For everyday products, however, the name has to mean something to the Chinese consumer. Thus, many car names bear no resemblance to their Western original name, but include the word ‘horse’, a symbol of strength in Chinese culture – BMW’s Chinese name is the equivalent of Precious Horse. The Chinese equivalent of Nike means ‘Enduring and Persevering’ and ‘Tasty Fun’ is what people are drinking when they order a Coca-Cola. Marriott means ’10,000 wealthy elites’ and Pentium means ‘galloping’.

The Chinese character ‘qing’, meaning ‘clear’ has many positive connotations to the Chinese, so is used in many brand names. The English name Clear Dandruff Shampoo is the more picturesque Qing Yang or ‘Clear Flying in the Wind’.

For more Chinese brand names see this New York Times article.

One producer has come up with Britagne – pronounced like Britannia – but there is a fear that the French may think the ending is copying champagne, and, moreover, that Britagne will be confused with the French region Bretagne. Another has suggested Merret after an early scientist and champagne maker. Malcolm Gluck, the wine writer, thinks the name should be quintessentially English, and fashionable; he has suggested, with his tongue firmly in his cheek presumably, the name Pippa, after the current media darling Pippa Middleton, who almost outshone her sister at the recent British royal wedding.

Pippa’s popularity is unlikely to last as long as the British sparking wine industry, unfortunately, which makes it an unsuitable name. Words have fashions, and some become inextricably linked to a particular decade eg groovy, dude. With an old-fashioned or dated name, there is a danger that consumers will see your product as dated and irrelevant, too.

For more on the sparkling wine story see here. For more information on business and brand names, go to the Winning Names website.

The author of the Detroit News piece on car names likes Mini Countryman and Chevrolet Volt – fairly ordinary, recognizable words. Alphanumeric names, such as the Lexus CT200H, are difficult to remember (you’ll start asking yourself ‘Is it a Lexus CH or TH?’).

Here’s the article. For more on company names, please visit the main Winning Names website.

In a recent study, one group of subjects was shown an ad for an ice-cream scoop costing $7.66, while the other saw an ad giving the price for an identical scoop as $7.22. One would expect people to prefer the lower-priced one if they were going to buy a scoop, yet shoppers who were offered the $7.66 scoop were more likely to buy it than those offered the cheaper version.

The reason, think the researchers, is because of the different sounds in the numbers 66 and 22. The price $7.66, when said aloud, has three ‘s’ sounds (plus two more if you count the ‘s’ sound inherent in the ‘x’, pronounced ‘ks’ of six and sixty). S is perceived to be a ‘small’ sound, associated with small things and, in this instance, small prices. ‘T’ is perceived to be a stronger or ‘bigger’ sound. 

The technical term for a sound like ‘t’ is plosive or stop. Other stops include b, k, g, d and p. These sounds are produced by air building up in the mouth, then being released all at once. You cannot make these sounds last a long time, like you can with the sounds s, m, n or l, for instance. This ‘mini-burst’ of air gives the sounds their perceived strength. S is both a sibilant and a fricative. Other sibilants or ‘hissing’ sounds include sh, z and zh (as in Zhivago, or the sound in the middle of ‘measure’). Fricatives are consonants where the air comes out through a narrow channel in the mouth, which is formed when two parts of the mouth eg tongue and roof, or lip and teeth, almost touch each other or touch lightly. Z, sh, f and v are fricatives.

Other studies have shown that brand names beginning with a plosive are more memorable than others (see this article, for instance).

More on the significance of sounds and good words for brand and business names on the main Winning Names site.

The answer is that no-one really knows. An article in this week’s Economist magazine considers the matter and offers a possible reason, namely that the name becomes a verb because there is not already an existing verb in English which means the same. So, before you ‘googled’ the internet, you could only ‘use a search engine’ – there wasn’t a single-word verb. However, that is not true of all verbed brand names. You could photocopy documents before Xerox became so well known, and you could vacuum carpets before Hoover.

Manufacturers once did not like their brand names becoming generic names as it made their name difficult to trademark. Also, there was always the danger that the generic meaning of the verb would eclipse the brand. That would happen, for instance, if someone said they were googling the internet while using Yahoo or Dogpile or another search engine. I’m sure that does happen, just as someone uses a cheap paper handkerchief but calls it a Kleenex. Nowadays companies seem less bothered about their name becoming a verb. Microsoft reportedly chose the word Bing for their search engine because they wanted to make it easy for people to say ‘let’s bing a restaurant’ etc.

You can read the Economist article here and you can read more on names on the main Winning Names site.

If you want to know more about names, and particularly if you are trying to think up a good one for your business, please visit the Winning Names site.

For more information on choosing a good name for your business, please visit the main Winning Names website.

Charities often change their names as they have to move with the times and continue to appear relevant if they want to continue attracting donations from the general public. In changing to a shorter name the YMCA is doing what a lot of companies and charities have been doing over the past decade or two. It is recognized that people have busier lives these days and any company or charity wanting to attract their attention has to do so in a split second — people won’t be bothered to read a whole line’s worth of text to discover what something is all about.

The M and C of YMCA stand for Men’s and Christian, so it may well be that the organization wanted a more inclusive name.

For more information on names, please visit the main Winning Names website.

One example he cites is Keds sneakers. The company claimed that their shoes were the first to be called sneakers, thus hoping to bask in the glory of being associated with such an American classic. In fact, their timing was out by several decades, as citations in the Oxford English Dictionary prove.

Another example is the company Rainbow Technologies, which claimed the name ‘dongle’ is so-called after the gadget’s inventor Don Gall. The chocolate company Hershey claimed that the name for one of their products, Kisses, came about because of the noise of one of their chocolate-swishing machines in the early 20th century. This theory was later debunked when the expression ‘candy kisses’ was discovered to be around well before Hershey made its brand-name Kisses.

The clever word etymythology, a blend of etymology (the study of word origins) and mythology, was coined by Yale linguist Laurence R Horn. Another term that has been levelled at companies who make up false etymologies is ‘strategic corporate forgetting’.

This all might seem amusing and harmless enough, and companies usually own up willingly when they are rumbled. However, there might be a more sinister intention to the practice of making up etymologies and citing a long connection between a word and a company. The idea is possibly to create in consumers’ minds such a close association between a positive word (eg kisses, sneakers) and a particular company, that consumers will think of the perfectly ordinary English word, and immediately think of the company, as if no other company could make sneakers or candy kisses. Hershey went through a court action in the 1990s to trademark the word ‘kisses’ and the false history of the word, although it was not mentioned in legal proceedings, played right into the company’s hands when it claimed that the word ‘kisses’ was associated in the public’s mind with the Hershey brand.

Here’s the full article.

For more stories on company and brand names, and for advice on creating unique names for your business or its products, please visit the main Winning Names site.

Of course, the manufacturers of those brands may not mind not selling their products in Britain. They might be appealing exclusively to a domestic market. With more and more companies doing business abroad these days, however, it always makes sense to have any proposed brand names checked out by a qualified linguist. And I mean qualified. I don’t mean a friend’s 18-year-old daughter who worked as an au pair in the country for a summer and purports to speak the language. The Chartered Institute of Linguists is a good source for professional linguists.

For more tips on what to avoid when choosing a brand name, and guidelines on how to choose a good name, please visit the main Winning Names site.