The Name Game

Years ago, the first time I went freelance, I thought it might be fun to call my business iCopy. It said copywriter, it was military slang for "I get it" and making it one word with a lower case "i" seemed really cool. So cool that before I could get around to ordering business cards, Macintosh beat me to it and launched the iMac. I was disappointed, but I took it as a sign that iDontsuck.

This has happened to me more than once, and if you are a half-way decent copywriter, it will happen to you. That cool TV spot, great headline, or indelible tag your client rejected pops up in the mind of some other copywriter, somewhere. Their version gets produced, and all you can do is stew in your own bile – especially since that other person's take is usually lame compared to what you had in mind. But if you want to experience the Deja Thought Of phenomenon at it's worst, try naming something.

When I first got on the Internet a million years ago, I thought I could be curly@aol.com. No, I could not. I could be curly33. I ran into the same problem when I tried to name my other blog. There's a reason I defaulted to Eucalyptus Way. The blog was intended to chronicle a seasoned East Coast woman's adjustment to West Coast ways. I riffed on California, on midlife crises, on change itself. I explored every possibility. The truth is, it's easier to name your child than it is to name your blog. And that is a piece of cake compared to, say, naming a new line of intravenous fluids. Healthcare and IT are gigantic baptismal maws that suck up all the most evocative names – the ones that instantly create a vibe, evoke an attribute of the product or just plain sound cool.

Finally, you cobble together a list of names, some of which aren't half bad. You google them as you go along and eliminate any names that crop up in your same category. Of course, if you're naming something for the international market, you're just getting started. Does your name mean toe jam in Hebrew? Heartburn in Danish? Group sex in Farsi? (Do they have a word for that in Farsi? Maybe not. If there is, the religious police would give you a good lashing just for uttering it.) Eventually, you realize that your winning monicker is Swahili for fuck your mother and you're back to square one.

So you move on to combining syllables, and again, any halfway decent sounding non-word belongs to some IT or pharma company. It's enough to make you want to howl at the moon. Some people specialize in this – the naming, not the howling– although I suspect they have their moments of animal despair after nomenclating for twenty hours straight.

A few years back, I was working on a pharmaceutical account. They had contracted an internationally famous branding agency to name a new medication, and they shared the results with our agency. The list consisted of a bunch of seemingly random three syllable names. Except they weren't really random because each syllable had a rationale. Rationales not unlike these:
" We used the syllable "Tor" because it's strong, evokes Taurus the bull, and also the Nordic god Thor."
"Na". Sounds like no - subtext is eliminating or doing away with. Also the root of Navigate - good for a chronic condition. "
"Vel? It's soft, like velvet. The el sound is feminine, like the word Elle. Works well for a dermatology product.
To make matters more challenging, the name has to be stealthily persuasive because it can't sound like a claim to the company attorneys. That's why, to this day, there is no medicine called Siknomor.

Names 101

On no! It's Finnish for enema!

Think globally, check globally.