I’m sure we’ve all driven past billboards and wondered how a company came up with the product or service names that pop up on our routes. Perhaps we chuckle at some or greet others with downright annoyance because they’re too cutesy or pretentious or whatever pushes the button for us.
My favorite marketing guru, Marcia Yudkin recently posted about “product/solution/technique names that really resonate and why.”
Her example was the following four names for decluttering methods mentioned in an article she had read:
- The KonMari Method
- Four Box Cleaning
- Junk Snowball Decluttering
- Swedish Death Cleaning
She notes that option #4 was featured in the article. For good reason. The name put “death” (extreme) together with “Swedish” (known but not a word we run across every day) and “cleaning” (everyday). Ms. Yudkin found the juxtaposition “electrifying … dramatic and unexpected.” She wanted to know more so she read on.
What Swedish Death Cleaning directs you to do is to go through your possessions, finding them new homes so your survivors won’t have to. Check out the YouTube video from Margareta Magnusson, the originator. (For those who live in the Bay Area’s mid-peninsula, let me put in a plug here for “Pick of the Litter,” the Peninsula Humane Society thrift shop.)
But the real point of this post is about effective naming. It is, as Ms. Yudkin points out, “not easy to bestow a name on techniques, events or companies with that arresting quality that still seems appropriate and appealing once you learn more. But why not try?” I heartily concur, because it would be lovely not to trip over names like “Abilify,” a treatment for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, or Accenture, which is suggestive, I guess of “accent” and “future” and yet (in my opinion), a bit silly-sounding.
What are your candidates for great or terrible names? I’d love to hear them.
everydayplus / 123RF Stock Photo
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