Hands off LaCrosse

Staying north of the border and south of the waistline, there’s news that GM has a new-found confidence in its marketing convictions. It concerns the Buick LaCrosse and the habits of Quebecois teenagers.

LaCrosse is a wildly popular sport in Canada. Sort of like hockey played on grass, it originated with the Native American nations of the United States and Canada, mainly among the Huron and Iroquois tribes.

So LaCrosse would seem to be a wholesome, easy-to-pronounce, action-oriented name for a vehicle. Except that it is apparently slang for masturbation in Quebec. Why the febrile teens of Quebec would refer to it as ‘la crosse’ is anyone’s guess but GM erred on the side of caution when it launched the LaCrosse in 2005. They called it the Allure in Canada.

The new GM seems to have come to its senses over this issue.  It has decided the 2010 model will be called the LaCrosse on both sides of the border.

Keep your hands where I can see them.

“It was in fact our dealers in Quebec who wanted the name changed,” George Saratlic, a GM Canada product communications spokesman, told the Canadian Press. ”They saw little down side to using the LaCrosse name in common with the U.S. and recognized the huge upside in terms of the enhanced advertising support that could be derived from the LaCrosse name and creative work done for it in the U.S.”

This is hardly the first time a carmaker has been distracted by an automotive double entendre. The Ford Pinto, the Mitsubishi Pajero, and the Mazda Laputa apparently all mean something unsavoury somewhere in South America.

As Ira Bachrach of NameLab says. “It happens all the time. You sit in a room and there’s always some guy in the back who says that means sexual perversion in Nicaragua.”

“Most companies ignore it or at the very worst they do research to see whether a), it’s generally perceived in the audience they care about and b), whether it’s relevant, whether the audience really cares.”

Which leads us to the legendary Chevy Nova story, the classic cautionary tale of the pitfalls of names in foreign markets. It goes something like this – GM launched the Chevrolet Nova into the Spanish speaking market and it bombed because ‘no va’ translates to ‘it doesn’t go’ in Spanish.

It lives on in countless marketing textbooks. It is repeated in numerous business and branding seminars and is a staple of magazine and newspaper reporters in need of a pithy example of branding folly.

A great anecdote, for sure. Except that the story is not true. Sorry. Blame Snopes.

Google? What kind of name is that?

The subject of names and name origins has always been good for a quick article to fill a few column inches of newsprint or five minutes of air time.

ABC News ran such a story recently. It was the fairly desultory stroll down the well-trodden paths and naming byways of Accenture, Uggs, Wii and Google.

“Imagine what life was like before Google”, the reporter began. “Worse yet, imagine if there was no Google and we had to look everything up on BackRub”. Gasp. Just imagine.

BackRub, so legend has it, was the working name for search engine before it became Google, which is itself an unwitting misspelling of the word Googol, a mathematical term. Few people know what or care what a Googol is but it’s interesting how a familiar name, no matter how obscure, can seem so perfectly apt to this reporter; and how an unfamiliar name like BackRub can be so weirdly cumbersome and inappropriate.

One of the greatest challenges in naming is helping people to get beyond initial gut reaction to unfamiliar words (that’s how names start life) and think of them as successful, familiar brands. In this facet of human nature lies the essence of a brand: people like what they know, they are uncomfortable with the unfamiliar.

Juliet had it so wrong. Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic warhorse from Minnesota,  said it better if not as prosaically :  In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be” .

Time Warner’s naming twavails

When it comes to name changes, the Time Warner organization has had its share of unfortunate events.

The merger with AOL produced the misbegotten AOL Time Warner for a brief period before Time Warner executives regained their composure senses and dropped AOL from the corporate name. In this case the name was the least of Time Warner’s problems, however unlovely and humiliating it may have been. Its offspring, Time Warner Telecom, made much heavier weather of its naming challenge.

The entrepreuner’s naming trap 2: Lack of due diligence

Financial advisor Sid Blum had been running his own firm, GreenLight Fee Only Advisors, for more than three years when in April he received a threatening legal letter from Greenlight Capital Inc., the hedge fund led by legendary short-seller David Einhorn.

The letter ordered Mr. Blum to stop using the GreenLight name. The hedge fund followed up by filing a lawsuit in May.