought All Known Metal Bands, a hard-backed, black-clad tome listing thousands of heavy metal band names. Each name offers a different perspective on the dark side of humanity.

Some choice morsels:

Fatal
Rancid
Rupture
Organ Harvest
Kreditor
Ravine
As I Lay Dying
Sarcoma
Made in France
Totem
Lady Winter
Nightfall

I named a friend's band, Marrow. Their music isn't metal, but it is dark. If you're the kind of person that prefers Fuck You, Penguin to Cute Overload, you'll want to give them a listen.

Perfume, wine, cheese, cocktail and band names are categorically creative because of the arbitrary relationship of name to product. There are exceptions, chiefly those that follow very traditional naming conventions. The name of the source, whether person (winemaker, cheesemaker, perfumer, guitarist, celebrity sponsor, etc.) or place (district, appellation, region, farm, etc.), or ingredients makes an obvious, indistinct, uncreative, fall-back moniker.

To wit (or lack thereof):

Dave Matthews Band
Beringer Wines
Rum & Coke
Napa Valley Vineyards
California Premium Cheese
Chateau Lafitte
Carlos by Carlos Santana

There's one category of creative names that's not just arbitrary, but intentionally obfuscatory: code names.

Code names deliberately hide what they refer to. Companies use code names internally for products in development. Some companies have established nomenclature systems for theirs. Intel code names their chips based on "geographical names (since they can never be trademarked by someone else) of towns, rivers or mountains near the location of the Intel facility" (Alviso, Klamath, Covington, etc.). Apple used cats as code names for versions of its operating system; the cat is incorporated into the official product name (Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, etc).

Though it typically begins life as a ruse to obscure, a code name will become part of a company's everyday lingo as it's used by employees and becomes familiar to them. When typed in emails and product specification sheets, and uttered in hushed tones around the water cooler, the code name sheds its strangeness. And, as observed by fellow namers in this article, "a popular code name can help engineering teams build an emotional attachment to the product". When it comes time to brand the product for the real world, the code name might be the most compelling name in consideration.

One unintended benefit of code names is that, by virtue of their arbitrariness, they are also likely be clear as trademarks.

Code names can actually make great go-to-market brand names:

• They are arbitrary and don't directly refer to a product's features or design. They won't age or become outdated like feature-based names.
• Code names are often based on imaginative metaphors. They can trigger many personal associations and thereby foster an emotional bond.
• They are often free to use as a trademark.

This is why a code name will sometimes be adopted as the final go-to-market name. These brands started as internal code names:

Saturn
In the 1980's, the Big Three were fighting Japanese car makers for dominance of the US market. GM believed their struggle was analogous to the U.S.-Russian space race three decades prior. In that spirit, GM executives code-named their new product initiative Saturn, inspired by the Saturn V rocket that first brought man — a U.S. man — to the moon. A vehicle called Saturn won the space race; maybe it could win their race too. A different kind of car name was a great way for GM to demonstrate this would be "a different kind of company, a different kind of car". GM recently shuffled off the Saturn brand. It's been bought by the Penske Automotive Group.

Ford Taurus
I have heard, though can't find the original source, that the name Taurus was inspired by astrology. Two people working on the project discovered each others' wife was a Taurus. Despite its basis in astrology, and regarded as a pseudoscience or superstition by many, the Ford Taurus became one of America's best-selling cars.

Apple Macintosh
Yes, another code name.

As a namer who has faced the challenge of selling-in arbitrary names, the success of code names encourages me. A name that would be difficult, if not impossible, for me to rally an executive team around, stands a better chance if it sneaks by through the subterfuge of a code name. The exposure effect makes the client more and more comfortable with the name over time. Thus what was once arbitrary may become inevitable.

It would be instructive if my clients gave me a list of possible code names for whatever I'm naming. I should try that sometime.

Results are not always rosy when a code name is revealed to the public. One notorious example has changed how many high-profile companies choose theirs:

Apple meant no ill-will when its Power Macintosh 7100 was code-named Sagan. They chose Carl Sagan because his trademark catchphrase, "billions and billions", reflected their hopes for astronomical revenue. But the astronomer took offense, perhaps because other Apple code names included an anthropological hoax and a scientific pariah (Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion, respectively). Sagan sued Apple and lost. Apple, none too happy it was sued, then changed the product's internal code name to BHA, for Butt-Head Astronomer. Sagan sued again and lost. The Apple team finally changed the internal code name to LAW, Lawyers Are Wimps.

The lesson for companies is that if a code name leaks, litigation or embarassment could ensue. Code names are not be chosen lightly.

An instance of an ill-chosen military code name was Operation Infinite Justice, the U.S. Department of Defense's named response to the 9/11 attacks. Muslims took offense to the name, believing that only Allah can mete out infinite justice. This code name, it was thought, would make the military's job harder, so it was quickly changed to Operation Enduring Freedom.

Military "code words", like those in the private sector, are also creative though they are constructed using a prescribed, regimented methodology and approved set of source words. I wonder if the name Operation Infinite Justice followed the Department of Defense guidelines, or if it was created ad hoc?

This page details Department of Defense code name, nickname and exercise term nomenclature. Fellow verbivores will salivate over the Code of Names Handbook (pdf) which lists all two-word code names prior to 1983.

Here are some creative examples. Some seem fitting; others ironic:

Beartrap: USN, classified anti-submarine aircraft program
Big Belly: Conversion program to enlarge conventional bomb load of B-52Ds, 12/1965-
Big Stick: A new Navy bomb-carrying canister for use on A-4, A-6 and A-7 attack aircraft
Blow Hole: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort connected with target location and identification
Cold Flare: Study of solar flare activity at high altitude, in preparation for polar or high-altitude supersonic flights
College Girls: High level intercept activity against U-2
Face Lift: An Air Force recovery procedure
Idealist: CIA codename for development of U-2
Ranch Hand: Operation, spraying of more than 18 million gallons of 'Agent Orange' and other herbicides from UC-123s over South-Vietnam, 1962-1971

So, where are the most creative names?

Products for kids
Web-based companies
Perfumes
Wines
Cocktails
Bands
Code names

Find lists of those things and you'll find the most creative names.