In the Product Naming Sweepstakes, Here Are Some Big Winners (page 2 of 2)

Typically, the financial press mentions that Altria is the parent company of Philip Morris USA somewhere in the story lest the reader remain clueless.

In addition, Frankel mentions that when Andersen Consulting was changing its name, other Big Six firms were adopting new names, too. He cites PricewaterhouseCooper Consulting renaming itself "Monday!" Two questions naturally arise: Were professional namers involved in that one? What were they thinking? It's true that that "Monday!" barely lasted through Tuesday because IBM dropped the name when it added PwC to its IBM Business Consulting Group, but the questions remain and Frankel is no help.

Frankel writes about techniques used by naming consultants to expand their output. He describes how Lexicon Branding, the firm that came up with Powerbook and Pentium as well as BlackBerry, sometimes breaks staffers up into separate teams or "misleads them into thinking they are creating a name for one client when it may be meant for another." Perhaps more revealingly, Frankel says that "identifying clients that produce good products helps Lexicon tie its reputation to successes not failures." Not a bad strategy...

Overall, Frankel makes a convincing case that, for any product, a good name is an asset well worth seeking. And along the way, Wordcraft drops all sorts of fun information about the naming process in and around its main case histories. Frankel tells, for example, how the people of Denver fought against having Mile High Stadium clunkily renamed "Invesco Field at Mile High." Money talks and Invesco won, but feelings ran so high, Frankel relates, that John Hickenlooper, a local bar owner who led the fight against the name change, was elected mayor of Denver in a landslide.