The name game

IV. Here are six points that appear in the text. Put the points in order from 1 to 6.

(A) ___ Salyut and other early space stations

(B) ___ Why Lagrange stations were not built

(C) ___ Plans for the Lagrange stations

(D) ___ A description of the International Space Station

(E) ___ 1950s visions of space stations

(F) ___ A look at the Island 3 Lagrange station

TEXT 6

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. How do firms decide on names? Here are a few of the ways companies play the name game:

Some companies choose 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 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 right: This women's fashion company went bankrupt in no time. However, Monster.com, Google, and Yahoo! have succeeded despite or maybe because of their unusual names.

Some corporations have turned to other languages for names. A company or product name may come from Latin (Aquafina bottled water, Avis car rentals, Volvo automobiles) or Greek (Amphion multimedia, Oreo cookies), Spanish (El Polio Loco fast food restaurants, Fuego technology), Danish (Haagen-Dazs ice cream), or Hawaiian (Akamai internet technology). Other companies borrow from mythology: Nike shoes, Ajax cleanser, and Midas mufflers are all named after figures in classical myths.

Some names are totally invented. One advantage for a corporation in making up a name is that this name is then the unambiguous property of the company, and it is easy to trademark. Some of these coined names, while not real words, are suggestive of actual words. For example, Nyquil, a brand of cough medicine meant to be taken at night, suggests the words night and tranquil. Aleve, a pain medicine, is reminiscent of the word relieve, and Acura is similar to the word accurate. Other coined names are completely meaningless: Exxon, Kodak, Xerox, and SONY are examples of successful names of this type. Not all coined names are well liked. The famed entrepreneur Donald Trump once said that the corporate name Allegis sounded like «a world class disease». That's because the names of so many diseases – arthritis, gingivitis, encephalitis – end in -is.

Choosing good names becomes more difficult when a firm markets internationally. Today, through the Internet, even small businesses often do business in several countries. Sometimes the leap from one language to another can be positive; the Chinese pictogram for the sounds of the name Coca-Cola contains the words for «delicious» and «leisure». More often, though, a problem occurs. The classic example of an international naming gaffe is that of the General Motors car called the Nova. Named for an exploding star, the Nova was a reliable car, but its sales were never brisk in Spanish-speaking countries. This was supposedly because Nova could be read as no va in Spanish, meaning «It does not go». In German, the word mist means dirt or manure, so Country Mist makeup and the nasal spray Primatene Mist had to be renamed for the German market. A food company literally made a big mistake when it named a burrito Burrada. (Burrada means «big mistake» is Spanish.) Bran Buds, a type of breakfast cereal, sounds like «burnt farmers» in Swedish, and the word Dainty, the name of a type of soap, sounds like the word for «aloof» in Finnish and like the word for «stupid» in Farsi. Firms and products from English-speaking countries are not the only ones with problematic names: Bimbo bread from Spain, Zif soft drinks from Greece, Creap coffee creamer from Japan, Swine chocolates from China, and Pocari Sweat sports drink from Japan may do well in their regional markets, but would probably not be very successful in English-speaking countries. The name of the Japanese computer maker Toshiba sounds like «tou-chu-ba» to speakers of Mandarin Chinese. This phrase means «Let's steal it». The lessons from naming mix-ups is that global marketers must do their homework. They must make sure that the names they choose are easy to pronounce and that they do not have any negative linguistic or cultural meanings in the target language. For large international businesses – in fact, for any company of any size – playing the name game is a serious business.

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