Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to the vicious world of corporate name-creation

salon.com

17 pointsbyrneseyeview13 comments

37signals mocked this back in the first bubble:

http://www.37signals.com/enormicom/

It's almost dead on. Wow. I'd thought it was pretty bad hyperbole even for 37s, but it's exactly accurate.

Edit: The last paragraph is amazing: "our senior manager for Internet development just fell in love with the name 'Jamcracker.' And so today, the Harvey meeting is known as the Jamcracker meeting. There are 300 people at this company who identify Jamcracker with Harvey." among others.

Incredible. If you think paying over a million dollars for "mood boards" is a good investment, I have some Albertan seal-hunt licenses I'd like to sell you. This is a prime example of the advantages startups enjoy: your competitors spend a million bucks on something you can replicate in an afternoon.

I'm an Albertan and I object to you selling licenses to kill the seals in our zoos.

Every couple years this story pops up. I love how some company took Jamcracker.

>> Bahr stops for a moment, as if listening to herself. Then she bursts out laughing. "Listen," she says. "I take it back. You write whatever you want to write. If someone out there wants to name their company Jamcracker, God bless them. And good luck to them."

Oh my. Jamcracker Inc. raised $100 million in 2000.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1033-247167.html

Looks like they're still around: http://www.jamcracker.com/

The point is, the name is overrated. Think of the Wii, how people hated the name. A few months on, who cared? They wanted to buy the widget, and never mind what the widget is called. The name does not define your product; the product defines your name. Anything else is just voodoo.

Paying for someone to name your car model "J30"? Oh come on.

This reminds me of the (semi-apocryphal) story of the creation of the Euro symbol. A European Commissioner, Jean-Pierre Malivoir, was given a big pot of money to hire a designer to come up with a proposed symbol for the new currency. He thought it was a total waste of money, and sat down and came up with the early version of what is now the Euro symbol himself.

I hope that guy was being facetious when he said he doesn't understand why some women find "Jamcracker" uncomfortable. If he was being serious, he lacks such basic intuitions towards spoken English language that I wouldn't want him anywhere near my company name.

Examples of their creations:

Navistar and Tempstar, Telegy and Telegent, Verbex and Azurex, Nortel and Meritel.

They do sound like they were created by brand consultants. Meanwhile Yahoo, Google, and Amazon are doing ok just taking whatever the founders picked.

"You might have a provocative, fun name. But do you have the basis for a lasting brand? We still don't know how compelling a brand Yahoo will be 10 years from now. I sense a real missed opportunity."

And I thought it was bad that we can spend several hours of meeting time arguing about the name of a product at my large company....

I kept checking that this wasn't the onion while reading it...

(1999)

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