December 5, 2000

BY Deborah Lohse
San Jose Mercury News

When Andersen Consulting decided recently to spend $175 million introducing its new name, Accenture, it was the latest in a long string of high-falutin' -- and inscrutable -- name changes that have some brand experts crying out for an end to the "coined" name craze.

Accenture follows the unveiling of other names that read like brand consultants were stuck with a bad Scrabble hand: GTE Corp. and Bell Atlantic Corp.'s Verizon wireless-phone debut, Lucent Technologies' recent spinoff of Avaya Inc., and SBC and Bellsouth's October christening of their joint venture Cingular Wireless.

"It's a wild, dangerous game that's going on,'' lamented John Diefenbach, a partner with brand consultants Wolff Olins. Picking a name has become "part hokum, part academia, part process,'' with the end results all too often being "the embarrassment of my profession,'' he said.

Corporations are adopting these mouthfuls for a variety of reasons, including a decreasing supply of trademark and Internet domain names, and a desire to expand and "redefine'' themselves or their services. Weaning corporations off this ugly trend won't be easy.

For starters, it's hard to get one's hands on a good old moniker such as "Gap,'' "Apple'' or "General Electric.'' If a chosen name doesn't get disqualified because it's one of the scores of names that get trademarked every week, it's almost sure to have been staked out as an Internet domain name, tens of thousands of which are registered daily.

Beyond those hurdles, many companies are intent on "redefining'' their space, so they want a name with no pre-associations -- which often means a made-up name with an aura of power, technology or importance.

And since many newly named companies are global, or aspire to be, they have to dodge the same bullets abroad, plus avoid the embarrassments suffered by Nova or Pinto brands, pulled from Latin American distribution when it was discovered they could mean "it doesn't go'' or "penis,'' respectively.

Earlier trends
The naming business has always dealt in coined words, especially those that implied that companies had the hottest new technology, noted Steven Addis, chief executive of Addis, a Berkeley brand-consulting company. In past decades, companies tacked "-omatic'' onto their names or products, such as Vote-o-matic, figuring that made them look as if they had the latest in time-saving gadgetry.

With the '70s came products with the suffix "-tron,'' like Sony's Trinitron, while in the '80s companies simply added synthetic-sounding suffixes like "-sis'' or "-x.'' Now the industry already has passed through, and is leaving, the Internet and dot-com name craze where simply slapping an I- or E- to the front or ".com'' at the end has been a disproved road to success.

"Open a 5-year-old computer magazine, and it reads like a cemetery of bad names,'' quipped Naseem Javed, president of ABC Namebank International.

Now, the name game is much more complex, because companies don't want to tie themselves to any one technology, product, or even continent. Also, companies are less likely to sell a distinct product -- Kleenex -- and more likely to provide a changing array of services, none of which the company wants to exclude from the name. "It's not about getting anybody to drink more Coca-Cola, not anymore,'' Diefenbach said.

That's what faced executives of Andersen Consulting, forced by an arbitrator to shed the Andersen name after a legal dispute with former partner Arthur Andersen. "Our challenge was we were in consulting, computer software, financial services and six other classes of trade,'' said James E. Murphy, global managing director of marketing and communications for Accenture.

The company started with a slate of 5,000 names, some from employees and some from Landor Associates consulting firm. That list was winnowed down to 500 that "met our positioning'' goals, Murphy said. But after checking the list against trademark and other databases, including a Berlitz program designed to spot offensive or adverse translations in 50 countries, Andersen lost all but 29 names. From that list, Accenture, submitted by an employee in Oslo, emerged the winner. The word is supposed to connote an "accent on the future.'' (The company declined to share any discarded names, but Murphy recalled that one word meant "crude'' in one of Andersen's 50 countries.)

Trademark frenzy
Extricity Inc. can sympathize. When the business-to-business software company a couple of years ago wanted to change its name from Crossroute (figuring it was getting confused with hundreds of other "cross'' companies) it hit major trademark potholes.

`"We really liked Caprio,'' which had connotations of "capture the moment,'' said David Cope, vice president of marketing at Extricity. "But just a week before we did the search on it, someone filed for it'' with the trademark office, he said. Another favorite, "Connexity,'' was trademarked by a company in Europe.

Many companies would prefer not to coin a new word. Executives forming the new telecom venture from SBC and Bellsouth were "cocky going in,'' noted Virginia Vann, senior vice president of marketing for the new company. "We said, "We don't want a made-up name.' ''

But those hopes were dashed fast when consultants warned that "there's not a color, not a fruit, not an animal, not a prehistoric animal -- none of those'' names were available, thanks to trademark problems, said Vann. The company settled on Cingular Wireless because it wasn't "too corporate or too technological,'' Vann said. "At the end of the day we were happy to have something that sounded like a real word.''

Hard to stand out
The downside of coined names, of course, is that they start to sound interchangeable after a while. "We used to joke that Telesis was what you had, and Nynex is what you rubbed on it,'' Diefenbach said.

To stand out, companies have to spend millions more in advertising to drill the new name into the minds of customers, partners and employees. Accenture's $175 million campaign, including Super Bowl spots, is costing about $100 million more than the company would have spent without the name change, Murphy said. But they are resigned. The name is "a coined word, just like . . . Xerox was, and we're going to put meaning into it,'' said Murphy, who likened the process to filling "an empty vessel.''

"You need to do that when you can't get a descriptive name.''

Javed said his criteria for naming a company is that it should be short, trademarkable, hard to misspell, related to what the company does and easy to remember. "If you are a bicycle company, shouldn't your name convey that you are a bicycle company?''

But Javed appears to fall short of his own rules from time to time. He boasted that it took him four days to find a name for an overseas consultancy he described as a smaller version of Andersen. His pick? Exelum.