The only interesting thing about the new Keysight Technologies name from Agilent is the weird familiarity of the story surrounding its development.
It’s like a tired, old Agatha Christie plot recycled over and over. Only the names of the characters have changed.
A corporate spinoff is announced: they need a name, one with a message–wait, so what do we stand for? It also has to be easy to pronounce and – watch out for those tricky translation issues – it can’t mean shriveled testicles or anything rude in Japanese!
It sounds easy; it turned out to be very hard, much harder than anyone imagined.
An internal multi-regional, cross-functional team is formed just to complicate things. Once again executives rummage for candidates in the HP heritage bin – Addison Technologies anyone? Lawyers in international markets can’t agree. A private investigator is hired to track down the owner of a domain name.
It finally gets down to a shortlist of candidates…and then the CEO nixes them all on his iPhone.
He doesn’t like anything? Quick, back to the drawing board!
“It’s really hard to just take a bunch of letters and put them together, and have somebody identify with them right away,” says client breathlessly after three months of turmoil. “I would definitely describe it as a wild ride, three months of insanity.” Indeed. Insane.
A new name is finally announced. A happy ending in this case. Phew! But such an unnecessary palaver.
Read the unabridged version here.
Thanks to the EEVBlog, here are a few possible alternative name candidates:
Namedroppings. 