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.

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

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)

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.

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. 

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 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.

The Chevrolet story that began one 100 years ago this week has become emblematic of American life and its varying fortunes over the last century.

Chevy’s great era was the 1950s. It was a time of growth and national optimism and Chevy was a part of it. America grew up in a Chevy. They have been celebrated in song over the decades and invariably with a sense of nostalgia for a different time.

Don McLean’s opaque but haunting American Pie entered our collective consciousness in 1971 with its wistful longing for a simpler age that ended abruptly “the day the music died”. Lines such as “bye-bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry” made it one of the most discussed, dissected and universally memorable popular songs of all time.

The Chevrolet story itself began in Detroit on November 3, 1911. William Crapo Durant, an automotive visionary and founder of the General Motors Holding Company, had just been ousted by the company’s bankers. He joined forces with Louis Chevrolet, a dashing Swiss-born racing driver, and together they set up Chevrolet (“pronounced “Shev-Ro-Lay”) a new carmaker named in Chevrolet’s honor and, no doubt, an attempt to trade on his ‘brand’.

Louis Chevrolet, in a Buick

Chevrolet boomed, outflanking rival Ford with a range of models and was later folded into GM with Durant briefly regained control. By the 1960s, the era of the fabulous, bullet-shaped Corvette Stingray, Chevrolet accounted for about half of GM’s 60% share of America’s car market.

The now iconic Chevrolet bowtie logo first appeared in 1913 but its origins are hazy. Popular legend has it that impulsive Durant saw the design in a wallpaper pattern on a French hotel room wall and ripped a piece off. Another story has it that Louis Chevrolet fancied a logo in a stylized version of the Swiss cross in honor of his homeland.

Probably the most convincing account of the bowtie’s origin comes from more recent research by historian Ken Kaufmann*. He presents a case that the emblem is based upon a logo for “Coalettes”, a coal-based domestic fuel. According to records Durant’s wife is reported as saying that the emblem was first seen by Durant while they were vacationing in Hot Springs, Virginia. She is quoted as recalling: “We were in a suite reading the papers, and he saw this design and said ‘I think this would be a very good emblem for Chevrolet’.”

Disillusion set in during the 1970s. Different values took over. The company began to churn out nondescript rust traps such as the Vega and its reputation, along with the quality and design of its cars, went into a long tailspin, ending in GM’s bankruptcy and bail-out in 2009. Chevy’s market share was just 12.7%.

Even though a steady stream of attractive small cars has begun to restore Chevrolet’s fortunes, such as the Cruze, perceptions are slow to catch up.  The brand still has a long way to go before it means anything again.

As for Louis Chevrolet, he lost all his earnings in the stock market crash of 1929. Without income, he went to work as a line mechanic in a Chevrolet factory. He died nearly penniless on June 6, 1941 but he bequeathed his name to the world.

Could it be..?

*In his blog post “Chevrolet Bowtie History” Ken Kaufman writes: This past year I have been reading that great Southern newspaper, The Constitution, from Atlanta Georgia…when I ‘spotted’ this Coalettes bowtie ad, I think I experienced the same excitement Durant did almost eighty years ago, when he might have ‘spotted’ the same ad in the same paper. The date of this Constitution ad was November 12, 1911, nine days after the Chevrolet Motor Company was incorporated.

Related articles

• 100 years of Chevy: An improbable journey to American icon (usatoday.com)

Jobs proposed “Apple” after returning from a visit to All One Farm in Chimacum, WA where he had helped tend for the apple trees.

“I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” Jobs told Isaacson. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’”

All One Family Farm, where Steve Jobs found his inspiration for Apple

It was February 1987: Richard Ferris, CEO of UAL Corp., fatefully announced his company would, henceforth, be known as Allegis.

The name change was intended to reflect the broadened scope of the expensively constructed travel enterprise that included Hertz Car Rental, Westin and Hilton International hotel chains, as well as United Airlines.

“We are a travel company, not just a transportation company”, said Ferris. “Allegis clearly identifies us as the only corporation that can offer travelers door-to-door service.”

Investor activist Donald Trump saw things differently. ”It sounds like the next world-class disease,” was his biased diagnosis.

It was the beginning of the end for Ferris and Allegis. Investor discontent coalesced around the name change and within six months Ferris was gone and his grand plan was being dismantled.

Introducing Xylem and Exelis

What was not so easily quelled was the fear and loathing Allegis had generated about corporate names. More than three decades later the fallout still swirled around the corners of boardrooms like a toxic mist. “Don’t give us an Allegis” was the joke, and behind it there was real fear.

The chaotic creativity of the Internet age has eased the anxiety. The likes of Google, Hulu, Zoomba, Skype and Zoosk have, out of necessity, attuned our ears to exotic and unfamiliar nomenclature but not enough to prevent the occasional atavistic twitch from sections of the media over what they characterize gleefully as “disastrous corporate rebrandings”.

There are signs of a real thaw, however. Recently, the conglomerate now known as ITT decided to split itself into three, spinning off its water treatment business and its military business. After much deliberation by Lippincott, the same branding company that gave the world Allegis, they brought forth “Xylem” and “Exelis” as the names for the two new entities. They were met with the dull thud of indifference.

Only a botanist would know that Xylem is a Greek-derived word that refers to vascular tissue that carries water and nutrients through plants. Likewise, it would take a lepidopterist to know that Exelis is a genus of moth, but one can hazard a guess at the intended meaning. In reality both names are, to all intents and purposes, gloriously meaningless.

Where is the outrage, the rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth? There is none.

Admittedly, Qwikster has been given up by Netflix as a juicy sacrificial offering to placate the Rebranding Disaster Gods but Xylem may be the miracle drug it sounds like it should be.

Could Xylem be the cure for Allegis — that most pernicious of name-aversion diseases first exhibited by Donald Trump 34 years ago?