Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business
Product Description: In Wordcraft, Alex Frankel, a business writer who once briefly worked as a namer, tells the story of how five major brands got their names: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, the Porsche Cayenne, and IBM’s “e-business.” Behind each name is an account of how words and language infuse the products we use every day with meaning, and how great words actually succeed in changing people’s behavior. The book is filled with stories about words that come from every corner of our world: technology, health, sports, food, business, and more.
Subjects: Business & Economics, Business / Economics / Finance, Business/Economics, Careers - Other Specific Fields, Marketing - Product Management, Business & Economics / Marketing / General, Marketing - General,
Read this book and learn about the naming aspect of brands and branding.
Short and sweet, that's how I describe this nice little book about the importance of naming your business and/or products so revenues will be maximized. It also discusses extensively the way in which companies go about thinking up great names for their businesses and/or products.
After a book is written it has to be packaged before it is sold. It can be a wonderful book, but if the cover isn't flashy and the title just right, then sales will suffer. In a way, this book is about the importance of choosing the right title for a book. A book is a product isn't it? But it also talks about titling (naming) businesses, too.
There's really no systematic method to the madness of naming, and we learn this by reading this book. But naming is VERY important just the same. Besides a book full of content on the naming industry, what we get out of this book is five stories describing how big-time successful brand names got started, three of which were BlackBerry, Accenture, and Viagra.
I regularly meet with entrepreneurs in my capacity as a volunteer SCORE counselor. And people starting a business usually don't discuss with me their new business' name. And I rarely raise the issue. It usually is not viewed as an important topic to consider. But after reading this book I think the author makes it clear that naming a business or product is a very important thing to consider when starting a business or developing a product. As a result, I highly recommend that any entrepreneur give this book a read so they can hopefully not hurt their business by choosing a "less than" name.
I would have liked the book better if the Table of Contents had had chapter titles that were more descriptive of the book's content. There are 11 chapters in this book, but known are worth naming here. 5 stars!
A Worthwhile Peek Behind the Curtain of Big-time Branding
In "Wordcraft," Alex Frankel ushers readers into the highly secretive and competitive naming industry where companies such as Porsche, IBM and Pfizer risk millions of dollars to launch brand names they hope will become part of the cultural lexicon.
The naming process is simultaneously fascinating and exhausting. Names are not hatched on cocktail napkins in sports bars. Rather, they are conceived by legions of creative types, many of whom are freelancers. Name finalists must clear myriad trademark and other legal hurdles. And occasionally a chosen name comes from an unlikely source, as in the case of Accenture, a company name coined by an employee in Norway.
Frankel, who himself was a freelance namer and launched his own naming firm during the 90s Internet boom, profiles how five new brands got their names, including Viagra and IBM's "e-business." For business people, marketers and cultural observers, Frankel's book is a worthwhile peek behind the curtain of big-time branding.
naming is not the first step in branding
If you have work to do in naming -this is such a well written book you are certain to find value from the thirteen bucks. The only danger is considering the development of a name to be the first step in brand development. The process needs to begin with strategic positions. It's not so much about words as ideas. it is in fact possible to develop a brand from the visual representation and get to the name as an implementation of the brand image...
Entertaining & insightful book
Very entertaining and insightful reading. Mr. Frankel is a master storyteller who both entertains his readers and delivers great insight into the world of naming. His first-hand experiences provide the reader with a true understanding of how companies craft a brand from a name.
A Way With Words
Shakespeare may have had us wonder "What's in a name?" but though roses named differently might smell as sweet, they don't have millions of dollars riding on how well a name works. Corporations do, and they know it, and they are ready to pay other companies big money to make sure that the names do more than the job of just being handy labels for their products. Alex Frankel is a business journalist who has actually formed a company to name things for business, and in _Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business_ (Crown), he lets us know how this strange and modern facet of global business works. A brand is not just a name but "... an amalgamation of everything that one thinks about when a particular word is uttered." If corporations are spending millions of dollars to make sure that the names that are so familiar (Prozac, Amazon, Cuisinart) can become familiar and can subtly carry extra emotional weight, it is a good idea that consumers get to know a little bit about how we are being influenced (led, manipulated) in this way.
Frankel's book is an analysis of five brand names: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, the Porsche Cayenne, and IBM's e-business, concentrating on the work of the small firms that name the products of big firms for a fee. The world's first naming firm has its own apt name, Lexicon, and it was responsible for naming the BlackBerry, the handheld e-mail device of Research in Motion. "BlackBerry" is a word with an element of fun to it; it is not, by its own nature, tied to e-mail or messages. This represents in some ways a liability; another considered word, "AirWire", might hint of wireless communication, but BlackBerry did not make people think of what the product did. As a result, advertising dollars had to be spent to make the connection, but it proved to be an easy connection to make. BlackBerry was launched in 1999, and every message sent by a BlackBerry was labeled as being sent by BlackBerry, further spreading the name. It became a huge hit at least partially because of the name; some e-mail addicted executives took to calling it the "CrackBerry." The best part of the book is Frankel's depiction of the naming of the products of the pharmaceutical industry, especially the naming of Viagra. Look at that brand name: vigor, vitality, virile are all there. It rhymes with Niagara, the famous destination for newlyweds. (Frankel compares the newer drugs for ED: Cialis doesn't have any particular handle for name interpretation, but Levitra has the "vi" inside it, and it is connected to levitation, getting it up.) Viagra was a made up name that caught on quickly. Phillip Roth lauded it in _The Human Stain_. It got virile spokesmen to say it was a helpful medicine. It even entered the _Oxford English Dictionary_.
Not everything goes so smoothly. One of the chapters here examines the Denver case of the Mile High Stadium, whose naming privileges were sold, so that it is supposed to be known as Invesco Field at Mile High. The public, whose taxes helped pay for the field, didn't like the name, and the editor of the _Denver Post_ refused to allow the "official" name in the sports pages. A bar owner who led a civic protest against the name got elected mayor. There may be larger issues for brand names in the future, as memorable names are manufactured for one product after another; with all that remunerative effort by the naming companies, will we be so inundated with meaning-full brand names that each one will mean less? It is already easy to talk in corporate names; we Xerox documents, or FedEx them, or we Google for them. For now, though, the five different namer-named words examined here are getting business done; they are successfully getting the word out. Frankel has provided an entertaining sidelight on the way corporations do business now, full of juicy anecdotes from executives who take themselves and their naming mission with billion-dollar seriousness.
