Mazda, the car company based in Hiroshima, Japan, recently ran into a problem. Its range of "crossovers" and SUVs went from the CX-3 to the CX-5 to the CX-9, and it wanted to insert another model in between the CX-3 and CX-5. What would the logical name be? To go in between "3" and "5"? Any guesses?
The company decided on "CX-30."
I know, right?
The problem was that Mazda already had a CX-4 in China, and the new car for the rest of the world was not that vehicle; it was a different vehicle. So the decision was made (passive voice again!) to call the car the CX-30. I think if I had to name a vehicle between the 3 and the 5 and I couldn't use 4, I would just pick a verbal name, meaning a word, such as "Stinger" or "Tacoma." If it has to be an odd-man-out in terms of the established naming protocol, my reasoning would be, then just go all the way.
Of course, sometimes word-names aren't to everyone's taste. I've read over the years about product names that have unfortunate meanings in foreign languages. Sometimes that's done on purpose: consider that currently there's there's a line of inexpensive audio products branded "Schiit."
My uncle raised racehorses for many years, and he mentioned once how hard it was to name racehorses. You can't give a racehorse a name that's already been used, which is why you get names like Ghostzapper and Nosupeforyou (at least the latter wasn't named "Supenazi." Or maybe that name was already taken). I figured it would be easy, so I asked him if I could help, and he agreed. I came up with a list of ten potential names, including several I liked a lot.
Not only were seven or eight of my ten names already taken, but my uncle, off the top of his head, could list the accomplishments of several of the racehorses who'd been given the names I proposed. I ended up naming "Montana Blackfoot," who had an undistinguished career, winning three races and earning $21,111 in 26 starts. But I learned the lesson: naming things is hard.
I thought about that when I was considering the mistakes and missteps of Olympus Corporation's Imaging business. Let's face it, not only is OM-D E-M[x] not going to go down in history as a name to conjure with, a name with resonance, but even owners can't remember where the hyphens go. I can't tell you how many times I've corrected "OMD" or "EM-1."
It's like naming a magazine "Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques," which was the name of the magazine I edited when I got there. On the evening of the day I got the job, I went to a dinner party at my brother's house, and when I told them about my new job everyone wanted to know the magazine's name. So, slowly and clearly, I told each of the people who asked. Later I went around and asked those same people if they could remember the magazine's name. Not one could.
I figured that was a problem.
Over the years I've poked fun at various camera companies for their awkward product names. I like to assume, in that smug, superior way we have of thinking about things that don't actually concern us, that I could do better. But in fact I probably couldn't. Naming things is tough.
After an arduous, drawn-out process that frayed many nerves, we renamed "Darkroom & Creative Camera Techniques" "Photo Techniques." It had nothing to do with creativity—it was entirely a negotiated settlement, and it was a tough slog to get there. The business manager felt we had spent a lot of money promoting the words "darkroom" and "techniques"—the magazine's original name had been "Darkroom Techniques"—and she didn't want to lose both words, and the newsstand sales manager wanted to put the word "photo" in the far upper-left corner, so newsstand browsers would stand a chance of seeing the P and the H and at least part of the O when the magazines were half-hidden behind other magazines on the newsstand.
And here's the story of that Schiit name, from Jason Stoddard, co-founder of the company:
[I]t always seemed like I was running out to the garage (where the workbench was).
“I’ve got schiit to do,” I’d tell Lisa, and disappear.
She’s endlessly patient, but one day, she’d finally had enough. “Why don’t you just call it Schiit?” she shot back, crossing her arms.
“Call what schiit?”
“The new company. You’re always saying you’ve got schiit to do. Why not just call it Schiit?”
At first, I laughed. A company called Schiit? No sane company would do that. If we proposed that name to any Centric client, I imagined what they’d say. Way too out there. Can’t believe you’d propose that. Piss off too many people. What a crazy idea. Then they’d fire us.
But I’d had 15 years of marketing playing it safe, second-guessing everything we did, and watering down every great idea until it was meaningless. Maybe you can blame my decision on that history. Maybe it was nothing more than that.
And this company wasn’t about playing it safe. Hell, we were trying to reach Chinese prices here in the USA. And do it without a million-dollar investment. That was about as crazy as it got.
“Nobody would ever forget it,” I replied, finally.
“It would cut down your marketing costs,” Lisa agreed.
“And we could say we make some really good Schiit.”
Lisa laughed. “Why not? Go ape Schiit.”
“And Schiit happens,” I agreed.
“If you don’t have our stuff, you’re up Schiit creek,” Lisa added.
I nodded and sat back. Suddenly it didn’t seem so crazy. Hell, the word was meaningless for, what, 80% of the world that didn’t speak English? And if you spelled it funny, it could sound vaguely German.
Hey, they've got us talking about them, right? Even though I personally absolutely refuse to buy anything called Schiit. Not gonna happen. When it comes to naming things, about the best you can say is that you can't lose them all. But you certainly can't win them all, either.
Mike
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Patrick Murphy: "Company and product names can take on a life of their own. In the 1980s I was working on a the World Wildlife Fund publication with a cover story was about pangolins (until recently very obscure creatures...). For some reason I started making jokes with my friend Andrea about famous pangolin TV shows of the 1960s: My Three Pangolins; Pangolin: Impossible; The Pangolin Bunch, etc. It seemed hilarious at the time, working late, under pressure. When time came to name my one-man graphic arts company, I called it Pangolin Graphic Design. Then I started another one-man company doing laser light show programs. I wanted to answer the phone the same way for both, so it became Pangolin Laser Software: 'Hello, this is Pangolin, can I help you?'
"Fast forward 40 years, and Pangolin Laser Systems (slightly renamed after I sold it in 2000) is the world leader in this small but fun field. Probably any major laser show you've seen, from the Super Bowl to the Olympics to Disney to Pink Floyd—the vast majority were created and presented using Pangolin software. But imagine if the World Wildlife Fund story had been about aardvarks...."
Ken Ohrn: "My fave naming blunder is Chevrolet, who named a car the 'Nova.' In Spanish, of course, this means 'doesn't go.'"
Bob (partial comment): "If I could be the super-duper all powerful, I don't know, guy for a few hours, I would allow marketing people a maximum of seven syllables for a product name. Seven. If someone used all seven, I wouldn't fire them, but they'd lose their bonus and merit increase for the next two years. Too extreme? Consider this: iPod. iPhone. iPad. Three products. Three product names. Six syllables total! The company that adopted those names managed OK (and I don't work for that company, if it matters). You establish the brand through the quality of the product, not by making its name more bloated and idiotic, or illogical, than it should be physically possible to do."
John Camp: "I agree that naming things can be tough, but OM-D E-M[x]? Give me a break. Bozo the Clown could have come up with something better. 'Bozo' would be better."
Mike replies: Fewer syllables.
John Seidel: "Sitting here listening to music running through my Schiit DAC. It's good Schiit. You should give this Schiit a try, Mike. Dis Schiit's da bomb."
Weekes James: "When we go out to a market in Provence my friend Ian and I skip the market and go for a walk. We meet our wives at a little bar. We each have a nice cold beer and the ladies prefer a lemonade. The prevalent brand in our area is called Pschitt! With the exclamation point. It is meant to sound like the bottle being opened. Needless to say we always announce too the wives, 'You’re in luck! The have the good Pschitt!'"
Soeren Engelbrecht: "When I worked for Nikon in the noughts, we had three lines of COOLPIX compacts: S (~Style), L (~Life), and P (~Performance).
"We of course never told our customers what the letters meant—and they had to figure out themselves that cameras in the 'L' line were mostly cheaper than the 'S' Line. Most people could figure out that the 'P' line was the expensive one. Now here's the really weird thing: The three lines were managed by three product teams, who used different numbering schemes.
"So the L-cameras were simply named consecutively after the release date: L-1, L-2, L-3, through L-24. A lesser camera could have a higher number than a better one.
"The P-series also started out with P-1 and P-2, but that quickly went to two, three, and four-digit numbers. Within the same number of digits, a higher number was usually better than one with a lower number.
"The S-cameras were a mix of the two other numbering schemes—I never managed to understand that fully. Except that any camera with a 'c' appended had WiFi.
"Just imagine being a customer looking for a camera and trying to grasp this...."
Lee: "By coincidence I ordered three pieces of Schiit this morning while you were apparently writing this post. I also subscribed to D&CCT and Photo Techniques until the very end. I'm using isolation time to get my Schitt together."
Mike replies: People love talking Schitt.
Kurt G Kramer: "The current name change that I just don't get and think is stupid is from "Weight Watchers" to "WW". Typically acronyms serve the function of reducing a long name to a short one. International Business Machines became IBM. In this case they went from 3 syllables to 6 syllables. Not only is WW not descriptive of the product, but their name gained weight!"
Mike replies: I didn't know about that one, but you're right, it's incredibly stupid. "Weight Watchers" is one of the iconic brands, extremely well established and well known to people way outside its sphere of business operations. It's even descriptive, which most businesses would dearly wish for. "WW" connotes "world war" and perhaps confuses with "world wide web" and is otherwise meaningless. You might as intelligently change "Coca-Cola" to "CC" or "Ford Motor Company" to "FM Co." Very, very stupid.
Acronyms and initialisms are fashionable, but a lot of them are inane. I thought it was a big mistake for Photo District News to switch over to "PDN." PDN was long used as a nickname among initiates, but it only makes sense if you knew it stood for Photo District News. So why not just keep the name? Besides, the full name was cool, and distinguished their mission from that of magazines for amateurs.
Mike Chisholm: "I'm surprised nobody has so far mentioned poet Marianne Moore's attempts to name what eventually became the ill-fated Ford Edsel. Her offerings included: Thunderblender; The Resilient Bullet; Bullet Cloisoné; The Intelligent Whale, and The Ford Fabergé Mongoose Civique. The list is long (she was obviously taken with the idea), but culminated in the best of all: the Utopian Turtletop."
