Naming the New CtP

[Cory Smith]

 

[KevinC@EFI]

In all my years of marketing and naming products, I've learned only a few things about naming:

1) You'll never make more than 2 people happy with the name you choose.
2) If you ask 5 people for opinions, you'll get no less than 6 different answers.
3) 6 months after you launch a product with a new name, all the complaints are irrelevant. If the product is good, and you do a good job demonstrating the value, all of a sudden the name has value too and people will forget about the earlier complaints on the name. (it's how you use it, right?)
4) Very few products have tanked solely due to a bad name. Well... I have some stories there too.

Kevin.

 

[chevalier]

I've always admired the simple and elegant BMW and Mercedes Benz naming conventions. Once familiar with the brand you know exactly what type it is, what configuration, etc. 1,3,5,7,M#,X#,Z#.

I'm completely baffled why companies like Agfa put a ":" (colon) in front of the product names. Does anybody know why they do that?

 

[KevinC@EFI]

I've always admired the simple and elegant BMW and Mercedes Benz naming conventions. Once familiar with the brand you know exactly what type it is, what configuration, etc. 1,3,5,7,M#,X#,Z#.

I'm completely baffled why companies like Agfa put a ":" (colon) in front of the product names. Does anybody know why they do that?

I agree - simplicity in naming is always a good thing. As for the Agfa colon thing... it may be as simple as by adding that it's easier to trademark a name (because it's unique rather than a generic term). We've had some bizarre internal rules about product naming over the years, all trying to address the same issue. Why does Apple use "i" in lower case before their products? Same thing... but over time they have successfully built it into a branding thing.

We always joked that they use it because they pulled their names or products out of their "colon"... but that's normal competitor stuff.

Kevin.

 

[warist]

In all my years of marketing and naming products, I've learned only a few things about naming:

2) If you ask 5 people for opinions, you'll get no less than 6 different answers.

Kevin.

Too true. I remember meetings dragging on for hours over a stupid name. Everyone took it upon themselves to brainstorm their own ideas so we were left to sift through something like 30 names between five people.

 

[KevinC@EFI]

And just a couple of the many horror stories...

1) I inherited a product called the "Melica" (digital photo printer). It wasn't selling well in Southern Europe. It turns out that the name in Italian roughly translates to "lick me".

2) My friend worked for Sony Canada. The Sony Japan team was launching a new tape storage system for data centers that was capable of storing up to 1 Petabyte (1000 Terabytes) of data! Naturally, they wanted to name it the 'Petafile'. Um... no.

Kevin.