Cool Rules Pronto

Who ever imagined that naming a company would become a game of speed and chance?

Today, I decided to look up the name Client9.com. In case you’ve been stationed in Antarctica and missed the screaming sensationalist headlines, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was recently busted for hiring prostitutes: he was the mysterious “Client 9″ in investigative reports. Given my penchant for anything that sounds like it came from a James Bond film, I immediately looked to reserve “Client 9″ as the site of a satirical series, but someone beat me to the punch. Damn, that’s fast.

And that’s a taste of what it’s like to name a company in 2008.

Over my two decades in business, I’ve named numerous products and companies — and it hasn’t gotten any easier. The big naming agencies use computers, linguist PhD’s and legal teams to ferret out the “right name” for a client, and then charge six figures for the service. Someday I’ll get there. In the meantime, I use my imagination, multiple shots of espresso, countless sources of stimulation (Communication Arts magazine, the novels of Tom Robbins, Babylonian mythology) and a set of criteria:

1. Availability: Is the name available — both legally (check both federal and state trademark registries) and as a .com? (Note: Although there are now several options to .com, the alternatives just don’t have the same clout — or searchability. You still really want a .com.)

Also, is a similar name being used by something unsavory? I once developed a name that turned out to be similar to the web address of a neo-Nazi website, so I had to go back to the drawing board. In addition, if you find a name that was previously used but now abandoned, you might want to research what it was used for.

One of my biggest pet peeves is web-address squatters. Just when you think you’ve nailed a great name, you find that someone else has already booked it online — but they’re not using it. They just reserved it for resale. And it’s not just geeks in Third World countries hoping to score an extra buck. The domain-registration and hosting service Network Solutions was recently sued for automatically grabbing web addresses that people were researching on their site. Regardless of the legality, it makes finding an available name even harder.

2. Suitability: Is the name a good fit for the company, the industry, and the target consumer?

I love the name “Skullcandy” for the brand of headphones targeting the extreme sports and music crowd. It captures the company’s edgy culture, describes the product, and appeals to the youthful rebellious audience.

I’m not so wild about “The CW” for a television network targeting young people. It says absolutely nothing. At least its previous name, “The WB,” conjured up Warner Bros (its original parent company), the Wayan Brothers (its early programming), or White Babes (the focus of its non-Wayan Brothers programming). “CW” is what, Country Western? Corporate Waste? Creepy Weasels?

3. Memorability: Today’s consumers encounter thousands of company names from around the world. Most reflect no imagination or even thought.

In Web 2.0, apparently, the weirder the better. It started with Yahoo! and Google becoming massive and famous. Then came the onslaught of nonsense names like Danoo, Ooyala, Veoh and Hulu. Maybe those names will stick, but they’ll take time, work and money.

The worst corporate names are acronyms, like The CW, BASF, EDS, TIAA-CREF, or half the ad agency names in the industry (see below). It usually takes decades and millions of dollars in marketing to get acronym-based names to stick (like IBM or BMW), since acronyms are usually unpronounceable and have no meaning on their own.

Or it takes a brilliant ad agency to create something memorable about it: the Kaplan Thaler Group used a talking duck to finally make AFLAC memorable. Before the duck, AFLAC had spent millions of dollars on advertising and yet failed to generate much name recall by consumers. My hats off to AFLAC for taking a creative risk for a conservative product (insurance). It worked. But what if AFLAC had a better name in the first place?

4. Spellability: If consumers have a hard time remembering the spelling, they’re never going to find your website. Hulu is only 4 letters, but I’ve already had to spell it for several people.

Even if the name is made up of common words, if it’s too long, people will mistype it. Trying to type AllAmericanFootballLeague.com into your browser will give you writer’s cramp. (In addition, as I mentioned in a previous post, the League’s acronym AAFL is pronounced “awful.”)

5. Creativity: In dotcom land, first, everyone put an e- in front of their names (eTrade, eToys, eBay). Then came i- (before Apple locked up every noun in the world with an i- in front of it). Now I see names with You- at the beginning.

Other industries aren’t immune from copycat behavior. At the Consumer Electronics Show, every other name had the word Tech in it. In football, it’s something generic + FL (UFL, AAFL, USFL, XFL). Even in frogurt chains, Pinkberry spawned such leaps of imagination as Blue Cherry and Kiwiberri (Pinkberry itself is a take on another chain, Red Mango). All very sad and shameless.

It’s perfectly fine to derive your name from other sources of inspiration (such as classic ’80s teen flicks) as long as they’re not in the same industry. Otherwise, you’re just confusing consumers instead of impressing them — some might even think you’re lame. You’re also setting yourself up for a lawsuit.

Almost as bad as a derivative name is a generic corporate name, like Technical Solutions, Premier Staffing, or National Finance Services. I just made up those names right here on the spot and… (drum roll please)… yes, they are real companies — companies whose names are boring and impossible to remember, even if you’re holding the CEO’s business card in your hand.

And unless you’re a law firm, don’t make your name a string of the partners’ last names. Talk about hard to remember, spell or even pronounce.

An original creative name stands out from the crowd. It’s easy to remember. And It says that you’re a smart company that’s worth watching.

It also makes for great conversation at networking events.

Inspirations & Competitors

My criteria are based in part on the work of Marty Neumeier, author of the books The Brand Gap and Zag (I recommend both). You can read his original criteria off his agency site. Ironically, his website has the unfortunate name of NeutronLLC.com — a forgettable combination of a commonplace noun and a corporate suffix — proving that even the experts hit the occasional wall.

Indeed, I’ve found it amusing that many ad agencies, who are masters of branding, have names that sound like they came from a law firm or a spilled bowl of alphabet soup: TBWA\Chiat\Day, GSD&M, Crispin Porter + Bogusky…

In fact, I just Googled “naming services,” and the first listing that came up was Master-McNeil, who are self-proclaimed “Thought Leaders in Naming.” And yet the best they could do for themselves was the last names of their founders. Ego, anyone? (Fortunately for them, they own the URL naming.com.)

So What’s Up with Atomic Tango?

When I had to come up with a name for my own agency, I decided to avoid the industry clichés of using an acronym or my last name (for many people, Nager is both hard to pronounce and spell).

I came up with the word “Tango” first. It’s easy to spell and fun to say. It refers to a sensual dance requiring athleticism, cooperation and precision. And because I work closely with clients, I wanted to evoke the expression “it takes two to tango.”

But the name Tango was already taken — as are nearly all one-word .coms — so I decided to create a two-word name, which is an effective way to bypass the squatters. I selected “Atomic” because it’s easy to spell and say, and because it evokes the late ’50s/early ’60s, which to me was the pinnacle of American style. (Yes, I’m mad about the TV series Mad Men, which is set in an ad agency in 1960.) It hints at “fusion,” which is what my agency does (fusing creativity and strategy). It was also the era of the early James Bond flicks, and the time when my father was jet-setting around the world as a member of the State Department.

So I put the two words together, and in the year ‘007 (which comes around every thousand years), Atomic Tango was born.

Good name? I’ll let you decide. It’s worked for me so far.