Branded Nomenclature
Learned Volume 3, Issue 11
Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. And this week, we're actually learning a little bit about linguistics.
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I had always thought of brands as a visual thing. Imagine Nike's swoop or Apple's apple. They are the ne plus ultra of the branding world, an image so iconic and yet so deeply connected to a brand identity that the actual name of the brand no longer needs to appear alongside it to evoke a connection with the consumer. And yet, I've been reading a lot about onomastics, the linguistic study of names, which has brought me to an idea much loved in advertising, that strong brand names can be built from phonemic scratch regardless of their semantic meaning.
In plain English, that means that there's a working theory that different sounds in English create different feelings and connections in the minds of English speakers regardless of what they mean. So, for example, the hard sounds of D or T make us think of speed. Therefore, if we were trying to come up with a name for a new sports car, we might want a word that started with one of those sounds. Our next step would be to decide if we wanted to use an existing word or to make one up from scratch.
A brand so famous it was enshrined in song. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
(George Eastman famously did this with Kodak. According to legend and company myth, he wanted a word that evoked images of the outdoors but wouldn't actually run into any issues with any other brands, so he took the word kodiak and dropped the I.)
The first brand I ever created was back when I was at university. I needed a brand name and logo for my photography business. I went to my school's computer lab, opened up the clip art library and grabbed the first one that I liked, a very regal-looking lion sitting on his haunches. I decided that I would call my brand Lion's Pride Photography and that was that. Brand name, check. Logo, check. Next step was to find some clientele. I made it for one semester and exactly four paid gigs before someone pointed out that it was actually the lionesses who ran the pride and that was that. Next time, I'd put a little more thought into the words I chose to represent my brand.
There’s some debate about whether the advertising meaning of brand actually comes from the ranching meaning of brand, but it seems logical. Photo by Stijn te Strake on Unsplash
My next attempt came during the early heyday of blogging. I had just moved to Japan and wanted to keep people informed as I discovered new and interesting aspects of this place. This time, I put some thought into what I wanted to call the website and had a friend do a proper logo for me. A few shaky steps later, I had my first website: Autoneuroticism. I love that branding. One of these days, I'm bringing it back.
In the intervening 20 years since the birth and death of Autoneuroticism, I've done a lot of naming: blogs, schools, photography (again), more blogs, the occasional product, the occasional weekly newsletter, ahem, - all of it needed something to identify the company that produced it. And what I've only just realized is how limited my palette has been in finding those names. As I said above, I've always thought about branding visually. Although there have been a few of my named brands that have veered from the pattern, I tend to fall back on the same visual cues: lions, the sun, retro or old-timey gadgets (like typewriters). Likewise, I tend to rely on the same colors of orange and yellow shading into brown and gold. And the words I used to describe these gold lions and orange suns tend to come out of my id, my sense of identity and ambition.
Never once did it occur to me to approach things from the other side, to find a set of sounds, an aural representation of the brand and then find images to match. Truthfully, I'm not sure that this realization will lead to any significant change. I mean, my brands are on the smallest of scales. In fact, as brands go, only one of them has any legal standing, with the other current, active projects all just being that, personal projects without any real monetary value to them that would be worth the cost of registering the trademark.
But it is fun to think about.
After all, dreaming up odd ideas and occasionally doing the work to force them out into the world is how I keep myself sane and functional in a mad world. So, maybe the next time I foster an idea into reality, I'll read back over the literature and pick out a name based entirely on how it sounds. Something with a Z to evoke smallness, maybe, or a P for dependability. Or maybe I'll just stick to gold lions and orange suns. It's worked this far.
Oh, and onomastics? No connection to onanism, you filthy heathens. I checked.
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Until next time, stay curious, stay sane. Learn something.
Joel