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http://www.inc.com/magazine/20040401/culture.html
April 2004
By Michael Dirda
Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Maybe. But would the handheld BlackBerry have sold as well if it had been named AirWire, Badge, Hula, Sling, Vuant, or TelTop? In Word Craft , business writer Alex Frankel explores how "namers," working for consulting firms like Lexicon and Wood Worldwide, came up with Pentium, PowerBook, e-business, Saturn, and Viagra. A good name must support the product's "message," suggest a subtle backstory of meaning, and function as a kind of one-word haiku. With the impotence pill Viagra, for example, "Vi" evokes vitality, vigor, and virility. The right name, moreover, creates brand awareness and controls a consumer's perceptions. The mellifluous-sounding Viagra transformed life-destroying impotence into treatable erectile dysfunction. Frankel includes a half-dozen winning profiles of corporate wordsmiths, image makers, and advertising gurus. Yet even a literary light can flub the name game. When Ford Motor Co. asked Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore to christen a new automobile, she suggested the Silver Sword, the Resilient Bullet, and the Utopian Turtletop. Ford rejected them all and instead chose...the Edsel.
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