123rf.com: Wavebreak Media Ltd.
Ivan Levison, a brilliant marketing copywriter, wrote early this year about names and, by extension, marketing language. He decries the tendency to come up with product or company names that are essentially meaningless.
As he notes, Ford, Ferrari, Porsche, and Rolls-Royces were named after the companies’ owners. As time went on, cars were named more evocatively with “names that men, then the principal buyers of cars in America, would find irresistible.” He mentions the Explorer and the Viper but oddly enough, leaves out the Mustang. In my view, that wonderful name suggests rugged independence and crazy speed, a suggestion that becomes flesh in the fabulous chase scene from Bullitt.
Since then, we seem to have lost our marketing juju. I’m sure I’m not alone in scratching my head over names like Agilent, Etsy, and Spotify. They sound SV cool, but really, what do they say? Mr. Levison’s article is a plea for meaningful names. Honest names. Here, he delivers a nice ding to the Altria Group, formerly Philip Morris, which has chosen “to become invisible and fly under the radar with a non-name.” My aside: to obscure its purveyor-of-death origins.
In the spirit of interactivity and just plain good fun, I’d love to see your nominations for annoyingly meaningless names.
Leave a Comment