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Product naming is the discipline of deciding what a product will be called, and is very similar in concept and approach to the process of deciding on a name for a company or organization. Product naming is considered a critical part of the branding process, which includes all of the marketing activities that affect the brand image, such as positioning and the design of logo, packaging and the product itself. The process involved in product naming can take months or years to complete. Some key steps include specifying the objectives of the branding, developing the product name itself, evaluating names through target market testing and focus groups, choosing a final product name, and finally identifying it as a trademark for protection. [1]
A key ingredient in launching a successful company is the selection of its name. [2] Product names that are considered generally sound have several qualities in common.
Brand names typically fall into several different categories. [3]
AFLAC, IBM, M&M (for Forrest Mars and Bruce Murrie).
Names created by taking parts of words and putting them together: Nabisco (National Biscuit Company).
Fun to say, and particularly memorable: YouTube, Piggly Wiggly.
Use the idea for one thing and apply it to another: Caterpillar, Reebok.
Descriptive names describe to the product a characteristic: Toys R Us, General Motors, Cartoon Network, American Airlines, Burger King, Holiday Inn, Pizza Hut, and Google Maps.
Names don't have to be just a word or two: Seven for All Mankind, I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!, The Boring Company.
Invoke a vivid image that alludes to a brand benefit: London Fog, Amazon.
Use the name of a founder or founder family member: Barneys, Hewlett-Packard, and Wendy's.
Chose a name associated with company/product location: eBay for Echo Bay (a fictional place as well as the shortened form of "Echo Bay Technology Group," the name of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's consulting company, according to the List of company name etymologies), Fuji for the tallest mountain in Japan, Cisco for San Francisco.
For a name with personality: Yahoo!, Cracker Jack. For example, Yahoo comes from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, where Yahoo is a legendary being with the following characters: rude, unsophisticated, uncouth. Later the name Yahoo was popularized as an bacronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.
Base the name on ingredients: Clorox for chlorine plus sodium hydroxide, Pepsi for the digestive enzyme pepsin.
When two companies merge into one, sometimes both names are kept: ExxonMobil, Cadbury Schweppes, GlaxoSmithKline.
Use alternative spellings for common sounds: 2(x)ist, Krispy Kreme.
Use a founder's nickname: Adidas aka Adolf Dassler, Haribo Hans Riegel Bonn, Kinkos.
Use a sound associated with a product function or other brand idea: Twitter, Meow Mix.
Create a character or adopt an existing personage: Green Giant, Nike, Midas Mufflers.
Name is a combination of two (or more) words or morphemes, and their definitions, into one new word: Travelocity, Pinterest.
Linguistically, names are developed by combining morphemes, phonemes, and syntax to create a desired representation of a product.
Morphemes differ from words in that many morphemes may not be able to stand alone. The Sprint name is composed of a single word and a single morpheme. Conversely, a brand like Acuvue is composed of two morphemes, each with a distinct meaning. While "vue" may be able to stand as its own word, "acu" is seen as a prefix or a bound morpheme that must connect to a free morpheme like "vue." [4]
Phonemes are minimal units of sound. Depending on the speaker's accent, the English language has about 44 phonemes. [5] In product naming, names that are phonetically easy to pronounce and that are well balanced with vowels and consonants have an advantage over those that are not. Likewise, names that begin with or stress plosive consonant sounds B, hard C, D, G, K, P or T are often used because of their attention-getting quality. [6] Some phoneme sounds in English, for example L, V, F and W are thought of as feminine, while others such as X, M and Z are viewed as masculine. [7]
Syntax, or word order, is key to consumers' perceptions of a product name. Banana Republic would not carry the same meaning were it changed to "Republic Banana." Syntax also has significant implications for the naming of global products, because syntax has been argued to cross the barrier from one language to another. [8] (See the pioneering work on Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky)
Some specific product naming techniques, including a combination of morphemes, phonemes and syntax are shown in the graph below.
Method | Brand |
---|---|
Alliteration | Coca-Cola |
Oxymoron | Krispy Kreme |
Combination | Walkman |
Tautology | Crown Royal |
Theronym | Mustang |
Mimesis | |
Eponym | Trump Tower |
Description | Cinnamon Toast Crunch |
Synecdoche | Staples |
Poetics | USA Today |
Metonymy | Starbucks |
Allusion | London Fog |
Haplology | Land O'Lakes |
Clipping | FedEx |
Morphological borrowing | Nikon |
Omission | RAZR |
Acronym adaptation | BMW |
Acronym | KFC |
Founder's name | Ferrari |
Classical roots | Pentium |
Arbitrary | Apple |
Reduplication | Spic and Span |
A consideration companies find important in developing a product name is its "trademarkability". Product name trademarks may be established in a number of ways:
In addition, protecting a trademark is just as important as the initial process of registration. Trademark rights are maintained through actual use of the trademark, and will diminish over time if a trademark is not actively used.
Companies need to consider whether they can own a name in the digital realm. Securing a domain name, particularly with the globally recognized dot-com extension, is critical for some companies. It has also become increasingly important for firms to interact with their audience through social media websites. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram all have procedures for acquiring a name on their sites. In modern communication, the trademark is just the start of owning a name.
Because English is widely viewed as a global language, with over 380 million native speakers, many international trademarks are created in English. Still, language differences present difficulties when using a trademark internationally.
Many companies have stumbled across the importance of considering language differences in marketing new products.
Charles Francis Hockett was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics. He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism". His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities. Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and written forms, and may also be conveyed through sign languages. The vast majority of human languages have developed writing systems that allow for the recording and preservation of the sounds or signs of language. Human language is characterized by its cultural and historical diversity, with significant variations observed between cultures and across time. Human languages possess the properties of productivity and displacement, which enable the creation of an infinite number of sentences, and the ability to refer to objects, events, and ideas that are not immediately present in the discourse. The use of human language relies on social convention and is acquired through learning.
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge. In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν, neuter of λεξικός meaning 'of or for words'.
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
Morphophonology is the branch of linguistics that studies the interaction between morphological and phonological or phonetic processes. Its chief focus is the sound changes that take place in morphemes when they combine to form words.
In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morphology also looks at parts of speech, intonation and stress, and the ways context can change a word's pronunciation and meaning. Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme is a set of phones that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Calpis, also sold as Calpico, is a Japanese non-carbonated soft drink manufactured by Calpis Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Asahi Breweries headquartered in Shibuya, Tokyo. The beverage has a light, somewhat milky, and slightly acidic flavour, similar to plain or vanilla-flavoured yogurt or Yakult. Its ingredients include water, dry milk, and lactic acid, and it is produced by lactic acid fermentation.
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
Syntax is concerned with the way sentences are constructed from smaller parts, such as words and phrases. Two steps can be distinguished in the study of syntax. The first step is to identify different types of units in the stream of speech and writing. In natural languages, such units include sentences, phrases, and words. The second step is to analyze how these units build up larger patterns, and in particular to find general rules that govern the construction of sentences.http://people.dsv.su.se/~vadim/cmnew/chapter2/ch2_21.htm
In linguistics, double articulation, duality of patterning, or duality is the fundamental language phenomenon consisting of the use of combinations of a small number of meaningless elements to produce a large number of meaningful elements. Its name refers to this two-level structure inherent to sign systems, many of which are composed of these two kinds of elements: 1) distinctive but meaningless and 2) significant or meaningful.
Speedtalk is a fictional constructed language and key plot device in Robert A. Heinlein's novella Gulf (1949). Speedtalk is a logic-based language with complex syntax, minimal vocabulary, and a rich phoneme inventory ; it would make both communication and thought more efficient and precise. A single phoneme indicates a word, so a "word" indicates a sentence. In the only example given, a "word" means "The far horizons draw no nearer."
In linguistics, a suprafix is a type of affix that gives a suprasegmental pattern to either a neutral base or a base with a preexisting suprasegmental pattern. This affix will, then, convey a derivational or inflectional meaning. This suprasegmental pattern acts like segmental phonemes within a morpheme; the suprafix is a combination of suprasegmental phonemes, organized into a pattern, that creates a morpheme. For example, a number of African languages express tense / aspect distinctions by tone. English has a process of changing stress on verbs to create nouns.
A brand blunder is an error associated with the branding of a product, especially a new product in a new market. Reasons for such slips include the lack of understanding of the language, culture and consumer attitudes in the new market.
Contrastive distribution in linguistics, as opposed to complementary distribution or free variation, is the relationship between two different elements in which both elements are found in the same environment with a change in meaning.
Odia grammar is the study of the morphological and syntactic structures, word order, case inflections, verb conjugation and other grammatical structures of Odia, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The modern-day scientific study of linguistics takes all aspects of language into account — i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
In linguistics, functional morphemes, also sometimes referred to as functors, are building blocks for language acquisition. A functional morpheme is a morpheme which simply modifies the meaning of a word, rather than supplying the root meaning. Functional morpheme are generally considered a closed class, which means that new functional morphemes cannot normally be created.