Glyphix

What’s in a name?

admin — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 23:18:54 +0000

One of the great benefits in what we do is the opportunity to work with a wide variety of businesses. That means we come across an awful lot of good marketing information and ideas. What we learn in one industry often transfers well to others.

What’s in a name? Plenty. A great name can sum up the brand: Jiffy Lube. It can explain the service or hold out the product’s benefit: Under Armour. Other times a company grows into the brand: AOL. And still other times, names just make no sense at all: Yahoo! and Google.

Here are some others.

Did you know? This is the original Canon logo and name, circa 1934.

Canon: Founded in 1933 under the name Precision Optical Instruments Laboratory. Two years later they adopted “Canon” after the company’s first camera, the Kwanon. Kwanon is the Japanese name of the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy.

Cisco: Contrary to popular belief and theories, Cisco is simply short for San Francisco. Their logo resembles the suspension cables found on the Golden Gate bridge.

Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola’s name comes from the coca leaves and kola nuts used as flavoring in the soft drink. Eventually Coca-Cola creator John S. Pemberton changed the ‘K’ of kola to ‘C’ to create a more fluid name.

Google: The name started as a joke about the amount of information the search engine could search, or a “Googol” of information. (A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.) When founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin gave a presentation to an angel investor, they received a check made out to “Google.”

Hotmail: Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith had the idea of checking their email via a web interface, and tried to find a name that ended in “mail.” They finally settled on hotmail because it had the letters “html,” referencing the HTML programming language used to help create the product.

IKEA: IKEA is simply a random collection of letters, based from the first letters of founder Ingvar Kamprad’s name in addition to the first letters of the names of the Swedish property and the village in which he grew up: Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd.

Lego: Lego is a combination of the Danish phrase “leg godt,” which translates to “play well.” Initially the company built wooden toys, and later switched to making plastic bricks. Lego also means “I put together” in Latin, but the Lego Group claims this is merely a coincidence and the origin of the word is strictly Danish.

Skype: The original prototype of the company’s flagship product had the name “Sky-Peer-to-Peer,” which was shrunk down to Skyper, then finally Skype.

Yahoo: The word “yahoo” was coined by Jonathan Swift in the the book Gulliver’s Travels. The term represented repulsive, filthy creatures that resembled humans. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo considered themselves yahoos, and thought the term would be appropriate for their joint venture.

Think You’re Getting the Best Out of your Creative Agency? Here’s How to Make Sure.

admin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:15:24 +0000

A wise old adman once said: “The good clients get the good work”.

So you just hired a new ad agency, marketing firm or some creative group to help support your company’s sales efforts. Sure they’re talented and capable of great work, or you wouldn’t have hired them in the first place. So how is it that some clients are able to get great work out of their creative partners while others can’t?

The truth is, whenever you hire an ad agency, marketing firm or any creative group, you’ve entered into a unique business relationship. Unlike some vendor relationships, you, as the client, can take several steps to help ensure that your creative team delivers your company’s message with as much impact to the market as possible; remember, successful work benefits both of you.

ICG Advisors

admin — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:58:54 +0000

ICG Advisors is a investment group which had grown into a large company primarily through word-of-mouth. When they realized that they needed new documents to better communicate with their growing list of clients, they also realized that they no real corporate identity.

Due Diligence

From the start, we knew this project would be more difficult than usual. Not only did they have no experience with creative, but because they were in the middle of their corporate launch, they didn’t have time to provide input about their look-and-feel preferences, corporate personality or goals for their identity.

Instead, we interviewed a small group of satisfied ICG clients, distilling their responses into a set of words which represented their view of ICG Advisors:

Entrepreneurial. Smart. Honest. Proactive. Responsive. Disciplined. Candid. Forthright. Objective. Accountable. Able to explain things in layman’s terms.