The Name GameEach year, business executives around the world struggle to find original and

The Name Game

Each year, business executives around the world struggle to find original and catchy names for their companies and their companies' products, According to business experts, these decisions are among the most important decisions that firms ever make. A name is the first point of contact that a company has with the world, and it can be an effective marketing tool. And respected names have value. When a company is sold, there is often a fee for transferring the company name to the new owners. The rights to the names Indian Motorcycles and Pan Am Airlines were sold years after those companies went bankrupt. Names are so important that some companies hire special naming firms that develop a list of names, test them at focus groups, screen them to be sure they are available, and then trademark the final selections. But how do firms decide on names？

Ways of playing the name game

Some companies cheese straightforward names. These may include the name or names of the founders (Proctor & Gamble, Hewlett Packard), the place where they first did business (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Mutual of New York), or their primary products (General Electric, General Motors). To make a straightforward name memorable, though, is a challenge.

Some companies are mainly identified by initials. International Business Machines is almost universally called IBM, American Telephone and Telegraph has become AT&T, and Kentucky Fried Chicken has consciously chosen to be known as KFC. In some cases, though, it is not exactly clear what the initials stand for. The computer company NBI's initials stand for "Nothing But Initials." Or take the case of IKEA, the Swedish design firm: The initials IK come from the name of the founder, Ingvar Komrat. The E comes from the name of his family farm, Elmtaryd, and the A comes from the nearby town of Agunnaryd. Some firms create names by a process called "morpheme (词素)construction," first shortening and then fusing parts of the company's full names. For example, United Information Systems is generally referred to as Unisys and Federal Express as FedEx. FedEx saved money with its new name too: the shorter name cost $1,000 less to paint on each of the company's 10,000 trucks. Some companies use unusual spellings of common names: Cingular for Singular, Citibank for City Bank, and Sunkist for Sun Kissed.

Some companies choose names that are inspired by other company names. According to the founder of the Carnation evaporated-milk company, the name for his product was suggested, strangely enough, by a brand of cigars known as Carnations. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers, was a Beatles fan, and he named his company after Apple Records, the label founded by the Beatles. This "borrowing" is perfectly legal as long as the two companies are not in the same line of business. (Reportedly, Steve Jobs had to sign an agreement not to produce records.) However, in some cases, company lawyers have said that use of their name, or even part of their name, results in "dilution" of the strength of that name, and they have sued other companies to prevent this. Toys-R-Us, for example, has tried to protect the "R-Us" portion of their name even when it has been applied to completely different products, such as cheese or flowers or guns, and McDonald's has tried to prevent companies from using the "Mc" prefix that has been used for many of their products.

Some firms have chosen names that have nothing to do with their business. Apple is not in the fruit business; it makes computers. Red pepper does not sell spices; it sells software. Domino's has nothing to do with games; it makes pizza. A number of companies have chosen off-the-wall or playful names for their products. There are those naming experts who warn against this, saying that consumers will not take these seriously, and in the case of Boo. com, they may have been fight:

A．Y

B．N

C．NG