Author Archives: Angela Tung

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The Name Game: Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma of : : CRONAN : :

Continuing our series on the art of naming, today we talk to Michael Cronan and Karin Hibma, founders of : : CRONAN : :.

: : CRONAN : : is a Bay Area-based naming and brand design agency that has named many iconic consumer products and companies, including TiVo, Amazon Kindle, and the Kno tablet.

Michael has a background in fine arts. He taught at the California College of Art, Oakland and San Francisco for 20 years, was consulting product development and design director of the SFMOMA MuseumStore, is a founding member and former president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts San Francisco chapter, and much more.

Karin also has a fine arts background, working as a freelance design researcher and founding a creative research company and an award-winning product development company. She also recently received the AIGA Fellow lifetime achievement award.

How did you get started in the naming business?

It has become our sweet spot. Designers have the opportunity to understand a client’s business deeply and help them achieve their goals. We were fortunate to cut our teeth with designing for national and international branding, corporate identity packaging, store design clients – in a very wide set of activities.

We’ve had spectacular long-term relationships with Levi Strauss, Estee Lauder, William Sonoma, Blue Cross, Apple, the San Francisco Symphony, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many more. Naming products and then entire companies came as a natural extension of those pursuits.

During the early 2000s, we began to work more remotely with our teams and clients, coming together at key moments in the process to move projects along very effectively. We realized that we could focus more and more on what for us is the most generative part of the process – the naming and identity design. And we could do it as a collaborative process, helping the clients evolve and grow their business through our approach.

We’ve found that our approach has been productive for our clients. One recently referred to us as “ninjas” as we helped his company move through a very narrow time window to create a new business personality, unify the team, and create a platform for their growth, all announced with new company, brand, and product names, as well as a dynamic new identity.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

We work with companies in high technology, consumer products and mobile apps, community foundations, banking, movie and music entertainment – the category of clients is always mixed. We work with those companies who are making a strategic change with an eye to national or international reach, from conceptualizing a new service, starting a new company, launching a new product, all the way to re-energizing an existing brand. There is a spectrum of points where we get involved.

Minimizing the risk of change and expanding change’s positive branding opportunities for company leaders is essentially what we do. We help our clients answer who they are, and move from where they are to where they want to be. We only work with the leaders and the key decision-makers in a strategic team they pull together. We always have the leader’s direct line and they are in the majority of meetings. As it turns out, that is very powerful. It is one of the things that makes what we do work.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

We never start with ideas just because we will get distracted before we truly know what it should be, or even what it can be.

And we do find that clients come with and have pretty terrific ideas. Sometimes they have exhaustive lists of names they’ve generated but not found yet the answer. If they don’t bring ideas and lists, they do work with us in a collaborative environment created to give them the confidence and excitement they need to bring their ideas forward, appreciate ours, and to find what they need and want to get to YES – that’s the answer!

We design the exact approach around each client and for their project. We work in various ways but the core of our process begins with what we call Deep Listening. We listen and picture the results of what the client intends to do with all the positive outcomes and everything fitting into place, essentially focused on long extended success. We do this as a thought experiment, but we remove any critique from our thinking. We try to live in that positive outcome reference before we come back and look at the project from a critical point of view. There is always plenty of time to critique and evaluate what may or may not work.

Deep Listening helps us understand that an idea needs a chance to live before it can work. It is our way of getting on the same page with our clients and quickly sharing their vision without forsaking the discriminative abilities and successful outcomes they pay us for.

That Deep Listening phase includes a one-room meeting with all the people that will have input on the decisions including the CEO, founder, partners, executive director, chairman – you name it. We get them to speak about why they believe in what they do. We call the meeting an Intensive because many times the outcomes are well, intensive, with everyone speaking personally and responding directly to the questions we ask.

At the same time there is a lot of laughter in the meetings. Plato said something about learning more about a person with an hour of play than in a month of conversation. When you play or laugh, you drop your guard and new ideas can enter your consideration set and the realm of possibility.

And finally finding the right naive questions to ask of our clients and ourselves is probably the key to our process and the success we’ve enjoyed. Asking the right questions is a way to rapidly uncover what is not being considered and many times, leads to higher order thinking. When you get to that point the choices and design become easy.

What are some resources that you use?

We use a mad set of classic and multi-lingual dictionaries and of course Wordnik, plus comparative linguistics, standard search, the US Trademark resources and search urls, all without getting wonky. We need to keep current on business, communication, cultural and design trends while trying to stay as naive and open as possible to new ideas. One thing for sure, experience is and becomes the brand, so we use any means we can to understand and live the client’s product and business experience.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Our favorite is a successful Japanese fermented milk based soft drink that tried to capture the American market, named CALPIS. Sometimes a name can spell doom, or at least something you really do not want to drink.

One client we averted from a potential name disaster years ago was a company that syndicated internet services. They came to us to design their identity after recently investing in the name SYNDIC. They felt the name they had commissioned described what they did. We did not like it because it had SYN in the name as well as a DIC, and the graphic we could envision was funny but wasn’t where we thought they wanted to be.

Syndications were not happy new opportunities, and the name also seemed cold and selfish. We suggested that the naming firm should maybe take a second look. After two weeks the client came back unhappily with SYNDICA, a feminized version of the same name. We renamed and branded them Verio, from the Latin veritas or truth. They lived up to the promise in the name and today are one of planet earth’s largest internet service providers.

What are some new names that you particularly like?

Of those we did not name, how about Pinterest, Instagram, ModCloth, and Zite? They are not overly descriptive yet they communicate the core value being offered in a fresh and appealing way.

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

We generally would love to see arcane (fill in the culture) sky god names go the way of the white clouds. If you have to explain the attributes of the sky god and how your company has the same attributes, you have lost.

We’d like to see the overly cute double entendre names split from the scene. Constantly cute works for cupcake shops but a cute name will get more foolish with time. And too geeky names are a dime-a-dozen, indistinguishable from one another.

The oooga booga, zoooma, looma oomph names with too many vowels are hard to remember. Try keeping track of where you are driving in Hawaii. Without GPS all you have are lovely words with extra vowels.

And consumer drug names in general – it is completely confusing to have 2-3 names for the same product, all un-memorable.

UPDATE: We were saddened to hear of Michael Cronan’s passing on January 1, 2013. Our condolences to his loved ones.

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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge – Week of November 19, 2012

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.

Remember that once a month we’re giving away Wordnik schwag to two randomly chosen players, to be announced the last Monday of the month – and that’s today! This month’s winners are @QueenTechnoGeek and @Kotonosato. Congrats! We’ll be in touch soon to get your addresses.

As always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or subscribe via email.

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Thanksgiving Contest Winners: Turducken Words

To celebrate Thanksgiving and that linguistic and literal portmanteau, the turducken, we asked you to come up with a new turkey-word blend, whether it be food-related, a feeling, or a phenomenon – anything to do with Thanksgiving that smashed two or more words together.

Some made us hungry, like @KathrynMcCalla’s carb-fest of a word, rolluffatoes, “rolls with stuffing and mashed potatoes crammed inside,” or @randyclarktko’s grandiose crandiose sauce, “cranberry sauce with multiple ingredients.”

A couple made us feel slightly ill, like @4ndyman’s porkey, “Turkey stuffed with ham and wrapped in bacon. . .or, more realistically, dying in your sleep after dinner” (a turcoma, to the nth degree, right @CSmithMo?), and @larry_kunz’s ode to the Hostess Twinkie, the twurkie, a “Thanksgiving bird stuffed with shortcake-and-cream treats.”

Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich Porn, Volume 2, open faced

Thanksgiving Leftover Sandwich Porn, Volume 2, open faced

[Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 by Marshall Astor – Food Fetishist]

 Thanksgiving leftovers are made for smashing together, as agreed by @ChristaKinde and her cruffingberry sandwich, “thin slab pan-fried stuffing + cranberries on bread,”and @MrZiebarth’s crankeywich, “a turkey and cranberry sandwich,” which also kind of sounds like a sandwich you might give a cranky person to cheer them up (which we guess it is!).

Some described what may be familiar experiences, such as the joy of @borglocutus’s Fooburkey, a day of Thanksgiving and football; another from @4ndyman, self-gravification, “the act of dribbling gravy on oneself during Thanksgiving dinner”; and these two from @PlainLizzy: the turzazster, “when you bake a turkey with the plastic bag still inside,” and captivisioninlaw, “being forced to watch what your father-in-law puts on TV all holiday weekend long.”

As for the winner, we picked two this time: 4ndyman’s (who was on turkey-word fire) anni-left-ick shock, “The surprise & disgust that follows the discovery of Thanksgiving leftovers in the fridge a year later,” and @CSmithMo’s appetizinger, “the first snippy comment of the night,” because sometimes unfortunately Thanksgiving isn’t just about stuffing one’s face.

Thanks to all the players! Everyone mentioned in this post will get some Wordnik schwag. Have a great holiday!

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WotD Perfect Tweet Challenge – Week of November 12, 2012

Every week, we pose a challenge: using any word of the day from the week, create a perfect tweet, otherwise known as a twoosh. Here are our favorites from last week.

Remember that once a month we’re giving away Wordnik T-shirts to two randomly chosen players, to be announced the last Monday of the month, and as always, to get the word of the day, follow us on Twitter, like us onFacebook, or subscribe via email.

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This Week’s Language Blog Roundup: Election, WOTY, and terrifying origins

Welcome to this week’s Language Blog Roundup, in which we bring you the highlights from our favorite language blogs and the latest in word news and culture.

The Peace Hat, FDR (WWll) and Fala, Too!

The Peace Hat, FDR (WWll) and Fala, Too! by Tony Fischer Photography

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by Tony Fischer Photography]

You might have heard there was a little election last week. Mental Floss told us where red states and blue states come from while Zinzin gave us a history of Presidential pet names and nicknames. Our tweet about waiting to vote in line or on line got Jen Doll thinking about the semantics of voting and line waiting. Ben Zimmer questioned the razor-tight-ness of the presidential race, examined the We are all the X now trope, and helped us figure out the origin of Romney’s latest Mittonym, poopy-head, and the phrase, fiscal cliff.

As 2012 winds down, candidates for Word of the Year (WOTY) abound. Oxford Dictionary’s UK pick is omnishambles, “a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations,” while its choice for the U.S. is the verb form of GIF, “to create a GIF file of (an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event).” Wondering how Oxford came up with GIF? Here are some animated GIFs that tell the tale. Also check out these 11 former WOTY candidates that are now delebs.

The end of the year also means holiday-time, which means holiday cliches. Do what John McIntyre says and shun them.

In dictionary news, Macmillan Dictionary announced that they will be going completely digital, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the owner of the American Heritage Dictionary, has acquired Webster’s New World Dictionary.

In other language news, Jonathan Green told us about the Scottish slang of Trainspotting author, Irvine Welsh. Ben Zimmer showed how Twitter language reveals gender, and at Language Log, discussed using syllepsis in headlines while Mark Liberman took a bite out of toothbutter. Johnson explored the tu-vous distinction and, inspired by our Diwali post on Indian-Anglo words, delved into the etymology of punch and other five words.

At Lingua Franca, Geoffrey Pullum leaned to the adverbial right while Ben Yagoda celebrated the flexiptivist, “a position between the classic prescriptivist and descriptivist.” At Macmillan Dictionary blog, Gill Francis discussed the big ask of online dictionaries, Stan Carey served up the origin of the word treacle, and on his own blog did not make a hames of the word hames. He also had some fun with the Fargo accent.

In words of the week, Erin McKean noted vore, a fetish involving “the idea of being eaten whole and alive, eating another alive, or watching this process”; haikai, “a form of lighthearted collaborative poetry in which each poet links his verse to the previous one’s”; dancheong, a “Korean ornamental style”; and sourdough, a brave imbiber of the Sourtoe cocktail.

Fritinancy’s word choices were fondleslab, “a touchscreen device, particularly a tablet computer, to which its owner appears unnaturally attached,” and epistemic closure, “a reference to closed systems of deduction that are unaffected by empirical evidence.” Also don’t miss our interview with Fritinancy, aka Nancy Friedman, about the art of naming.

Sesquiotica explored the punworthy mediochre, and the pronunciation of madder and matter. The Dialect Blog looked at the Higgins’ boast, the claim to have “an exceptional knack for guessing dialects,” and dialect gripes about The Help. The Virtual Linguist shared an unusual definition of cocktail and the origin of the word banshee. Meanwhile, Ozwords was as game as Ned Kelly.

This week we also learned how to spell out a scream and other style tidbits from the Chicago Manual of Style, the terrifying origins of the phrase, drinking the Kool-Aid, and the disturbing origins of 10 famous fairy tales. We wished that this New York Times’ language tool were open to the public. We loved these literary comics, the idea of William Shatner reading our poetry (full of Shatner pauses, no doubt), and these limericks of every single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

That’s it for this week!

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The Name Game: Nancy Friedman and Wordworking

Many of us take brand and company names for granted. We run in Nikes, stare at our iPhones, and hit Target on the weekends. Some brand names become so common, we forget they were even brands to begin with. But how did these names come about?

We decided to talk to a few professional namers about the art of naming. First up is Nancy Friedman of Wordworking. In addition to verbal branding, Nancy writes about words and language at her blog, Fritinancy, and as a contributor to the Visual Thesaurus. You can also follow her smart word snarkery (we do) on Twitter.

Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we interview more naming experts.

How did you get started in the naming business?

I was in the right place at the right time. I’d worked as a journalist and copywriter and moonlighted as a poet, and a friend with a similar background asked me casually whether I’d like to get into the name-development game. I started freelancing for an agency that trained all of us in namestorming techniques such as mind-mapping and word-building. I got to work with uber-smart people, exercise my word-play muscles, and get paid! And, usually, fed! (Agencies do like to put on a spread.)

As it turned out, journalism and marketing were the perfect preparation for my name-development career. The first phase of any name-development project involves asking a lot of questions, so that who-what-where-when-how-why training proved indispensable. Later phases require a strong sense of the market, the audience, and the competition, which is what marketing is all about.

What types of customers and clients do you work with?

Well-funded ones.

Seriously, though, I’ve worked with small, medium, and large businesses in virtually every industry: software, hardware, middleware (yes, there is such a thing), hospitality, fashion, medical devices, furniture, food, transportation, nonprofit … I even did one pharmaceutical-naming project, although that’s a highly specialized field that nowadays is handled by niche agencies.

Please describe the naming process. Do you usually start with ideas, or do you find your customers often have their own ideas already?

A professional naming process ideally starts with a blank slate and a lot of questions. The answers to the questions become the basis of the naming brief, a detailed written document that describes the objectives and criteria for the name: what it needs to say and how it should (and shouldn’t) say it. Most do-it-yourself namers skip – or aren’t even aware of – this crucial step.

In many cases the slate isn’t 100% blank: I’m renaming an existing brand, or the client has already developed a list of names that haven’t passed the test (usually because the test hasn’t been well defined—that’s why you need a naming brief), or there’s a code name that’s for internal use only. I do an audit on those internal names as well as on competitors’ names.

What are some resources that you use?

I have several shelves full of specialized dictionaries: The Surfin’ary, The Cowboy Dictionary, From Juba to Jive, The New York Times Crossword Puzzle Dictionary, a word-parts dictionary, and many foreign-language dictionaries. And that’s a very partial list. I use online resources, too, including Wordnik, of course!

But mostly I use my stored knowledge about how language works – sound symbolism, market-appropriateness, and so on. I use lateral-thinking techniques to get beyond the obvious and the descriptive: for legal and other reasons, a “suggestive” name is much stronger than a descriptive one.

What are some mistakes you’ve seen companies make in terms of naming?

Not taking the time to develop the naming brief is the biggest one. The naming brief is a road map for the creative process and a benchmark for evaluating the results.

Next in line: confusing a domain with a brand name. Trademark is a much more important consideration than domain availability; there are all kinds of ways to get a domain, including, yes, buying one from a domainer. You have to face reality; this isn’t the wide-open domain market of 1997.

Next: Confusing a name with a brand. It takes much more than a name to build success: word of mouth, advertising, customer service, consistent communication. Don’t say “We want a name like Zappos” when you mean “We want to build a company like Zappos.”

Other mistakes: Too many decisionmakers. (I like to keep it to four or five, max.) Not generating enough names. (Only about 5% will be available, so you need to create at least 300 names, preferably more. That’s not a challenge for professional namers, but most amateurs find it very difficult.) Not understanding how long the naming process takes or what it should realistically cost. Resistance to metaphor. Fixation on an internally developed name, even when it’s clearly problematic. Ego.

What are some new names that you particularly like?

Beeminder is the very nice name of a website that helps people set and meet goals. It suggests industriousness and reminders, and it’s fun and easy to say – much better than the company’s original name, Kibotzer (sic!). The original tagline, “Reminders with a Sting,” made me smile. The current tagline is more pedestrian: “Solving the Self-Control Problem.”

I also like Weightless Books, which sells DRM-free publications in a variety of formats. They’re e-books, so they are literally weightless, and you get them instantly, so they’re waitless. Very nice.

In big-company-land, I’m a fan of Surface, the name of Microsoft’s new tablet device. As a noun, it draws attention to the device’s near-two-dimensionality; as a verb, it suggests “coming up for air.” And it subtly reinforces the Windows brand: windows are, after all, mostly surface.

What are some trends you’d sooner see die off?

What’s up with the adverbs and forced verbs? So many names end in –ly (I’ve created a Pinterest board with 117 examples, and I add a few new ones every week). So many names end in –ify (Storify, Zenify, Securify, Themify…). And in retail I’m seeing a lot of X+Y names: Circle & Square, Imogene + Willie, Time & Silence, Georgi & Willow, Holler & Squall. These concepts may have seemed fresh early on, but now they all blend together.

Oh, one more: the all-caps, no-vowels name. BHLDN. STK. BLK DNM. It’s as though we’re all shouting while texting. UGH.

Anything else to add?

I tell my clients that a brand name is an arranged marriage, not a love match. If you’re waiting for your heart to pound and your pulse to race, forget about it! You want a name with a good background (meaning, spelling, pronunciation) and good prospects (able to stand the test of time) that won’t embarrass you in front of strangers or bore you at home.

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Thanksgiving Contest: Create a New Turducken

Mmm...turducken

Mmm...turducken, by jeffreyw

[Photo: CC BY 2.0 by jeffreyw]

We here at Wordnik love Franken-words, also known as portmanteaus or word blends.

Last year our Thanksgiving word of the day was turducken, a literal and linguistic blend of a turkey, duck, and chicken. In our Thanksgiving post, we wrote about tofurkey, turbaconducken (a turducken wrapped in bacon), and the cherpumple, “a three-layer cake with an entire pie baked into each layer—a cherry pie baked inside a white cake, a pumpkin pie baked inside a yellow cake and an apple pie baked inside a spice cake.”

In celebration of these turducken words, we want you to create a new Thanksgiving-related portmanteau. It could be a (horrific) new food, a feeling, or a phenomenon. The only rules are that they combine two or more words, and that they have to do with turkey-day.

Tweet your turducken words with the hashtag #turkeyword. You can enter as many times as you like. The contest will run from through the weekend. On Monday, November 19, we’ll announce our favorites, the runners-up, and the big winner. Prizes await!

Get word-cooking!