Wordcraft

Abstract: In Wordcraft, Alex Frankel describes the "art of turning little words into big business." The book details the process through which professional naming firms develop company and brand names, and the stories behind the birth of some well known brand names such as Accenture, BlackBerry, and Viagra.

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Thus Losec, an ulcer medication, had to be renamed Prilosec to avoid confusion with Lasix, a diuretic. This is not a trivial issue. According to some reports, mix-ups in the names of drugs are responsible for up to 25 percent of all medication errors in the US. The guidelines also do not allow names seem to convey a promise of a cure, or indicate a dosage. Thus, Panacea will not be accepted as the name for any drug. And naturally, the name must not infringe on any registered trademarks. With all these limitations, coming up with the right name is only a small part of the naming process. Even after a name is created, a great deal of research and investigation still needs to be done. Possibly, this justifies the $100,000 - $700,00 fees charged by the leading firms in the field - a sum that is anyway peanuts to most pharmaceutical companies. After a name is chosen, it must be launched and broadcasted to the market. In the book, the author talks of bottom-up and top-down approaches to broadcasting a name. Accenture followed a top-down approach to familiarizing people with the name - through print and TV advertising and publicity campaigns.

An example of a bottom-up campaign is the Whassup! advertising campaign from Budweiser, where after a series of advertisements from the company, the general public adopted and spread the word. In essence, Budweiser let go off its creation, leaving it to the people on the street to expand on, and popularize, the usage of the term.

One measure of the success of a name is its entry into dictionaries. Another indicator could be its use as a verb, as in Xeroxed, Googled, or FedExed. Both these indicate that the name has taken root in popular culture. With the public appropriating the name for their own use, the firm that owns the name is actually losing its ownership of the name. However, it gains as the name is popularized and disseminated far and wide in the process. A part of the latter half of the book is devoted to Stone Yamashita Partners, a small 30 employee consulting firm based in San Francisco credited with creating, or more accurately, appropriating, the term e-business for IBM. According to author, the firm is believed to have played a significant role in the transformation of the company, including the changes in its corporate culture. The firm's website speaks of its "unlikely combination of professionals...with a shared passion for invoking systemic, seismic change." As with the power of a brand name, Stone Yamashita could be all that the author says it is (and maybe even more); it could also be somewhat less.

Just how seriously should one take a book on naming? Clearly brand names are important. Witness the success of Kodak and Xerox - both, one would assume, names that were created without the help of high priced naming agencies and have stood the test of time. But how credible is the process the author describes, used to come up with new names? Does it deliver consistently good results? How much of the success of Viagra is attributable to the name, and how much to the millions Pfizer spent on promoting the drug? As with the recommendations of management consultants, the number of variables is so large, that it is difficult to attribute success or failure to any one component of a strategy. There is also the issue of observer bias. The names we are likely to know about are the successful names. The failures, because they were failures, tend to remain unknown.

The book is interesting, but not gripping. It also suffers from a few drawbacks. One, it tends to become repetitive in parts. Two, the book seems to lack a coherent structure, looking like a series of incidents or case studies strung together. Sometimes, it also ends up reading like promotional plugs for some of the companies or individuals being written about. Some of the stories are just too long, and not interesting enough to sustain a readers' attention. Finally, naming is not rocket science. And, given the impreciseness of the process, it is hard to separate the smoke and mirrors from the substance. Finally, for a person whose work is coming up with saleable names, the author has chosen a name - Quiddity, meaning "the real nature of a thing; the essence" - for his own firm, which sounds like a cross between Queer and Oddity. However, the word has a second meaning - "a hairsplitting distinction; a quibble." Much like an argument about the importance of brand names, perhaps.