Wednesday, February 17, 2010

News: Name-calling In Google Age

by Jeremy Au Yong
- Straits Times, Life 13/02/2010

  I know I'm coming late to the party, so I won't go on and on about how dumb a name Apple has given it's tablet PC, the iPad.

Yet, I would be remiss in my duties here if I did not at least devote a few sentences to the feminine hygiene product jokes inspired by this product.

So if you don't mind, I'll try to get it over with quickly. Here goes:
Will the 64GB model be called the maxipad?
Will there be two data plans - light flow and heavy flow?
Will it come scented for the days when my data is feeling "not so fresh"?
If I order an iPad, will my girlfriend and I have to worry if it arrives late?
Is it true that for one week every month the iPad will be unresponsive and harsh?

Ahhhh, that feels better. Ok, I'm all done with that. No more iPad cracks from me today, I promise. Thank you for your patience.

With that absorbing matter out of the way (sorry, this is the last one, I swear), I can now move on to the real meat of today's column, which is: Why are there so many dumb product names these days anyway? Have we already used up all the good ones or what?

I mean, ask any random person in the street and they'll tell you straight away that you should not name your product an iPad, unless your product might be something guys are embarrassed to buy at a FairPrice.

Yet, here we have a situation where one of the world's premier IT giants is proudly using the name for its latest flagship product.

Not only that, we have a second company, Fujitsu, actually wanting to fight Apple over it. They claim they had come up with and used the dumb name first. It's their dumb name, not Apple's. (techiewen: wow I didn't know Fujitsu used it and want to claim it for theirs. read more here - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/fujitsu_ipad/)



Of course, it would be grossly unfair of me to single out the iPad as the only bad product name out there. There are heaps of other examples.



Osim, for instance, has an unending supply of products with bad names. The products themselves are fine, it's just that they seem to like taking an otherwise innocuous word, messing up its spelling and sticking a random letter in front of it.

The desired effect, it seems, is to have every product name look like a typo.

Some examples include: the uZap, uKimono, uMomi, uSoffa and the uGottaBeKidding.

Another example of a less than ideal name is the Nintendo Wii.

It is still not entirely clear to me what they were trying to achieve when they call it that. I mean the only English word that even comes remotely close is "wee" and that is far from flattering.

Granted, the video game console has since become such a success that you can publicly proclaim "I really need a Wii" and no one will be moved to usher you to a toilet.

Then there is the Volkswagen Golf. At first glance, it certainly seems like a completely reasonable name as far as cars go. But more than one person has pointed out to me that the car is essentially named after a slow, plodding sport where one of the biggest challenges is driving.

So I mulled over this prevalence of bad product names, trying to work out how they happened. I ultimately decided the Internet was to blame. The way I see it, naming used to be simpler before the Internet. Say you invited a new kind of self- sucking straw that you wanted to call the Suckmaster 2000. Back then all you had to do was to write this name on a piece of paper. You would take this piece of paper down to the local office of product names and try to register it. If there wasn't already another piece of paper there with the word Suckmaster 2000 on it, the name would be yours.

These days, after you come up with a name, you have to Google it just to see what else in the world has a name similar to that. The idea here is that you want people to see your web page high in the results whenever somebody searches for a Suckmaster 2000. If it turns out that there are tons of other Suckmasters out there, then you might want to change the name to something unique, Super Suckmaster perhaps, or the Ultra Suckmaster 3000.

When you are satisfied that you rname is unique enough, you have to check whether the domain ultrasuckmaster.com is available as well as the e-mail address ultrasuckmaster@hotmail.com and the blog ultrasuckmaster.blogspot.com. If they are not, you'd have to modify the name further, move some letters around and be creative with spelling.

This isn't just for products. There have been reports of parents in the US doing the same for baby names.

Anyway, after all that checking, you will most likely end up with a name like the uSuckmasterblaster 4000, or for short, the uSuck.

And then unreasonable people will make fun of the name in a newspaper column.

Take heart, however, that a good product can still succeed even if it has a stupid name. Just look at the iPad.

I mean, dumb name or not, I want one. Period (Sorry!)

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