http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108147445675878714,00.html

Such questions are at the heart of "Wordcraft," Alex Frankel's look at the business of naming names. A young journalist in San Francisco, Mr. Frankel had some first-hand experience as a "naming consultant" during the dot-com boom and afterward decided to research the whole subject. The result is a thoughtful and engaging exploration of how companies and products get their names nowadays, as well as the function of brands in a global culture.

Mr. Frankel focuses on BlackBerry and four other brands: Accenture, Viagra, the Porsche Cayenne and IBM's "e-business." His account is leavened by, among other things, a chronicle of his own naming misadventures, a brief survey of how brand names function in contemporary fiction and a profile of a typically quirky freelance "namer." Readers of "Wordcraft" (Crown, 241 pages, $24) will discover that Shakespeare is credited with coining some 1,500 words ("including lackluster, bandit and watchdog") and that most of us have learned 60,000 words by the time we're 18 -- meaning we average 10 new words a day from our first birthday on.

So just how do companies and products get named? It's not easy. Businesses are so obsessed with branding that names are seen as crucial, yet finding a good one -- not yet trademarked -- can be difficult. On "Seinfeld," when Cosmo Kramer and Frank Costanza invent a product to relieve the stresses of male mammary overdevelopment, their do-it-yourself approach to naming ends up in an argument over the relative merits of "the bro" and "the manssiere."

Refined Strategy
Corporations use a more refined strategy, but there is no evidence that it is any more successful. What they do is to hire a consultant, who will marshal an assortment of poets, linguists, displaced academics and others to search out just the right term. There are focus groups, client meetings and brainstorming sessions. The process seems to require stylish clothes, fashionably open offices and not inconsiderable fees.

And the results are decidedly mixed, as even Mr. Frankel acknowledges. He praises the names BlackBerry and Viagra as something close to ideal. Both are quick (blackberry comes out faster than, say, strawberry); both sound upbeat; and both say something (if not much) about their products. The BlackBerry itself is indeed black, while the name Viagra suggests vitality or vigor. But Mr. Frankel reveals that consultants had cooked up both terms for other purposes. When the e-mail gadget and the treatment for "erectile dysfunction" (a term that was itself a marketing invention) came along, the names were simply pulled off the shelf.

Something more herculean was attempted when Andersen Consulting, in 2000, had to come up with a new name for itself as part of a divorce from the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. It not only hired Landor Associates, a leading consultancy in the field, but mobilized its own people across the globe. Mr. Frankel's account of this search -- against which the hunt for Osama bin Laden pales in scope -- is hilarious and revealing.

Looking for a New Label
Certainly there was no shortage of self-importance. At their first meeting, the roughly 40-person Andersen rebranding team decided that it ought to hire a video crew to record their history-making sessions. Once it got going, the group harvested 6,000 names from various sources, including a contest within the company that generated words from Breton, Sanskrit and Swahili, among other languages. The in-house leader of the effort was backed by 2,000 Andersen Consulting "brand champions" -- i.e., marketing employees "called up like a reservist army to inspire the company about the rebranding project and to build consensus around a new name." This superhuman effort -- "one of the most thorough name examinations that's ever been done by mankind," in the stirring words of the firm's marketing chief -- produced a list of 30 finalist-names that were mostly stunning in their awfulness, including not just Accenture (the firm's name today) but also AcceleratedCertitude, Ampatic, BrightEdge, Ceragence, Everise (presumably now available to Viagra competitors), FutureSeek, Haliageny, Illinium, Menzana, Oriens and, in some unconscious parody of consulting, Refount.

What Mr. Frankel grapples with in only the politest way is whether this whole obsession with naming is pointless. Too many businesses, it seems, have forgotten that a catchy name and a great ad campaign won't be worth the millions that are spent on them unless the product or service has value in itself. And if it does, you can call it what you will, even "Poland Spring" or "The Gap." A little less attention to branding -- and a little more to the beef underneath the brand -- makes all the difference.

Mr. Akst is a writer in Tivoli, N.Y.