Naming Things

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

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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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."

Comments

[Thomas Walsh]

This blog reminds me of the problem Chevrolet supposedly had with the Hispanic community when the introduced the Chevy Nova (no go). Of course, this might be an urban legend?

[Ken Owen]

I'm rather fond of my reasonably priced Schiit DACs. One's a "Modi 3", and the other, powering my computer speakers as I type, is a "Fulla".

[Lawrence Plummer]

Hey! I own four pieces of Schiit equipment, they're great!

[Dennis]

Heck, even before all the "good names" were taken, people struggled with it. I just started reading a book about the East India Trading Company and learned that it was originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East-Indies".

[Bob]

Robin Wong has a video on Olympus's problems, one of which is using the word "micro" as part of their product name. Why not "mirrorless four-thirds?" Or something. But not micro. No one wants to shoot with something that's micro. (And this from a loyal Olympus user (both Robin and me).) But Olympus isn't the only one at fault, as you point out.

I work for a big software and computer company that has inflicted absolutely *absurd* product names on its customers. And potential customers. I work in communications and I get that product names are hard. But 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.

Yeeesh!!! What was that all about!? I'll get back on the meds. Maybe there's a reason why I'm not the super-duper all powerful *guy*.

[-et-]

About 20 years ago I was on vacation in Montana in Glacier National Park on an August day that set a new record for high temperature. I really, really wanted something cold to drink, but the only available source was a small shop in the basement of the park lodge, and its refrigerator had already been emptied of water and soft drinks by others.

I normally do not care for beer except with pizza, but that was the only thing available that was cold. I had started to grab the closest national brand when I noticed a bottle right next to it called "Moose Drool".

My reaction for the first second or two was (not surprisingly) negative. But then I started thinking that this was not a product that was surviving on slick marketing, so perhaps the beer might be decent, and I ended up buying a bottle.

It was cold, which was really the only thing important to me at the time, and I was no expert on beer. However, out of curiosity I bought a six-pack and took it home to be judged by my much better qualified son-in-law, who found it quite satisfactory.

Like your example of Schiit electronics, this may be an example of reverse psychology, but I am told that "Moose Drool" beer is still being sold.

- Tom -

[Allan Ostling]

I'm glad you clarified the confusion of the subsequent renaming of "Darkroom Techniques." I subscribed from issue 1. In 1989 I moved the Bay Area to Tucson, and the subscription continued there.

I was delighted to be living only a short drive from the Center for Creative Photography, on the U of A camp https://kennerly.ccp.arizona.edu/.This is the repository for many valuable collections, including all the Ansel Adams negatives. They also had an extensive library devoted exclusively to photography. They had back copies of Darkroom Techniques and its successors, but they were missing the first two years. When I moved from Tucson to Seattle four years later I donated all those missing issues.

Although the CCP still thrives, the attached library is defunct. I hope the have those back issue in storage, somewhere.

[Eric Peterson]

Eyewear company here in LA, called Crap. Like Samuel L Jackson’s character said, “a rat might taste like pumpkin pie but I’ll never know”

[robert e]

They could have called it "CX-Pi, the most well-rounded vehicle in its class".

I'd buy something called Schiit, if it was good schiit.

[Geoff Wittig]

The pharmaceutical industry has the same problem; with more than 20,000 (and counting) drugs in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, it's a challenge for BigPharma to come up with a unique name for a new product. And if a name is too similar to an existing drug, it greatly increases the risk of a lethal mistake.
Just to add to the problem, drug companies now do their damndest to make new drugs' generic names intentionally unpronounceable, so you're basically forced to use the trade name and give them some free advertising.

[Robert Roaldi]

And there are problems with names as spoken in other languages. There used to be (maybe still) a Buick model called Crosse or Lacrosse or something, can't remember. But "crosse" is slang in Quebec French that means something that people do while alone.

I find it confusing that Mazda, Audi and BMW all use simple numbers to describe their models. Makes it awkward when writing some sentences, "He prefers the 3 over the 2." Lincoln was confusing for a while with MKTs and LTK, and I don't know what else. Made me wonder if a salesman ever entered the wrong name in a sales contract and they gave the wrong car to a client.

[I find it particularly irksome when a product has a single number like "Mazda 6" and a search engine will disregard any alphanumeric string shorter than a certain number of characters, so you can't include the "6." That's not as much of a problem now as it used to be, though. --Mike]

[wts]

Some small computer companies start with a "fun" name that they must then change when they begin selling into the corporate market. Here are 2 examples:
FoolishIT is now d7xTech.
CrapCleaner is now CCleaner.

[Alex Mercado]

Lest we forget the m:robe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxED-RtR6c

[They were ahead of their time is all. --Mike]

[Dan Khong]

In the land of the rising sun, OHNO is a distinguished surname. The name is made up of two elements: "o," meaning "small," and "no," meaning "field."

[hugh crawford]

Am I the only person that thinks phosgene gas when I hear CX ?
You would think that a company headquartered in Hiroshima would sensitive to naming a product line after a chemical weapon ( or a hazard of welding tin which is why I know)

Dairy cows have the same naming conventions. One of our cows , cleverlands darimost crystal, was world dairy champion in 1975, and I used be able to bet that I could walk into any county fair that had cows and find some farmer who knew who I was. Most of the guernsey cows in the world are probably related to our herd by now.

[Marco Sabatini]

A famous Swiss brand started selling very coloured watches, called Swatches because they were S(wiss)watches. Then they started selling lamps, called Slamps because they were S(wiss)lamps. Finally, they started selling cars, but they did not call them Scars, even if they were S(wiss)cars.
They called them Smarts.

[hugh crawford]

Oh almost forgot about Sony at one all their consumer TV sets had long numbers as model numbers and every year the new model would be one number lower than the model that it replaced apparently so salesman could confuse the customers by selling the old models as being newer and better than the new models.
I got a Crazy Eddie salesman screaming at me that I was a crazy person and after I showed him the official Sony catalog he kept screaming that I was some sort of communist. Ah NYC in the 80s.

[Zach]

Buick Lacrosse was poorly named for customers in Quebec.

The solution to Mazda's problem was, of course, the same answer as for AMC with the Pacer and the Gremlin - just add an X!

[David]

I’m sure there’s an Elon Musk joke to be had somewhere amongst this, but it’s just not in me this morning.

[Stephen Scharf]

"Even though I personally absolutely refuse to buy anything called Schiit."

As I sit here listening to my wonderful Gungnir Multibit DAC from Schiit Audio, all I can say is: "Your loss."

On another note, a lot of my buddies in high-end audio weren't buying Schiit Audio product because...they weren't expensive ENOUGH. Must be the concept of "vleben goods" at work. A number of them overcame their bias against buying something so inexpensive and are now VERY happy with their "piece of Schitt."

Don't let something like as simple as a name keep you from musical bliss.

[Eliott James]

I have a hard enough time naming a photograph. Can't imagine naming something important, like a company.

[SLOjoe]

Anyone know if Schiit products are good Schiit or not? Looking for some good sounding Schiit...

Must have a good sense of humor to buy products from this company that's for sure. It would be difficult to explain the name to friends who come over to listen to your new audio components.

[Dennis Ng]

There is a hyphen!? Really!?

Like the em5 mark II but always worry about the menu. Do not know that I do not even remember it has a hyphen even

[Dennis NG]

The link to the center or at least the museum is http://ccp-emuseum.catnet.arizona.edu/ The link provided is strange got .this and does not work

[Kurt G Kramer]

What about the nonsensical conglomerations of characters that Canon has used for 15+ years for their Digital Rebel series? I can't keep up, but they are akin to this: XrTSiII.
How can that mean anything to anybody?

[Kurt G Kramer]

I started exhibiting and selling photographs and getting the stray little assignment. I needed to come up with a name for my business. Putting the cart before the horse, I was experimenting with fonts. One of the words with which I experimented was Havana. I realized that if I added an "i" at the end, to get Havanai, it could be pronounced "Have an Eye". How clever!
Absolutely nobody got it.

[s.wolters]

SARS-CoV-2 is a terrible name too, but it seems to be quite successful.

[Jerker Andersson]

Lest we forget (if we ever knew): The Honda Fitta from a few years back. In Swedish (again) that word concerns the frontal mid section of the human body; women have one and men don´t, and not in a nice way. Ford Kuga - what at least two people do together to become more people or just for fun.

[Bear.]

Of course, the modern U-bend plumbing trap and floating ballcock for vacuum flush toilets was invented by Thomas Crapper, whose name was plastered on his company's cisterns. I'm sure it didn't help that by the of his invention in the mid-10th Century the word "crap" was in use from the Middle English word related to bodily wastes. No doubt Thomas was rightly proud of invention and saw nothing wrong with naming the company after himself but I'm not sure I would had done it myself. Imagine his poor kids at school(!). In the photograph arena, I think it was Eastman himself who said that he chose the otherwise meaningless "Kodak" as a name that was short, impossible to mispronounce (c.f. Nikon and Pentax), and not associated with anything else.

[beuler]

Think of the unfortunate individual in charge of naming car colors. Cosmic black. Tundra black. Thunder black. Abyss black.

The story of the OMD E-M1 name makes total sense for the historian types. Olympus wanted to call its first Maitani era SLR as the M1, but Leica already owned the letter M, so they went with OM. Olympus Maitani? Tha D was added for the digital era, hence OM Digital or OMD.

The letter E has been used by Olympus for all SLR cameras in the digital age, starting with the E-10 in 2000. The letter D was already taken for Olympus compact Digital cameras and the letter C was taken for the Camedia range of digital for advanced amateurs. Though technically not SLR cameras, the letter E was transported to all the Micro Four Thirds camera range. Perhaps to convince existing Four Thirds users that their lenses would still work on the new bodies?

To distinguish Four Thirds models from Micro Four Thirds models, Olympus added the M, hence EM-1, EM-5, EM-10. I imagine the M stands for Micro or Mirrorless, take your pick.

If it was me, the EM-1 would have been called the Sparrow, because it sounds cool.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

Legend has it that a Japanese car company wanted to make a rival to the Mustang type of pony cars. The suggestion was to call it Stallion but the Japanese have trouble pronouncing double 'l's (instead of 'hallo' they might say ' harro') so we got the Mitsubishi Starion.
(No racism or other nasties implied in this post.)
And could I just have one more beef. Why do U.K. people, and maybe others, have trouble pronouncing Mitsibushi and pronounce it Mitsubishi ?
One more.Mazda had a car named Xedos. Worrying customers might not know how to pronounce the name they ran a poster campaign with instructions to pronounce it ker- zee-dos. Funny I never heard of a ker-zy-lo-phone or a famous opera called ker-zerk-zees where a man sings of his love for a tree (Ombra ma fui)

[Mark Morris]

Schiit--never heard of 'em.

[Jim Witkowski]

A long time ago, I worked for an independent audio retailer in Phoenix. One day I asked the owner where these product names came from because they didn't make sense. I suggested calling them something simple, such as "Chuck's Radio."
He pulled out a brochure of a phono stage that we were installing in disco houses. A couple of guys, named Paul and Stan, made them, so they called their products PS Audio. I bought one of their preamps, and that was how I got into high-end audio.

[Steve Mallen]

Is there another reason, maybe? Apparently the number 4 can be associated with death (shi) in Japan and therefore sometimes room number 4 is missing in hotels and hospitals (or even floors in buildings). Although, if they used "CX-4" in China I guess that wipes that theory off the map :)

[Gordon Coale]

I have a Schiit stack next to my laptop. A Magni on top of a Mani on top of a Modi on top of a Jil. I love them!

[David L.]

Speaking of Panasonic cameras, and lost names, "Lumix" is hardly ever used by consumers.

[robert e]

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..."

Acronyms of company names can have a life of their own, too, and custody battles. That's the same WWF that won a legal tussle with the then "World Wrestling Federation" over use of their acronym-in-common, forcing the latter to change its name to "World Wrestling Entertainment".

[Rick_D]

As a hi-fi nerd you might be familiar with the Infinity POS speaker line. The story among folks in hi-fi retail is some development guys knocked the prototype together from the parts bin and were surprised when their "PoS" mutt speakers sounded good, and a new low-price line was born.

https://www.hifiengine.com/manual_library/infinity/pos-ii.shtml

IDK if audio and video components have the most awful model designations but they must be right up there, certainly worse than cars or cameras. Special shoutout to my fridge. I had to learn the proper model name to search for parts and repair info. KBFS20ETSS01. I'd like Kitchenaid to put more work into this. Who could resist the Kitchenaid Tornado 20?

[Kodachromeguy]

I agree about the baffling Olympus names, I am not actively following their product line, and I have no idea from the name convention which is supposed to be the higher-end model or whatever. Also, what is this OM stuff? I have OM lenses from the 1980s, and they do not fit the current cameras.

Cars like Lincoln made the same bone-headed mistake. MK-xyz? How is a casually interested consumer supposed to know what these things are? I bet they lost sales with this mess, as did Olympus.

[Ben Rosengart]

"Evite" means "avoid" in French and Spanish.

[Arg]

Olympus could have gone with OM-D1, OM-D5, OM-D10 and OM-DX, and they never would have had to endure a single year of losses.

Oh, and maybe not giving buyers the idea their sensors are tiny, the new camera format with its 'E'lectronic viewfinder could have been the E Four Thirds.

;)

[janekr]

'consider that currently there's there's a line of inexpensive audio products branded "Schiit."'
Inexpensive? Really?
I know, that for the hobby "sky is the limit", but Schiit DACs begin with nice $99.
As today's tv sets miss analog audio output and my good, old Kenwood amplifier has no digital input, I had to buy good enough DAC for around $30. That is INEXPENSIVE.

[Ellen K.]

"Nova" is actually I think more likely to make a Spanish speaker think "nueva" (new) than the two word phrase "no va".

The story about it being a blunder is definitely a myth:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/chevrolet-nova-name-spanish/
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/04/07/fact-check-the-nova-did-not-sell-poorly-in-latin-america-due-to-its-name