Prime time for the science of naming

Check out a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article about the importance of scientifically designed company names and the bright prospects of the name consulting industry that follows the rise in demand. This article raises great points about the fact that there are now more unique registered names of businesses than there are words in the Oxford English language dictionary. Therefore, if you think you have a perfect name for your company from existing vocabulary, chances are it is already taken and you have to concoct a fictional word that would describe your company. Besides, with today's international economy and companies establishing presence in multiple cultures, they need to make sure their name does not mean anything unacceptable in a different language. The article gives a hilarious, yet alarming, example of Gazprom and Nigerian company merger which has chosen a name NiGaz. Another classic example is Chevrolet "Nova" ("doesn't go" in Spanish) which saw a fiasco in Latin America. And a more recent and less known example is Windows "Vista" ("chicken" in Latvian), which I imagine did not see much success in Latvia. All these examples of disastrous naming point to the fact that names do matter and it is necessary to treat naming with a degree of seriousness and not just rely on chance.

Another point raised by the article is that right now the world is waiting for the next "weird, but not too weird" tech company name that will join Google and Twitter in the alley of internet fame. While these two epochal names were chosen pretty much at random, right now dozens of name consulting companies offer you to take no chances and seek professional help. They can help you figure out which combinations of sounds are best received by your audience and which ones express the essence of your product. No matter how silly this may sound, those details do matter. I still remember the discussion of experiments from my Consumer Behavior class where people rated a fictional car "Bromley" as having more leg space and being more powerful than an equivalent fictional car "Brimley" and that people thought an imaginary cell phone "Strawberry" was slower than an equivalent (then imaginary) call phone "Blackberry". So next time you think of picking a name at random, remember that there is a science to every name and do your due diligence before ending up with an oil merger NiGaz or a Chevy "Doesn't Go". And in the meantime, read the article, it is amazing!
"The Twitter Effect" by Eric Spitznagel (Bloomberg Businessweek)