Re: Name

[Sella Rush <sellar -at- APPTECHSYS -dot- COM>]

A book called The High Tech Marketing Companion (Dee Kiamy, ed) has a
chapter called How to Choose the Right Name for a High-Tech Product, by SB
Master, Master-McNeil, Inc.  Master-McNeil, Inc. specializes in naming
products and branding (logos?).  Talk about specialization--but it gives you
an idea about how important it is.

I just ran across an outline of that chapter:

http://www.virtuous.org/workshops/marketing.htm#naming

The crux is that the name provides a recognition point for customers, and
hopefully it conveys something about a characteristic of the product.  So
for a database you have Oracle, for a search product Quest or Navigator,
which are conceptual ideas, or Illustrator or DoctoHelp, which are pretty
practical. When someone creates marketing material, they can work off of
this explicit or implicit connection. Then again you've got names like
Peachtree or Amazon, which mean absolutely nothing with respect to the
product but are recognizable words that people can remember.  Here is where
a logo also fits in.

Note my signature below.  I also got saddled with the task of finding a
name.  Two years ago and nothing's happened.  In my case it's all office
politics:  the owner is also the developer, and so far no one's come up with
a name he likes, and no group has formed solidly behind a name to nudge him
on.  We don't have a shrinkwrap product, though, so it's not that important.
We just keep on using the initials CCM (contiguous connection model), which
no one likes but no one can seem to get rid of.

Sella Rush
mailto:sellar -at- apptechsys -dot- com
Applied Technical Systems (ATS)
Bremerton, Washington
Developers of the CCM Database

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