Naming is a complex business, perhaps that’s why the blogosphere is chockablock with sound advice and clever anecdotes on how to come up with one. At Go East, we find the Do Nots are just as edifying — and sometimes more surprising — than the Dos.

Here are a few favorites.

Do NOT:
1. Go for bland

There are plenty of highly successful companies with straight-up functional names out there, but if you are just starting out — especially in a category with a lot of competition — the more memorable and engaging the name, the more differentiating. And the easier to find.

According to “Protecting Your Brand Online,” a Hitwise report, 86 percent of all searches are for names and brands. If your product or company name is too generic, your audience is going to have a tough time sorting through the mess it turns up in a Google search — and they may not find you.

The same goes for true yet tried words. Google “innovative” and you’ll see what I mean.

2. Invent meaningless names

On the flip side, it doesn’t always pay to go with a wholly invented name. Last year, Microsoft took a beating from pretty much everybody for naming its new search engine Bing, which everyone agreed meant nothing to anyone. Why is that bad? Because endowing a name with meaning can cost millions of dollars. To boot, ruthless bloggers pointed out, the name could be an acronym for “But it’s not Google!”

Microsoft marketing execs told the New York Times they hoped the name would evoke the sound associated with Aha! moments and that it would encourage people to “verb it up” ala Google … so Bing it!

3. Name by committee

As Phil Davis of Entrepreneur.com points out, you can only pick one name, so you risk alienating the very people you are trying to involve. And, in the process of trying to find something crowd pleasing, you are likely to land on a very bland sort of name that suffers from problem number one. Davis recommends only involving a small number of people who can put the company first and their egos second — we’d add collaborative people who are comfortable with change.

4. Worry too much about the URL

We’ve all heard someone say they chose their company name because “the domain name was available,” but are URLs as important today? Given the statistics above, it seems like consumers are less likely to try to type your company name and www. into a browser window, and more likely to look for it in a search engine.

In that case, it might be more important to choose a memorable name that is relevant to your brand and easy to spell — and to ensure that you have awesome search engine optimization.

5. Neglect to review meaning

Everyone knows about the Chevrolet Nova: allegedly the similarity of “Nova” to No Va, Spanish for “no go,” caused the car to sell poorly in Spanish-speaking countries, so the company was forced to rename it.

This is actually a myth; the car apparently sold well in Venezuela and Mexico. Yet it is still a good reminder that those pitfalls exist and that it is important to have someone review your name choice for foreign and other contextual language issues.

Like all things creative, naming can be a highly subjective endeavor, so what sounds bland or meaningless to one ear may ring evocative in another. And that’s why, of all these NO NOs, I will always come back to number three. With a strong team, you can set personal preferences aside, work through that subjectivity, and choose a name that is right for your organization, company or product.

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I have been enjoying the recent spate of Snickers billboards, which seem to be multiplying like rabbits. As in the message above, the ads smoosh together Snickers-related words with other words and phrases to form a non-word and, often, a clever pun. I find the ads funny, memorable and recognizable, but colleagues and friends have wondered aloud if they are too arbitrary: do these words convey real meaning?  They don’t necessarily make one hungry for a Snickers bar, so is it enough that they are memorable — are they relevant?

An article by Stuart Elliot, published in the New York Times earlier this year, talks about how the ads have invented a new language, Snacklish, which not only keeps the ads light, something consumers apparently crave in the current economic crisis, but also mimics the phone vernacular of its target audience, men ages 18 to 34. Elliot writes:

The Snickers language will resonate with ‘‘young adults who are texting each other,’’ said [Walker vice president for integrated marketing communications at the Mars Snackfood U.S. division of Mars in Hackettstown, New Jersey.] ‘‘making up their own words, their own shorthand.’’

So the ads are relevant: they may not make the audience drool for nougat, but they build brand loyalty and recognition, and that’s what’s important here. We all know Snickers is packed with roasted peanuts, creamy nougat, rich caramel, and milk chocolate; they no longer need to hammer that home at every consumer touch point.

This is an awesome example of how a brand with huge recognition can move beyond features and benefits to do bold –and successful — things with advertising.

Thanks to AdMe.Ru for the photo.

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Too often, it happens that guidelines for copywriting are buried deep in the brand guidelines and given only a few paragraphs generally relating to the treatment of the brand’s name and products in content. This is good information, but it doesn’t help the people who talk and write about the brand every day  — internally or externally — understand how to bring it to life in words.

In some cases, it’s not that the organization hasn’t thought through its copy tone, it’s just that no one has taken the time to communicate those thoughts broadly.

As Rob Mitchell posits in an article on Brandchannel.com, it’s possible copywriting is generally overlooked because all of us use words on a regular basis — we speak, write e-mails and publish reports — and feel fairly confident with the medium, while designing is viewed as a highly specialized skill.

Yet, as Mitchell points out, poor writing and inconsistent use of voice and messaging can undermine a brand as surely as misuse of the logo. “If a company’s staff doesn’t speak, write or behave in line with what the customer has been led to expect,” Mitchell writes, ” then he will feel let down.”

Let down and possibly confused. Conversely, consistently good copy is critical to an audience’s ability to recognize a brand in the marketplace.

The challenge, when there are a large numbers of potential writers involved, is teaching staff and consultants to not only recognize when the copy tone is on brand, but also to create copy that represents the strengths of  the brand and resonates with its audiences.

And that’s where guidelines are helpful. In the end, copywriting guidelines create efficiencies and protect the brand, but they also free the writer up to be more creative. In a way, working within guidelines is almost like writing to a stringent poetry form: Rather than trying to redefine the audience, messages and tone, writers can focus on using the existing parameters to create the most engaging, relevant and effective copy possible.

Here are a few additions an organization should consider making to its guidelines to foster more consistent and engaging copywriting.

Writing well

Guidelines should include a brief section on writing well; the basics of business writing, such as: 

• Avoid over-using big words, complex sentences, clutter, jargon and the passive voice
• Strive for honesty, clarity and simplicity — less is more

In his article, Mitchell talks a lot about how, in the absence of guidelines or a real understanding of a brand, writers will fall back on jargon — meaningless phrases that, while comforting in their familiarity to some, may alienate others outside the “lingo.”

I would add that jargon can also clutter up your messaging, leaving audiences with a muddled perspective on your brand.

If possible, include examples of good and bad writing in your copywriting guidelines, e.g. using a long word where a short one will do — as in “numerous” vs. “many” — or the passive voice: Files will be organized vs. James will organize the files.

Core audiences

Defining your core audience with as much specific information as possible helps writers understand who they are talking to and craft messages and tone appropriately.

For example, it is immensely helpful to know the audience’s pain points, enthusiasms, sales cycles and how they interact with the product, etc.    

Copy tone  

Copy tone is complex.

On the one hand, it refers literally to the manner of expression: Confident and informed, warm and inviting, serious and reserved, enthusiastic and urgent, witty and informal. The tone of your copy should, of course, resonate with your core audiences. 

On the other hand, copy tone can also refer to personality.

Capturing the personality of your brand  in writing can mean expression, vocabulary, rhythm and punctuation — and it can be great fun.  Unfortunately, copy that takes on too strong a personality risks offending elements of your audience; one reader’s witty is another’s snotty.

Capturing that fine line is tricky.  If the goal of the guidelines is to simplify writing for anyone — consultants and the folks in your organization —  it’s probably best to focus on tone (expression) and audience.

Again, the best way to communicate your brand’s tone of voice within the guidelines is through examples:

Hot!Hot!Hot!  vs. Limited time offer

Key messages

Key messages are the most important aspects of the brand’s product offering and services summarized in a concise phrase or sentence. They communicate what differentiates your brand, what you want the consumer to remember.

In the brand guidelines, key messages help copywriters, and designers, understand the communication priorities of the brand so that they can write about it comfortably and honestly — to Mitchell’s point, there’s no need for jargon. They also ensure that writers consistently communicate the brand’s strengths to your core audiences, which in turn helps build audience recognition and opinion.

Key messages should not necessarily be pulled directly from the guidelines, but used as a basis for all communications — how the actual words are crafted will vary from tactic to tactic, audience to audience.

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These are the People Against Dirty advocates. They are my people.

When the Cooper Mini “Let’s Motor” campaign came out, I was charmed and inspired. I actually collected pieces of it. I feel the same about Method’s green campaign People Against Dirty. In fact, I have in front of me an ingenious direct mail piece pilfered from a coworker’s desk.

The piece combines relevant yet humorous photography and copy — lots of copy, relatively. Specifically, I enjoy the way the campaign defines traditional cleaning chemicals as “dirty” then spins into double entendre. 

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A colleague forwarded me the link to this tea company’s website. He was initially attracted to the company for its tin designs — which are indeed collectible — but once in the site, he realized the words were equally fantastic. 

Each tea has a distinct character, described not in the adjectives generally reserved for tea and wine — plucky, reserved, fruity, dry, leggy, demonstrative, smoky — but in cheeky narrative vignettes.

The brilliance of these delicious little stories is that they simultaneously reinforce the personality of the brand and describe the tea — and they are exactly the kind of thing one might want to read while drinking piping hot cup of tea.

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The only kind of shopping I truly enjoy is grocery shopping, and even that can get to be a bit of a slog on the weekend, when the whole world is out thumping melons and squeezing the Charmin. For all other forms of shopping (with the possible exception, now that I think about it, of hardware), give me a cup of coffee and a catalog – no, not the Internet, but an actual paper catalog.

 When it comes to buying stuff, I’m as happy as the average toddler to look at pictures, but oh, what a joy it is to slouch down on the couch with a catalog that ventures beyond materials and technical specs in its product descriptions. 

I love a catalog with a sense of humor, a story or simply a whimsical approach to its subject. And why should it not always be that way? Sure, the product descriptions inhabit a modicum of space, but what does size matter: no copy was ever so avidly read as the predictive aphorism we find on the 2″ x 1/4″ slip of paper tucked in our Chinese fortune cookie.

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Somewhere, everywhere, in darkened alleys and well-lit office cubicles, criminal minds are hard at work bungling the English language. Oh, their mockery is subtle — a dangled participle here, a malaprop there — but it undermines our ability to communicate effectively. Soon we will all be staring confusedly into our alphabet soup, looking for lost words.

Who will save us?

WordGirl!

WorldGirl is not so unlike Superman. Her space ship crashed here on Earth when she was but a babe, and she’s grown up as mild-mannered Betsy Botsford. Hailing from the faraway planet Lexicon, WordGirl’s super powers are “flying at the speed of sound, super strength and a comprehensive vocabulary.” Plus, she alliterates like a champ.

I’ve been a huge fan of WordGirl and her monkey sidekick Captain Huggy Face since last fall, when PBS spun them into a full show. What’s not to love about a 10-year-old girl who confidently fights criminals with big words and a quick wit? WordGirl is clever enough that adults will find her funny, but the show is based on the premise that kids are smart enough to understand long words and more complex humor. If I had kids, I’d be psyched that such a fantastic role model exists — mamas could do worse than to let their babies grow up to be WorldGirls.

You can check out WorldGirl in this hilarious interview with Jim Lehrer:

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