Spotlight on: Circle®Brands

This is a continuing series of postings that will spotlight other naming firms. We think our clients should have a choice, and clearly Eat My Words is not the only naming firm in business.

Next up is Circle®Brands, a self-described "dedicated band of brand architects passionate about creating distinct company names, product and service names, taglines and slogans. We subscribe to and incorporate the highly scientific, yet universally ignored, study of “human nature” and “common sense” to create names and phrases that exude instant brand resonance, memorability and top-of-mind awareness with your audience. "

Circle®Brands was unknown to us, and perhaps the world, until we stumbled across this press release entitled: MAVERICK NAMING COMPANY CREATES BRANDING INDUSTRY FIRST.

How could we not be intrigued? Here is the industry first. They have "boldly reverse-engineered the customary approach to branding by creating and trademarking comprehensive brand identity packages in advance of any client initiative."

That's right, they name your company before you have a company. A naming Field of Dreams, if you will.

A sampling of these proto-names includes:

• We Do The Math® - (brand package designed to catapult a progressive accounting/CPA firm into a national household name)
• Get SMiTTEN!® - (campaign for the Love of Michigan, playing off the geographically unique mitten-shaped state)
• LaBeatOh!® - (multi-faceted brand identity package that blends music and merchandising into a worldwide franchising concept revolving around a unique and exciting Latin-themed dining and entertainment venue)
• LVNV™ - (acronym for "Las Vegas Envy," Circle®Brands has created for the promotion of tourism and commerce for the city of Las Vegas, NV)
• Aguavana - (original name we created and submitted for consideration for the new 4-star luxury hotel concept from Joie de Vivre Hospitality)
• BloomService® - (ultimate brand identity package for the floral, gifting and garden lifestyle industry is geared to rival the industry frontrunner 1-800-FLOWERS
• Pizzapotamus® - (the Revolutionary New Marketing Tool For The Next Fast Food Generation!)
• Dr. Chewlittle's - (a clever and kid-friendly brand identity package ideal for marketing a doctor-recommended or created organic baby food and product line)

Perhaps you have noticed that certain names have the "®" designation, meaning the mark has been registered at the USPTO. We looked up We Do The Math® and discovered that it is in fact a registered trademark as "Accounting Services" and was first used in commerce on 09-22-2002. The owner is an affiliate of Circle®Brands, named Lip Service® Communications. Nowhere on the Lip Service website can we find any reference to accounting services (the WeDoTheMath.com website is a placeholder), so we don't know how the claim for "used in service" is upheld. Our guess is that the other registered marks may have similar issues.

Seeing that WeDoTheMath.com was purchased on March 29, 2002 and is still owned by our spotlight company, it appears that reverse-engineering doesn't add up to much.

We think this reverse-engineering concept is odd, soulless, hollow and lifeless. Instead, check out some great names created for the real world by our favorite naming company.

Oh, and we Do the Math.

IS CIRCLE®BRAND THE NAMING FIRM FOR YOU?

To evaluate if a naming firm is a good fit for you, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. Does the company have a creative name?
2. How memorable are the names in their portfolio?
3. Do they have experience in your category?
4. What do their clients say about them?
5. Do they look like they’d be fun to work with?

For more on other naming firms stay tuned for spotlights in our blog or check out Our Competitors on the Eat My Words website, which provides a fresh alternative to old-school naming.

The Skinny Version of our fun work slideshow

We've trimmed down our PDF to an easy-breezy 12 page slideshow of our work and capabilities. Check it out to see samples of our work and learn more about how Eat My Words creates unforgettable brand names that build instant affinity for brands and have proven ROI. Download EatMyWords_InANutshell.pdf

Xohm - a name that should've been X'd off the list

As the Easter Bunny makes his rounds, Sprint has brought us an egg of its own: Xohm (WiMax Service). Eat My Words would like to extend Xohm a warm welcome to the Name Shame Hall of Fame.

What does Xohm mean? No one seems to know, even the executives of the company. Atish Gude, Sr. VP of mobile broadband operations for Xohm said the company chose Xohm "because a marketing company told it to." He goes on to say, "we contracted with a company to come up with a very cool, cutting-edge name that really reflects what we're trying to do - which is mobilize the internet." How does the name reflect that? Gude calls it, "an empty vessel...We can make it out to be whatever we want." That marketing (naming) agency in question is Zenmark, a self proclaimed "World-Class Verbal Design Agency." (They sound ripe for one of our Competitive Spotlights.)

Sprint's John Polivka says Xohm is a made-up word, but Sprint fully intends to make Xohm a household name, hopefully spawning such usages as "Xohm me" or "meet me in the "Xohm." Polivka goes on to say, "focus groups keyed in on the lead letter "X" for its "cool factor." Finally, Polivka says that " the end goal is for the new name to become synonymous with the mobile Internet just as Xerox has become synonymous with photocopying." (EMW: Is he serious? Meet me in the Xohm? Cool Factor? Xerox?)

In various press release, Sprint says that Xohm is pronounced "Zoam." Others say "Zome." What we find amusing is that they tell us that Xohm is pronounced like two words that don't exist.

So, does Xohm pass the Eat My Words Scratch Test?

SCRATCH - scratch if it has any of these deal-breakers
Spelling-challenged - yes it is, oh please yes
Copycat – similar to competitor's names - no, thank God
Random – disconnected from brand - yes, and from reality
Annoying – hidden meaning, forced - blue ribbon here
Tame – flat, uninspired - yes, despite the "X" factor
Curse of Knowledge –no, not even insiders get it
Hard-to-pronounce -yes, even with the tutorial

So, if nailing just one of these is a deal-breaker, hitting a home run on all of these mistakes it an instant inductee into the Name Shame Hall of Fame and a leading contender for our Head Scratcher of the Year contest. Note: the name is similar to last year's winner, Xobni. Starting a name with X is so 2007, or in the case of Xerox, so 1961.)

TO VENT: Send your contender(s) for The Name Shame Hall of Fame to nameshame @ eatmywords.com. (We won’t sell your email address to spammers, we promise.)

Can your name pass The SMILE & SCRATCH Test?

The secret to powerful, unforgettable and sticky brand names is simple, "A name should make you smile, instead of scratch your head." We evaluate every name we create based on this no-brainer philosophy - and now you can too with the new Eat My Words SMILE and SCRATCH Test^TM. Run your own product and company names through the test and see how they hold up. It's not as easy as it sounds. Most names fail because they are spelling-challenged, hard to pronounce, and meaningless to customers who don't know Latin (which is just about everyone except for Alexandra's mother). So cancel your focus groups and use this criteria any time you're trying to objectively evaluate a name. You'll instantly be able to see if you have a winning name or if you should scratch it off your list.

SMILE – the qualities of a powerful name
Simple – easy to spell, say, and understand
Meaningful – your customers instantly "get it"
Imagery – visually evocative - creates a picture in your mind
Legs – carries brand, rich wordplay, brand-extensions
Emotional – empowers, entertains, engages, enlightens

SCRATCH - scratch if it has any of these deal-breakers
Spelling-challenged - it's not spelled the way it sounds
Copycat – similar to competitor's names
Random – disconnected from the brand
Annoying – hidden meaning, forced
Tame – flat, uninspired, non-emotional, boring
Curse of Knowledge – only insiders get it
Hard-to-pronounce - not obvious, relies on punctuation

All of our names pass the test: Spoon Me, Neato, Monkey Dunks, Cake Financial, DayTipper, Dizzywood, Dash, and countless others. Do yours?

This BS Brand Didn't Bear Up

Our friends at Cake Financial (a company that Eat My Words named), have a post on their dishy blog concerning the recent bad news about Bear Stearns. (While on the subject, we are enjoying "The Slice", Cake Financial's weekly market summary video starring Steve and Sven that is funny and destined for Internet immortality.) The Bear Stearns financial fallout resulted in a reduction in market cap from the 52 week high of $21.7 billion on April 25, 2007, to a low of $386 million on March 17, 2008 .

What ultimately will happen with the firm started by Joseph Bear and Robert Stearns in 1923 is not yet clear, but it is safe to say it will not ever recapture it's prominent position on wall street, it's market value, or (the ultimate point of this post), it's brand value.

As recently as the third quarter of 2007, Corebrand ranked Bear Stearns #429 in it's regular BrandPower Rankings ( Between US Bancorpand Deutsche Bank, to put it in perspective). According to Corebrand, BrandPower is "a single-score measure of the size and quality (familiarity and favorability) of a company’s reputation. It’s a measure of brand equity presented in both historical and competitive context. "

Our guess is that it will most likely (O.K., for sure) drop off the list altogether next time CoreBrand does their rankings.

While this is an extreme example, a significant portion of the aforementioned market cap freefall can be attributed to the intangible value of Bear Stearns which includes its "brand".

Perhaps Bear Stearns will take the time honored path of changing its name to distance itself from its own past, or just quietly fold into the paternal hands of its savior, JP Morgan. If you want to change your name and rebuild a new brand, Bear Stearns, we're here for you. Eat My Words specializes in creating names that score immediate (to use CoreBrand's words) familiarity and favorability. We're all about helping a company build its brand from the start with a name that creates buzz, which creates publicity, which creates business, which creates revenue, which creates brand value.

To put it mathematically:

EMW = ROI

This is no understatement

Nothing like a good cheeky descriptive name. We just became aware of a German männerwäsche store called, um...Balls. In case you were unclear of their point, there are some new print ads starring a couple of manly men, packaged as it were, to highlight the store's specialty. Subtle they are not.

Unfortunately, their website is in German, but you get the gist of what they are doing in a less than perfect Babelfish translation:

"In addition a badly sitting underwear can all day long a bad. Everyone knows these notch clamp down trousers, which one all day long reminded of it to buy next time better laundry".

We don't know about you but we hate it when badly sitting underwear can all day long a bad.

Of course, this got us to thinking about männerwäsche product names that are hanging out there in the world.

Here are some of our favorites: Thunderpants, Ballbra, Fig Leaves, Giggleberries, Below The Belt, Brass Monkeys, Freshpair and Budgy Smuggler - an Australian slang term used to describe snug-hugging man pants, which, when viewed from the front, looks as though the man in question may be trying to hide a domestic budgerigar (a small parrot) in said man pants.

Point is, underwear is inherently funny, so why have a serious name for either the store or the product? Some people probably thought they were nuts, but credit goes to Balls for having the Cojónes to bag a great name. We'll leave you with a little innovative guerrilla marketing program they erected all over Berlin.

Spotlight on: Bizword

This is a continuing series of postings that will spotlight other naming firms. We think our clients should have a choice, and clearly Eat My Words is not the only naming firm in business.

Speaking of business, or Bizness, is the naming firm Bizword. On their bare bones website they refer to themselves as "the name in branding (sm)." Ironically, for being "the name in branding(sm)", they don't list any brand names they have actually come up with.

As such, we will have to take their Bizword that they "develop powerful, compelling trademarks that sell. From gleam in the eye start-ups to entrenched global behemoths, our work spans the gamut of verbal brand expression: strategy; corporate, product and service naming; nomenclatures; architectures; brandlines and taglines."

In checking the USPTO database, we find in addition to Bizword, they also have the trademark on Überbrand, but no help there either.

We also found a quote from 1999 attributed to a principal of Bizword that may explain part of this dilemma. In discussing the impact of the Internet on competition he says:

"The great equalizer is the ability for anyone with dial-up access and an Internet account to build a website", explains Dennis Rainer, principal for Bizword (formerly Name-design), a San Jose, Calif.-based branding firm.

OK, but then after you build it, shouldn't you do something with it?

Bizword has had an Internet presence since December 2000, so it is odd they have not shared any of their names with the world in the last seven years. So, having no names to review, the best we can do is to provide a progression of their own taglines over the years:

• Planetary Trademarks. Phonetically Engineered.
• Breakout Branding.
• The idea and taste machine.
• Take me home. (Ed. What?)

If Bizword wants to tell us some of their names, we will be happy to list them here.

__________, _________, __________, ___________, ____________, __________.

In the meantime, take a look at some publicized names by our favorite naming firm.

IS BIZWORD THE RIGHT NAMING FIRM FOR YOU?

To evaluate if a naming firm is a good fit for you, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. Does the company have a creative name?
2. How memorable are the names in their portfolio?
3. Do they have experience in your category?
4. What do their clients say about them?
5. Do they look like they’d be fun to work with?

For more on other naming firms stay tuned for spotlights in our blog or check out Our Competitors on the Eat My Words website, which provides a fresh alternative to old-school naming.

Mxyplyzyk - a Superman name that's Super Bad

Submitted by our Sous Chef, Caroline “Ruby Sneakers” Leavitt, our most outrageous inductee into the Name Shame Hall of Fame ever is a quirky Greenwich Village gift boutique named Mxyplyzyk. The store claims "the name is inspired by a character in early Superman comics." Ironically, they didn't use the actual character's name, (Mr.) Mxyzptlk, (pictured below) which is spelled differently than "Mxyplyzyk," (perhaps thinking they might head off a C&D letter from D.C. Comics), because you cannot, after all, confuse Mxyplyzyk with Myxzptlk.

Mxyplyzyk hits all the criteria to qualify for the Name Shame Hall of Fame and is a leading contender for the annual Head Scratcher™ trophy, awarded each December by Eat My Words. Here's why:

1. It’s difficult to pronounce the first time you see it (actually every time you see it)
2. It’s meaningless unless someone explains it to you (even then)
3. It's forced and unnatural sounding (oh boy)
4. It has an unnatural spelling (ya think? )
5. It’s just damn annoying (did we say oh boy yet?)

Inc. magazine briefly discussed Mxyplyzyk in an article entitled "What's in a Name"?

Here is an except from the full article:

Kevin Brynan spends a large chunk of his day explaining over and over again how to pronounce the word Mxyplyzyk--the name of his gift shop in New York City's Greenwich Village. As it happens, the name (which is pronounced "mix-ee-pliz-ik," in case you were stumped) is so long that Brynan's business card is a three-part foldout. The unusual moniker, created by a co-founder and inspired by a Superman comic book character, is fitting for a shop with unusual items like pug dog "puggy" banks and warped vinyl record serving bowls. On the other hand, it's hard to tell your friends about a store when you can't pronounce the name, and good luck finding it online. Ultimately, Brynan thinks the unusual name has been a plus, highlighting the store's quirkiness and helping to draw foot traffic. Nonetheless, he adds, "sometimes I wish we'd named it John Doe."

(Side note to all journalists: Please stop using "What's in a name?" every time you do an article about naming. It was clever about 400 years ago, but not so much anymore.)

So, welcome to The Hall Mxyplyzyk. It's a rare name that is so very wrong on every level and makes us scratch our heads super hard. However, we can give credit where credit is due. We are quite sure that every extension of the domain name was available on GoDaddy for $9.95, which is a deciding factor for many companies when choosing a name. More on that later...

Spotlight on: ABC Namebank

This is the first in a series of weekly postings that will spotlight other naming firms. We think our clients should have a choice, and clearly Eat My Words is not the only naming firm in the phone book.

Speaking of phone books, just like "ABC Carpet Cleaning," and "ABC Plumbing," who have outsmarted their competition with names that get them listed first in the Yellow Pages, the first naming firm featured is "ABC Namebank." The brainchild of "Naseem Javed, (pictured above), ABC Namebank is a naming company whose "level of specialization is unmatched by any other agency in the world."

ABC Namebank's gold-star portfolio include Telus, Intria, Zarlink, Tronicus, Duplium, Gentra, Genexxa, Celestica, Minnova, Gennum, Agricore, Pollara, Vincor and "hundreds of others," which do not appear on their website. We did find this on the website though: "Over-creativity can cause fire and damage. Don't get too creative. Do not twist, bend, stretch, exaggerate, corrupt or modify alpha-structures to their extremes in naming. It may result in difficult,confusing, unpronounceable and only silly names. Avoid overly creative solutions."

A scrolling ticker on the homepage links to Mr. Javed's appearance on CNN Business Unusual. If you don't have time to watch it, here are some highlights...

On how he named his company...
"We specialize in the alphabet, 26 letters of the alphabet. All the connotations, all the permutations, the analysis. I borrowed the first three letters for my company".

On if Coca-Cola was a good name...
"Coca Cola is a very nice name. It was developed 20-30 years ago, 50 years ago [actually 1888]. But you would not want to fly a Coca-Cola Airlines most probably it will leak all over the place".

On what some good new names were...
Sony [formed 1958], Panasonic [formed in 1955] and Microsoft [formed in 1975]

In summary:
• There are 26 letters in the alphabet
• He's never enjoyed Virgin Cola on Virgin Airlines
• There have been no good names since 1975

IS ABC NAMEBANK THE RIGHT NAMING FIRM FOR YOU?
To evaluate if a naming firm is a good fit for you, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1. Does the company have a creative name?
2. How memorable are the names in their portfolio?
3. Do they have experience in your category?
4. What do their clients say about them?
5. Do they look like they’d be fun to work with?

For more on other naming firms stay tuned for weekly spotlights in our blog or check out Our Competitors on the Eat My Words website, which provides a fresh alternative to old-school naming.