Asics – a brand name with legs?

More than half the participants in the 2011 New York marathon are believed to have worn a particular brand of running shoe distinguished by a crossed “tiger stripes” pattern.

As popular and recognizable as the shoe seems to be, the dilemma for the company that makes them (and this is according to the company itself) is that few of those runners would be able to tell you the correct brand name of the shoes they were wearing.

They were known originally as “Onitsuka Tiger”, Onitsuka being a reference to Kihachiro Onitsuka, the man who founded the Onitsuka Company in Kobe, Japan in 1949.

According to this remarkable video in which he tells the story of the company, Onitsuka’s inspiration for making sports shoes came from a piece of octopus he found stuck to the bottom of a dish. The suction pad design would be ideal for athletes, he thought, such as basketball players who need soles that grip.

The first Onitsuka basketball shoes in Japan had a tiger face design on the arch of the foot and this became the company’s trademark. Onitsuka Tiger shoes, as they became known, were put on the international map in the 1960s with the introduction of the Mexico 66 – the shoe that featured the now famous crossed stripes design for the first time.

In 1977, Onitsuka merged his company with fishing and sporting goods company GTO and athletic uniform maker JELENK to form “ASICS” – an acronym of Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a Latin phrase which reputedly expresses the ancient ideal of “a sound mind in a sound body”.

This somewhat esoteric acronym has been formalized over the last few years into the name “Asics” and the Latin phrase upon which it was based has been boiled down to “Sound Mind, Sound Body”.

The problem for Asics is that the name is little known and less understood. The company is much smaller than rivals Nike and Adidas. For 2011, Asics had sales of about $3.03 billion; Nike and Adidas have sales of $20.86 billion and $15.82 billion, respectively.

Then there’s the name issue: the pronunciation of Asics differs in the U.S.—where the A is stressed, as in ‘AY-sics’. The rest of the world says ‘AH-sics”.

Nice shoe, what's the brand name?

Asics intends to correct its awareness problem with an advertising campaign in Europe this Olympic year. The advertising campaign aims to stress Asics’ credentials as the footwear for serious sports performance, rather than trying to embrace both the serious sports market and the broader lifestyle sector. Asics has quietly resurrected the Onitsuka Tiger brand for the lifestyle market with original models of Onitsuka shoes and added a clothing and bags line of products.

A “Made of Sport” media campaign will target sports fanatics with the Asics brand.

I can’t help thinking that Asics is missing something: awareness is just part of the problem. Asics needs a brand story. The “Made of Sport” campaign is uniquely uninspiring and does nothing to build the Asics brand. Given the company’s limited resources, the rich heritage of the Onitsuka Tiger brand and the beautiful story of Kihachiro Onitsuka and his vision, I know where I’d put my money.

The naming genius of Charles Dickens

It was Sam Weller who first made Charles Dickens famous.

Dickens’ first novel, The Pickwick Papers, was written in serial form and, by all accounts, the early installments weren’t doing so well.

Weller arrives on the scene in chapter 10 and transforms the story. The relationship between the idealistic and unworldly Pickwick and the astute Weller has been likened to that between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

The book went on to become the first modern publishing phenomenon, spawning bootleg copies, theatrical performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandize that today would be regarded as classic branding.

This extraordinary ability to characterize was Dickens’ real genius. Sharp depiction of the eccentricities and characteristic traits of people was distilled into caricature and given names so perfectly apposite they have become defining personality terms. We all know what a Scrooge is.

Dickens is reckoned to have created and named 989 such characters during his career. In honor of his two-hundredth birthday today here’s a few personal favorites.

Gradgrind (Hard Times)

Thomas Gradgrind is the notorious headmaster who is dedicated to the pursuit of profitable enterprise. His name is now used to refer to someone who is hard and only concerned with cold facts and numbers.

Bounderby (Hard Times)

Josiah Bounderby is a business associate of Gradgrind. Given to boasting about being a self-made man, he is loud, obnoxious, completely self-centered, and the novel’s most snobby and status-obsessed character. He marries Mr. Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, some 30 years his junior, in what turns out to be a loveless marriage. They have no children. Bounderby is callous, self-centred and ultimately revealed to be a liar and fraud. An utter bounder.

Dick Swiveller (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Though the name sounds a little sinister, Dick Swiveller is not a villain. Swiveller wants to marry the lovely Nell Trent but ends up with the Marchioness instead. He and the Marchioness expose the evil Brasses, Swiveller inherits money from his aunt, and the couple live happily ever after.

Harold Skimpole (Bleak House)

The obnoxious and manipulative Skimpole presents himself as a naïve man of childlike innocence. He claims he knows nothing about money management and uses it as an excuse to never pay for anything. Some claim Dickens modeled him after Leigh Hunt, another writer of the time, which, not surprisingly, caused a bit of animosity.

Sloppy (Our Mutual Friend)

One of Dickens’s many orphan characters, Sloppy lives with Betty Higden and is taken in by the Boffin family. The noble Sloppy later has a hand in exposing nasty Silas Wegg.

Wopsle (Great Expectations)

Wopsle is a parish clerk when we meet him in this classic story, but he doesn’t stay one for long. Choosing to become an actor, he changes his name to Waldengarver.

Polly Toodle (Dombey and Son)

Polly Toodle is Little Paul Dombey’s nurse who gets fired after taking him to visit her dingy apartment in London’s poorest area. Polly is a ray of hope in the face of poverty and hardship.

The Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby)

Wackford Squeers is the patriarch of this conniving, weasel-like pack. The Squeers run Dotheboys Hall, an orphanage for unwanted boys whom they mistreat horribly. Daughter Fanny, son Wackford, Jr., and the missus are each more cruel than the last.

Luke Honeythunder (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Here’s a name to conjure with. Luke Honeythunder is the boisterous and overbearing philanthropist and the guardian of Neville and Helena Landless.

Tulkinghorn (Bleak House)

This unscrupulous lawyer to the Dedlock family learns of Lady Dedlock’s secret past and tries to take advantage of it. It doesn’t end well for him — he is eventually murdered by her maid.

Bumble (Oliver Twist)

A petty parish beadle in the workhouse where Oliver spends much of his time, Bumble symbolizes Dickens’s contempt for the workhouse system.

Paul Sweedlepipe (Martin Chuzzlewit)

An eccentric barber, landlord, and bird lover, this character later inspired A Christmas Carol. Themes of greed and false honor run through Martin Chuzzlewit and also appear in the tale of Ebenezer Scrooge, published the following year.

Smike (Nicholas Nickleby)

Smike is rescued by Nicholas Nickleby from the evil Squeers. Smike turns out to be Nickleby’s cousin, unfortunately a discovery made after Smike dies from the Squeers’ cruelty.

Mr. Sowerberry (Oliver Twist)

As his name sounds, Sowerberry is a bitter and cruel undertaker who mistreats young Oliver before he escapes and runs away to London.

Uriah Heep (David Copperfield)

Uriah Heep, the ‘humble’ antagonist of this novel, is one of literature’s most celebrated villains. Scheming and hypocritical, he plans to ruin Copperfield’s friend Agnes Wickfield but is ultimately undone by Mr. Micawber.

Pumblechook (Great Expectations)

The great expectations of Pip, the main character and another Dickensian orphan, come from this rotund, loud-breathing guardian who takes Pip to wealthy and eccentric spinster Miss Havisham.

John Podsnap (Our Mutual Friend)

Dickens coined the term “podsnappery” to describe middle-class pomp and complacency. John Podsnap embodied this undesirable trait. Apparently, he was modeled after Dickens’s first biographer, John Forster.

A list of Dickensian characters is provided in the indispensable Wikipedia.

MSG to Blackberry: It’s the brand, stupid

“We make the best communications devices in the world.”

In just nine words the new CEO of Research In Motion, the company that makes the Blackberry, might well have written a fitting epitaph for the faltering device giant.

Last week the RIM board sent its two co-CEOs packing and replaced them with Thorsten Heins, who had been RIM’s COO, to revive the company’s fortunes.

Speaking to The New York Times he chose to talk up RIM’s manufacturing prowess. Technically, he may well be right: RIM makes excellent communications devices. But that’s hardly the point – a device is a device. His burning platform is the Blackberry brand.

Research in Motion struck gold when it developed a portable wireless device that allows users to get and send e-mail, phone and browse the Internet. Blackberry once commanded more than half of the American smartphone market. Today it has 10 percent. RIM’s share price has plunged 75 percent over the last year.

Blackberry has lost its luster and the world has moved on to cooler and sexier brands. Its tablet device, the Playbook, is a me-too flop. RIM’s task is not just to catch up to the iPhone and Android devices, but to make a quantum leap forward to restore the relevance of the Blackberry brand.

Why Blackberry?

The brand is inextricably linked with the Blackberry device itself.

David Placek, president of Lexicon Branding, the company that came up with Blackberry name, says he steered away from names that were directly linked to the word “e-mail,” since consumer research shows that word can increase clients’ blood pressure. Instead, his team looked for something “more natural, more entertaining and more joyful that might decrease blood pressure.”

Someone pointed out that the tiny buttons on the device keyboard looked like a collection of seeds, so Lexicon began exploring different fruity names: strawberry, melon and an assortment of vegetables were bandied about. The company finally settled on blackberry because the word is pleasing to most ears and the device, at the time, was black.

What is ‘Blackberry’: A device, or a brand platform on which the company can innovate? What is RIM: A device manufacturer, or a marketer of brands? And what is the brand relationship between the two?

The fortune of the entire company depends on how Mr. Heins chooses to answer these questions after more strategic deliberation with his incoming CMO. He then might be better prepared to save the Blackberry from the same fate of those other excellent but obsolete devices – The Sony Walkman, the Palm Pilot, the Polaroid Instant Camera, and the Atari 2600.

Brand 2012

2012 is a brand full of false promise. The world will not end this year.

Thanks to the Mayans (with a little help from Hollywood) 2012 has become synonymous with the apocalypse.

Here’s some bad news for those of you planning to take advantage of the huge “End-Of-The-World Sale” at Nordstrom’s. The world will not end. The Mayans were wrong. The apocalypse isn’t going to happen. There will be no sale. Not yet, anyway. C.G.P. Grey explains why in the above YouTube clip.

How the West was named

The story of America is written in the names that knit the land together.

Once, from eastern ocean to western shore, the land stretched away without names. Nameless headlands split the surf; nameless lakes reflected mountains; and nameless rivers flowed through nameless valleys into nameless bays.

Men came at last, tribe following tribe, speaking different languages and thinking different thoughts. According to their ways of speech and thought they gave names, and in their generations laid their bones by the streams they had named.

Names soon lay thickly on the land, and the Americans spoke them, great and little, easily and carelessly – Virginia, Susquehanna, Rio Grande, Deadman Creek, Sugarloaf Hill, Detroit, Wall Street – scarce thinking how they had come to be.

Yet the names had grown out of life, and the lifeblood, of all those who had gone before.

*    *    *

On the evening of Saturday, April 2, 1513 Juan Ponce de Leon laid anchor along the coastline of an unidentified stretch of land. The Spanish explorer had set sail from Puerto Rico a week earlier with three ships “to win honor and increase estate”.  Don Juan had tracked the coast all afternoon, and still he saw the land stretching far off, a low plain broken by groves of trees, green with April.

It was the custom of those who discovered new lands to name rivers, capes, mountains or the land itself, and to Don Juan one particular name was twice suitable for this new land.

It was April, and the season was still that of Our Lord’s Resurrection, only six days after the Easter of Flowers. He also thought the land he gazed upon was at this season a flowered land. Thus, he named it Florida (Flowering Easter).

*    *     *

Names sprang up across the new land between two oceans. From them it might be known how here one man hoped and struggled, how there another dreamed, or died, or sought fortune – Battle Mountain, Hardscrabble, Troy Smackover, Troy, Pasadena, Troublesome Creek, Cape Fear. Even Nameless.

While the name might suggest otherwise, the early inhabitants of Nameless, Texas were thoroughly invested in finding a name for their community. Located in northwest Travis County, Nameless was settled in 1869. Residents grew cotton or produced cedar posts and rails to make a living. By 1880 the townsfolk were ready to make their town official and applied for a U.S. post office.

The postal department rejected the names they suggested not once, but six times. Finally, in an act of frustration, the residents replied in writing, “Let the post office be nameless and be damned!”

Their bluff was called: The post office called Nameless was established in 1880. Although it survived well into the 20th century, all that remains in Nameless today is a historical marker, a cemetery and an abandoned schoolhouse, although the community without a name remains on state maps.

References:

Names on the land, by George R. Stewart (NYRB)

A Texas Town By Any Other Name: http://tinyurl.com/6p4c7ms

A corporate naming story straight out of the movies

Paramount, MGM, Fox, Pixar – iconic studio industry names that invoke all the romance, adventure and thrills of the movies they produce.

How about oil industry – do any of these names spring to mind in association with that unglamorous business?

No, very likely not.

Paramount - the peak of arrogance.

But the disconnect has not deterred Paramount Resources, a Calgary, Alberta oil and gas company that seems to have an odd infatuation with Hollywood. Apart from its corporate name, Paramount has a subsidiary named Fox Drilling and has a significant investment in a Canadian energy company called MGM Energy Corp.

And just to prove the nomenclature strategy is really no coincidence, Paramount recently created a new subsidiary and has named it, quite brazenly, Pixar Petroleum Corp.

This latest piece of naming plagiarism by Paramount crosses the line from the curious to the incomprehensibly bizarre. According to the Wall Street Journal, Paramount’s obsession with Hollywood is a long-running mystery for people who follow the company.

The Journal reports:

Stock analyst Jim Byrne, who covers Paramount Resources for BMO Nesbitt Burns, says he was incredulous when he heard the oil company was naming a new subsidiary Pixar. “How do they get away with it?” Mr. Byrne recalls asking himself.

Intellectual-property lawyers say it isn’t clear that the oil company’s use of the Pixar name could be considered trademark infringement because it is in such a different business, selling such different products.

Disney owns Pixar trademarks, according to filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, for “entertainment services in the field of film and television, namely, the creation, production and distribution of films, videos, animation and computer-generated images.”

“In an infringement claim, the issue is whether…the relevant consuming public is likely to be confused,” said Gloria Phares, an attorney with Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP who specializes in intellectual property. “But just because you have a mark in one area, like in animation, doesn’t mean you have a monopoly on a mark.”

Every naming consultant knows this and counts on it. It is getting harder to find good, original names that are not encumbered to some degree, as Blackberry-maker Research In Motion has discovered to its further embarrassment after naming its new operating system BBX.

A good name is a linguistic phenomenon that helps to create the very thing it identifies. Namers labor long and hard to find names that strategically suit the long-term business ambitions of a client company in all relevant USPTO classifications and celebrate when a name candidate appears to be reasonably free and clear.

Yet here is a public company merrily co-opting another company’s name and trading on its recognition in full knowledge of the fact. It is hard to comprehend what can be in the mind of the CEO in condoning this lazy, arrogant and most egregious practice.

Related articles

• Walt Disney Stakes Claim After Oil Firm Adopts Famous Name (online.wsj.com)
• Disney Goes After Pixar Petroleum for Trademark Infringement (tacticalip.com)

Another brand disconnect from Verizon and AT&T

You’ve probably seen the ads for something called 4G LTE. They are hard to miss.

Do you have any idea what 4G LTE is? More to the point, do AT&T and Verizon care that you don’t?

That last question is rhetorical: of course they don’t, or they wouldn’t be using these obscure initialisms.

In spite of the revolution sweeping the telecommunications industry it is startling just how customer unfriendly the big telecom providers continue to be with their branding practices.

In telecommunications parlance, 4G is simply the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards and, logically, a successor to the 3G and 2G families of standards.

LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, and what that is is anyone’s guess.  Something is presumably in the process of evolving over the long-term. As far as I can sensibly ascertain, LTE is a mobile broadband technology that allows people to stream music and watch videos on their smart phones and iPads anywhere, and download it quicker. So LTE is basically the same as 4G, and 4G LTE is saying the same thing twice.

In the world of telecommunications the future is undeniably digital. While high-quality wireless access has become a critical competitive necessity for cable, satellite TV, telecommunications and Internet service providers it is hard to understand what a company like Verizon is thinking with its inscrutable techno-babble acronyms. Educating people to be loyal to incremental generations of technology is very shortsighted. Today’s breakthrough is tomorrow’s obsolete technology, as 1-800 Flowers, Tower Records, Hollywood Video and American Telephone & Telegraph evidence.

If they are to have any differentiating relevance in the future, telecom companies have to get the engineers out of the marketing department, put few more marketers in the c-suite, move beyond the technology acronyms and discover a different, deeper way to connect with people.

How Zappos found a name that fit the business

To entrepreneur Tony Hsieh, Shoesite.com sounded like the poster child for every bad Internet idea.

Why would people want buy shoes online before they could try them on?

Shoesite founder Nick Swinmurn was convincing. His idea was to build the Amazon of shoes and create the world’s largest shore store online. His pitch was simple. Footwear was a $40 billion industry at the time in the US, of which catalog sales made up $2 billion and e-commerce would continue to grow.

Hsieh warmed to the idea but not the name. Shoesite seemed too generic, he thought. And it limited the business from eventually expanding into other product categories.

Hsieh told Swinmurn to come back with a better name. He came back with Zapos, derived from zapatos, the Spanish word for shoe. Hsieh suggested adding another p so people wouldn mispronounce it as ZAY-pos.

Thus was Zappos, the much-feted online shoe retailer, born. Tony Hsieh created a business that combined profits, passion and purpose. He described it as building a lifestyle that was about delivering happiness to everyone, not least himself.

He sold it to Amazon for more than $1.2 billion in 2009.

From Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, by Tony Hsieh. 

China, a place where names take on a whole new meaning

When people want the Real Thing in downtown Beijing they ask for a can of Kekoukele.

Close your eyes and listen hard and yes, it sounds somewhat like Coca-cola, but it conveys its essence of taste and fun in a way that the original name could not hope to match. It means, literally, “tasty fun”.

According to the New York Times, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance. The art of picking a brand name that resonates with Chinese consumers is no longer an art. It has become, says the Times, a sort of science, with consultants, computer programs and linguistic analyses to ensure that what tickles a Mandarin ear does not grate on a Cantonese one.

Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean “gets rid of dirt.” (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean “too purple.”)

There is also Reebok, or Rui bu, which means “quick steps.” And Colgate — Gao lu jie — which translates into “revealing superior cleanliness.” And Lay’s snack foods — Le shi — whose name means “happy things.” Nike (Nai ke) and BMW (Bao Ma, echoing the first two sounds of its English and German names) also have worn well on Chinese ears.

Taking care of his Precious Horse

Having a foreign-sounding name can lend a cachet that a true Chinese name would lack. Many upscale brands like Cadillac (Ka di la ke), or Hilton (Xi er dun), employ phonetic translations that mean nothing in Chinese. Rolls-Royce (Laosi-Laisi) includes two Chinese characters for “labor” and “plants” that more or less have become standard usage in foreign names — all to achieve a distinct foreign look and sound.

On the other hand, a genuine Chinese name can say things about a product that a mere collection of homonyms never could.

Citibank is known as Hua qi yinhang, which literally means “star-spangled banner bank,” not bad if you still have faith in American banks. If you are looking for the local Marriott, you’ll have to ask for Wan hao, or “10,000 wealthy elites.”

That’s not quite the mood whenever I check in to the Marriott. One of 10,000 maybe, but wealthy and elite is a stretch, even with my gold card.

Netflix and the lesson of Kodak’s museum brand

We love like family brands we accept and use to organize our lives. We respond as people do when they are betrayed, whether it’s justified or not.

Netflix is one such brand.  The DVD-by-mail company built a loyal customer base of almost 25 million who loved the control of ordering movies via the web and watching at their convenience. For the last three years, it finished either first or second in a national survey of customer satisfaction with e-retailers. That’s an intense level of brand connection.

A high-profile series of botched efforts to separate its core DVD service from its newer, video-on-demand-style streaming library has destroyed much of that goodwill.

Insult was added to injury when Netflix practically declared that its core DVD-by-mail service was for Neanderthals who still feel weirdly attached to antiquated entities like the Postal Service. They were no longer eligible to be members of the Netflix club – they’d have to pay extra to use a service called Qwikster.

Twitter and the blogosphere were aflame with indignation. Appropriate scorn was heaped upon the name, although much of it missed the point. The stock tanked and more than 800,000 subscribers decided there were better alternatives. Now, while all this demonstrates a staggering ineptitude when it comes to understanding brands and the relationship people have with them, the pity is that, until this meltdown, Netflix was thinking intelligently about its future.

Buried in a mea culpa email Reed Hastings addressed to subscribers was the real burning platform issue that he is rightly concerned about.

Who's next?

“For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly.”

The market that Netflix has had to itself is clearly changing. Digitization of content is laying waste to traditional industries that either can’t see the writing on the wall or choose to ignore it. Amazon and Apple between them have destroyed Borders, Blockbuster, Tower Records and (almost) Virgin Megastores. Netflix wants to be on the right side of this equation.

If there’s any company that keeps Reed Hastings awake at night it should be Kodak.

Here is a revered American company and, at one time, a powerful global brand brought to the brink of bankruptcy by its addiction to the fat margins of its core film business and its reluctance to change. Over the decades Kodak has displayed all the behavior of a company in the thrall of its own brand, which digitization has all but destroyed.

Founded in 1880 by George Eastman the company is struggling to complete a challenging transformation from a company reliant on a dying business to a seller of consumer and commercial printers. This from a company that invented the digital camera. The brand belongs in a museum.

In Clayton Christenson’s classic treatise “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, technology giants are frequently toppled by “disruptive” technologies that erode seemingly impregnable businesses, often with startling speed. This is partly because it’s easy for incumbents to dismiss the disruptive potential of a fledgling technology–a classic hazard of linear thinking–and partly because adapting to the new world would itself disrupt existing, and usually highly profitable, business relationships.

Netflix deserves some credit for trying to buck this trend. With the high fixed-cost DVD business on the verge of stagnation, the CEO took the almost unprecedented step of effectively blowing it up in order to speed the transition to streaming.

He’s also just received a valuable lesson brand management. Don’t count Netflix out.