Names can be so important. These
days, buildings are called corporate owners names. They used to be dedicated to
great Presidents or famous inventors or rich benefactors. Now we have names
like The Staples Center or Met Life Arena. What is next Viagra Venue? Ugh! People don’t keep traditional names anymore.
Even famous people choose names like Blanket or Apple for their children. Who
gets to choose some of the objects we know by name? If you are in the business
of launching a new product a name can be very important. David Placek is a
professional namer. His company is Lexicon based in Sausalito, California and
has named some of the biggest products around.
He chose Outback for Subaru. OnStar
for General Motors. Pentium for Intel and the bottled water Dasani for
Coca-Cola. It is obvious that he will work for anyone. A company or brand name
could last longer than your own name and it is also the only thing that your competitor
can not take away from you in the long end. It must be fun to get paid based on
your ideas and get paid as much as $100,000 dollars to name a new product. It
is not as easy as Don Draper made it look like on the TV show Mad Men in the
scene where he show the wheel of a
carousel slide machine and names it not a wheel but a carousel.
Every product needs a name and no
two products can be alike so with only 26 letters in the alphabet, the namer
people have a lot of work to do. I have no problem calling people some new
names but a new product seems to be an important thing.
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