Just as the dust was settling around Abbvie and Mondelez (sorry, still can’t find the macron e key), along comes another tricky little teaser of a name to stir things up again.
Say hello to Zoetis from Pfizer. Contrary to what you might expect from pharmaceutical company Zoetis is not a drug, it’s the name for the company’s $4.2 billion animal health unit that will be spun-off later this year.
Why Zoetis? Pfizer explains that the name “has its root in zo, which is familiar in commonly known words such as zoo and zoology.” It also derives from the word zoetic, which means “pertaining to life.” Obscure, but plausible enough. The real problem with Zoetis is how you are supposed to say it*. Care to take a guess?
Abbvie? Mondelez? Zoetis? The question has to be asked: In the naming business, are we beginning to scrape the bottom of the barrel?
It’s a legitimate question that deserves an answer. The really interesting thing about the question is that it was first asked more than 14 years ago when consultant Tony Spaeth raised an eyebrow at Visteon, Miravant and Diageo.
In a word, yes, was his conclusion: we are running out of names. He wrote: “There is a numeric limit to the universe of names, the combinations of letters of five syllables or less that are pronounceable, avoid offense in principal languages, and are not someone else’s property. A population explosion of business entities, on top of product proliferation, means we are rapidly depleting the supply. And as more companies think “global,” more seek global name protection, vastly increasing the pool of possible conflicts.”
He concluded: “Expect more strange new names like Diageo, distinctive yet functional, that take some getting used to. We really are scraping the linguistic barrel and have to reach further beyond our comfort zones to make names that work.”
He was right on that last point, but the barrel seems to be a lot deeper than he thought. Fourteen years later we have added tens of thousands of names to the corporate roster and our capacity for the acceptance of the linguistically exotic has shown encouraging elasticity; Google rules the Internet, a lot of people use Twitter, Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, we read books on Kindle, Hyundai is the cool car on the road and, for the time being, there’s a President named Obama in the White House.
Shakespeare would have been proud of us. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original. Just like the namers of today do. The point being that the English language is infinitely fungible. What we are running out of, if anything, is imagination and a capacity to accept linguistic invention.
There’s still the atavistic reflex to the unfamiliar and what are referred to as ‘meaningless’ corporate names, yet the truth is there is really no such thing as a meaningless name. For better or worse, “Mondelez” (pronounced mohn-dah-LEEZ, please) will be the name of a $31 billion global snacks business.
Yes, if you need one it has a clunky provenance as a word – monde means “world” in French, and delez is a play on “delish” – but why does it have to mean anything other than what it is: the name of a company? In spite of the disdain heaped at its door the Mondelez will be as accepted as Diageo is today. What is Diageo? It’s the world’s leading premium drinks business. That’s its meaning (please spare me the day/world etymology).
Poor Abbvie is just an unfortunate child with a speech impediment whose parents, Abbott Laboratories, don’t seem to care too much about her fate. The drug and medical-device company plans to spinoff its pharmaceutical business with the name AbbVie by the end of the year. Pronounced “Abb-VEE,” the name is derived from Abbott, its parent company, as well as “vi,” the Latin root for “life”. This one is scraping the barrel.
As for Zoetis, the world of animal health is tightly knit. The people who need to know about the company and what it does will be very familiar with the name, and Zoetis will be rolling off their tongues as easily as Nike (that’s ni-KEE, as we all had to be educated to say).
*BTW, Zoetis is pronounced zo-EH-tis, according to Pfizer.
Namedroppings. 
I don’t understand what you mean when you say there’s no such thing as a meaningless name Alan. Isn’t there a difference between say, Nokia, which has no meaning at all as far as I can tell, and Blackberry, which is a real name?
Dubbin
Thanks for your comment Toby. The point I am trying to make is that once a word becomes the name of something, that’s what the meaning will be. The name Nike, for example, means victory in Greek. But to all intents and purposes, Nike is the name of a sports apparel company. And to most people that’s all it means. The example you cite, Nokia, is in fact a town in Finland where the company was originally located. Blackberry is a fruit, but in terms of of the business it represents, it has no more meaning than Nokia, or Nike. Hope this helps.