99% Invisible - 109- Title TK

Episode Date: April 8, 2014

The name is important. It’s the first thing of any product you use or buy or see. The tip of the spear. You are bombarded by thousands of names every day. In this daily barrage, only the names that are … Continue reading →

This is Blueprint. I'm Roman Mars. This is sight unseen. I'm Roman Mars. This is an ear for design. I'm Roman Mars. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Now that's nice. The name is important. It's the first thing, the tip of the spear, with any product you use or buy or see.

And you are bombarded by thousands of names every day. The name of this producer is Avery Trouffleman. And in the daily barrage of names, only the names that are most interesting, most pleasant on the tongue, can survive in your memory. If it's any kind of consumer product, like from PNG or Sony, or yeah, it's going to be a naming company that did it, you might not know it, but probably. And naming companies, as in companies that name things, are responsible for many of the proper nouns that you remember. Naming is just this weird little area and there's business, right? And then there's marketing and then there's branding and then there's naming and

naming is so small. They're so really there's so few naming companies. There's like 20. And Laurel founded one of them. My name is Laurel Sutton. I'm one of the co-founders of Catchword. We're a naming firm here in the Bay Area. And Catchword comes from those guiding words at the top of a dictionary page. Those are the Catchwords. Most people don't know it. It doesn't matter. It just is what we do. So we're about words and we're about words that are catchy. She and her team have worked on everything. A line of yogurts for Chibani, the Palm Pre, Gap's Customer Rewards program, they have named as they put it. Everything except a car.

You might think, hey, I named my dog or my kids or my band or my blog. It's not too hard, but there are a number of things to consider when designing a name. Just think of all the associations with every word. Take for example, Photoshop elements. So we didn't name Photoshop, but we did come up with the elements part of it. And that word took a lot of work. Because Photoshop was looking to market

a less expensive version of their software that had all the same capabilities as regular Photoshop, just without all the bells and whistles. You would think that that would be easy, but it wasn't. So they didn't want to use Photoshop light or Photoshop basic or anything that sounded compromising. So we went through a really large exploration of all the different ways that we could say just as good, but not as full, fledged.

And we looked at essentials, we looked at just every word. And they chose elements for its subtlety. Elements are the most basic parts that you can have, but they're essentially, you can't have anything without elements. So that's the word that we eventually chose. And that's why you hire the experts to consider this stuff. And they don't come cheap.

The vast majority of naming companies like us are pretty expensive. But naming companies don't just make up names. They also check what names are available for URLs and for trademarks, and they see which names mean bad things and other languages. We can take any list of names and check them in any language in the world and say, is it pronounceable? Does it have negative meaning? And outside of the

US, is there a brand already existing in your country or some of like a TV show that has the same name that we should be aware of? And you can't underestimate the importance of linguistic checks once they were naming a little gadget toy. And one of the names that we had come up with for them turned out in Japanese to be a word that meant a small device that doesn't work. So we took that one right off the list. But more than anything else, Laurel and her team at Catchword just produce a ton of names.

As Laurel sees it, there is a direct relationship between quantity and quality. You know, the first 500 names that you come up with are gonna be really obvious things. They're already taken. They're not gonna be that interesting. You kind of have to get that out. So catch word, we'll generate over 2,000 names. And they present 30 to 50 to the client. And they come up with so many freaking names

because they come up with names across the naming spectrum. Okay, so we always draw a spectrum because we're talking about language, it's always a spectrum. So at one end of the spectrum, you have descriptive names. And those are names that absolutely just describe what the thing is. Classic example. Raising brand.

Benefits of descriptive names. They are self-explanatory. That's what that stuff is, right? It's a box. It's brand and it has raisins in it. You would never have to. That's what that stuff is, right? It's a box, it's brand, and it has raisins in it. You would never have to explain to anybody what this stuff is. Shredded wheat. That's what that is. It's wheat, and it's been shredded. Drawbacks to descriptive names, they are hard to own. Normally, you can't trademark names like this. In fact, raisened brand and shredded wheat are not trademarks.

Anybody can have a cereal and call it raisened brand or shredded wheat. So a lot of descriptive names tend to get modified. International business machines. Frity darn descriptive. Over time they've condensed that to IBM. The other big drawback is that descriptive names can be limited. If you remember there were companies called things like e-stamps, right? If you ever want to do anything but sell electronic stamps you're screwed. On the other end of the spectrum you've got so-called arbitrary names. And Apple is a great example of that.

It doesn't tell you anything about what they do, which allows for flexibility. They used to just make computers. Now they do media. They could do anything under that. I mean, they could make cars. But Apple is a real word that you can find in the dictionary, of course. It is its own set of associations. Maybe Apple implies learning or freshness, I don't know. But it doesn't apply to the thing, it's naming. Arbitrary names can also just be completely made up.

And these kinds are called empty vessels. Some examples are Hulu or Exxon or Xerox or Kodak. Kodak has absolutely no meaning. They only chose it because that great hard K sound is very acoustically relevant. That is, it really cuts through. We tend to say that things that start with that hard K sound are strong. Things that start with T, also the same way. It's kind of a strong, more aggressive sounding name, whereas an F sound is very soft It's a little harder to hear it and people just don't respond as well to it the benefits of arbitrary names and empty vessel names

They're easy to trademark easy to get the domain name for and usually good in languages around the world drawback They are hard to market you have to explain them to people You know you had a lot of money behind these kinds of names to tell people what they mean. Right. Okay, so you've got descriptive on one end of the spectrum, an arbitrary on the other, and most names fall somewhere in between the two, and Laurel calls all these names in the middle suggestive names.

They're not exactly arbitrary, and they're not exactly descriptive, like Microsoft. Microsoft software for microcomputers, right? It kind of says what it does, but not really because it's those two words that are smushed together like that. Microsoft is an example of a coined word, a word that doesn't exist in the English dictionary, but it's made up of familiar words, word parts, or sounds. Spotify and Nescafe and Netflix are also coin words. They sound like English words, but they're not. And Laurel and her team generate tons of coin words from lists of root words.

You try to find the right vocabulary for the client. And what are they trying to convey in this name? Make a list of vocabulary and then you think, OK, how could I modify these words? And then we have lists of prefixes and suffixes in English. And then you just start parenthemma. For example, take the root name. From there you can get nameling,

namely, rename, name spot, name pro, pro name. But okay, let's be honest. There are lots of websites that can mash prefixes and suffixes to words and generate big long lists for you. But websites are not linguists. They can't tell you what names are actually good. That's where the skill and the creative talent comes in is figuring out what's a good word.

And you wouldn't think it, but suggestive names are really difficult to create because you want them to have meaning? A lot of them are taken? Tak taken for domain names and trademarks. And as Laurel sees it, it doesn't hurt to have 2,000 options. But it doesn't have to be this way. There are other people who do it very differently. They do 10 names at a time. That works for them. I think it depends on whether you come from more strictly a naming background or whether you come from an ad agency background and you do it that way.

We tend to present around 12 names, just because if you present too many in the value of any given name is drastically reduced. Eli Altman is the creative director at 100 Monkeys. Another naming company only a few miles away. Ulyse Company got its name from the idea that if you put 100 Monkeys in front of 100 typewriters you're bound to get a good name.

It's kind of a joke about the process. They give their client a list of 12 names. It's not like 100 Monkeys produces fewer names because they're lazier. These guys just have a really different philosophy to naming. Some people think that naming is about linguistics. We are not of that philosophy. Names are all about the stories that they begin to tell.

Eli and his team do not make coined words or empty vessels. I just don't think that's maybe the most productive way to think about names is like sort of mixing with prefixes, creating portmanteaux, things like that. We're much more interested in history of a word and backstory than inventing. Really, these guys are very into mythology and narrative. At the meeting I sat in on, one name was a small town in Europe where a famous mathematician was born.

Others were inspired by anatomical charts and constellations. 100 monkeys has the dinner party in mind, names that lead to conversation. And in this way, Eli and his team have named front porch senior living communities, the Lot, which is the Rhode Island state lottery, start here, the Microsoft Windows Tutorial. Yeah, they've named a lot of different things.

Companies, products, services, theories. You've named theories? Yeah, it's true. It's called conditioned hyper-eating. A theory for how fast food companies design food to make it irresistible. Okay, conditioned hyper-eating was kind of a departure for a hundred monkeys. Normally they go for more poetic names. You know, it's just really about finding as many interesting words as you can from secret service code names to rundown theaters to types of wind and ocean currents.

And so whereas Laurel sees a naming spectrum, Eli envisions sort of a name taxonomy, and the classifications break down and down and down into 25 species. 25 categories of names, which he lists in his book, don't call it that. Names that are about people, Tesla, Jack Daniels, Invented characters, Jolly Green, Giant, Mr. Clean, names that feel like they have history in them, the inner public, crowned royal. And it's not like some of these categories are good and some are bad. There are just a lot of options.

It mostly comes down to what kind of story, if any, you want behind your name. Some clients really want a meaningless name. Remember, made-up names are easier to register domains or trademarks for and are less likely to offend. And if it's a meaningless word, if it's just a completely coined made-up word, you can make up any story you want around it. A name like Hulu, for example. As far as I know, it doesn't actually have any real meaning. I know that Hulu, the inventors of that, have a story around that name.

I don't think it's true. But it's a cool name because it's short. It's easy to remember. Visually, it's very interesting looking. So no, you don't need to have a story around it. The long and short event is this. If you've got enough money, you could pick any old name to do it. You could pick a name as meaningless as Hulu. Yep, money talks. If you have a ton of money, basically the name could be anything. Remember when the iPad was about to come out,

everyone thought it was the silliest name. You heard all kinds of sanitary napkin jokes. But now, through sheer force of will and advertising dollars, you don't think twice about it. But with a name like iPad, at least you can pronounce it. Can you imagine reading Xerox for the first time? Xerox. X rox. Xerox.

Xerox. Before they get their new name, companies and products usually have little internal code names or nicknames, like Project X or they get named after someone's cat or something like that. Sometimes, unfortunately, with big companies this will often happen, they will have a code name that someone internally has chosen, which is actually pretty good, and people get very attached to it. And then we have to convince them that they can't use it because it's probably not available as a trademark. So sometimes we have a little ceremony, like a grave thing. Seriously, we've actually done this where we have a, in our briefing, we'll put up a little slide where it shows a grave and then we'll have the code name on there.

And we'll say, okay, now we're going to have a monosilence for your code name because you can't have it. So you have to let it go. We all sit there for a minute. Okay, now we're going to think about the new name. So what should we name this episode? Uh, well I was going to call it what's in a name? I will slap you so hard if you call it what's in a name. I really will.

So yeah, apparently everybody's used that title to talk about naming. And then I thought I'd go for something, you know, settler, like a rose by any other. And I will also slap you if you call it that too. Man, 90% of the articles that we've been quoted in have either been what's in a name or a rose by any other name. Those have been the headlines on those.

Just awful. So I don't know what to call this episode. Help. What should we call it? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I'd have to give it some thought. I can't name on the fly like that.

Title TK. Wait, I don't get it. Why TK? Title TK means title yet to come. Like we'll fill it in later. If you're working in any newsroom, you know like if you don't know what the headline is or some little piece of research instead of stopping and figuring it out, you just type in TK and then your editor knows that you're going to go back and fill it in later. Shouldn't it be TC? Well I was taught that TK stood out better on the page so that you won't miss it when you're going back and revise me.

Makes sense, right? 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Truffleman with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio, KLW in San Francisco, and produced out of the offices of ArcSign, in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook.

All of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links, and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible, you must go to 99pi.org. Rx.