The Naming Nightmare

By Drew Letendre

© Copyright Drew Letendre, 2023

In one of my dreams, I’m a professional baseball player. This is the dream-come-true

part of the dream. But it quickly takes a dark turn. I find that each day, on waking, the dimensions of the field have mysteriously shifted. With each passing day the outfield fences rise and inch farther and farther away from home plate. Now the ‘Green Monster’ is 64 feet tall and 400 feet from home plate. The foul lines narrow. Or the distance between bases lengthens, while the pitcher’s mound crowds in on the batter’s box. It occurred to me that the trademark scenario is quite a bit like that dream.

Naming is an activity and profession that literally becomes more difficult by the day. Tens—perhaps hundreds—of thousands of fresh trademark applications are filed daily. What is one to do in the face of competition like that?

Of course, the trademark land grab began and began to accelerate in the 1990s with the birth of the internet (and the new name kind it created, the URL), the proliferation of new technologies, the growth of the global economy, and the explosion of products, services, and businesses needing names. Verbal real estate got gobbled up and continues to be. It’s not a new story. It’s the same story—but worse.

Naming at least had some room to maneuver back in the 90’s. In addition to desirable but difficult to own descriptive names and metaphors (real words, exploiting non-literal reference to what they identified), newer conventions emerged—hybrid names that fused two real words into unique pairs, esoteric jargon, and neologies (pure constructs or syntheses of word fragments), not to mention the plundering of Latin, expanded the universe of unencumbered options. Unlike real estate, one could make new product in the world of naming. But only for so long.

Today, even neologies, the most unique, plentiful, and protean material at our disposal is drying up. To make matters worse, it has become—perceptually, if not actually—the almost exclusive possession of the pharmaceutical industry. So much so, that it is becoming almost impossible to develop neologies that don’t fit neatly into the familiar disclaimer boilerplate, “…taking (neology) with MAO inhibitors can cause myocardial infarction, blood clots, ….do not take (neology) if you’re pregnant or breast feeding…” With each passing day, anything identified by a synthetic or ‘evocative’ construct (neology) risks “sounding like a drug” and that narrows the field of options if you’re a hedge fund or an IT company.

To be sure, there are still ways around this dilemma. However, most of those detours tend to be very unattractive. One of them is simply to ‘place bets’ on names already in use by other businesses (perhaps lots of them)—preferably not in the same or an uncomfortably adjacent category. In other words, hoping that you’re operating in a non-litigious environment, governed by a live-and-let-live ethic. Risky.

Another is to come up with really ugly names that are available because no one in their right mind would adopt them, e.g., phlyrixti, …stuff like that. Yes, ‘ugly’ (like its binary, beauty) is in the eye of the beholder. But things aren’t entirely subjective. What happens is that in order to make room under legal availability, we begin to break the other best practice standards and rules of naming. We concoct names that are unpronounceable, violate the vowel-consonant architecture of words in real languages, are long (very long), and are impossible to remember or spell. Phlyrixti.

The question is: is there a better option? Looking at the standard naming conventions in a different light might offer one. We could begin to synthesize and recombine the ‘elemental’ or ‘molecular’ units of naming—real descriptive words, real metaphorical words, hybrid names, neologies—into new conventions. For instance, one could create a hybrid name that was half metaphor, half descriptor, a new variation on an old model.

My talented colleagues at Catchword Branding recently did just this, and succeeded rather beautifully, I think. They coined the portmanteau name ‘PaperPie’ as the new name for Usborne Books and More (UBAM), a children’s books publisher and distributor. What’s the idea behind ‘PaperPie’?

In a world in which visual and literary content is being homogenized into code and being Hoovered up into interface-driven devices, UBAM insists on the value of the traditional book-and-mortar book as a physical artifact. The beauty, texture, and heft of a tome, the look and ‘feel’ of a book—they insist—still have magic about them. Perhaps the book’s allure is even on the rise, as screen-delivered content becomes the conventional default experience that ironically revives interest in the precursor it overtook. As a Phaidon Press tagline has it: ‘Books furnish a room.’ But the UBAM-come-PaperPie value proposition is that books adorn life. They are more than quasi objets-d’art that grace coffee tables and ‘fulfill’ bookcases. Especially for children, books are half-toy/half-text and a fulcrum around which they joyfully bond with their parents. Having waxed poetic about the special place of the ‘antique’ book, how does ‘PaperPie’ capture that magic in a new/er verbal form that may be a novel resource for namers? Obviously, the notion of paper pie is literal non-sense, we might say. Since books are 100% paper, half the name is a dull description of ‘source material.’ ‘Pie’ is where the language slips the leash, and the conjunction of words yields something apparently fresh. Books are ‘sweet’ paper. They’re desert, the special part of the meal that is more than functional nutrition, but something to savor and delight in. We have a name that combines the mundane, then elevates it to the experiential, the magical, and the child-like: a hybrid descriptor-metaphor. RubberRev for e-bike tires? You get the picture. So, in the spectrum between the generic descriptor and the esoteric and the evocative neology, let’s insert a new gradation and see if we can’t concoct some more. The brand craft challenge is not ‘just’ to come up with great new ownable names, but to refine the tools and materials of our craft—to come up with new name types.