Straight from the parallel universe where clever and horrible go together like peanut butter and chocolate comes the following press release:

We are excited to announce the launch of our new community website for Sears and Kmart customers. The service you originally registered with, My SHC Community is now called sk-YOU. The new name represents "Sears and Kmart, building a better relationship with you" and that is of course, part of our vision and mission. It is a growing and personalized online community currently comprised of 40,000 consumers who want to be heard. You can share ideas, opinions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics from travel to kitchen appliances and cell phone service. It enables you to provide feedback and guidance on the offers and shopping experiences that are most important to you.

I can see how this sounded wildly clever in a meeting.

Mash Sears, Kmart, and "you" all together and look what you get. It shows our commitment to the customer and it sounds like "sku".

Bzzzt, horrible. People don't care about stock keeping units—and they certainly don't want to be associated with one. They don't care about clever. Unless you're a financier, there's no reason to associate Sears with Kmart. Branding should help the you understand and remember a product. It's not about how you perceive the customer or about how you perceive an internal initiative. The dash and all caps YOU makes it harder for the customer to remember. But I ramble.

At Juice, our naming bible is available in PDF form from Igor International.

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php

The central wisdom of this guide—and it's packed full of gems, naming taxonomies by industry, checklists, taglines, case studies—is that names fall into the following categories.

Descriptive names (names that describe what the product or company does) BMW, IBM, AdWords

• Good for a product, easy to remember
• Rough sledding for a company name, as there will be dozens of companies in the field with similar names (unless you have 100 years of meticulous branding like BMW and IBM)

Invented names with latin roots

• Aquilent, Taligent, Acela, Agilent
• "Safe" choices, hard to remember, a blank slate. Generally too clever by half. Hey, did you think it was clever to name a company as a cross between "agile" and "intelligent"? Nobody cares!

Invented names that are fun to say

• Snapple, Oreo, Kodak
• Fun to say, opens the door for lots of positive associations with strong branding

Experiential names (names that describe the experience of the company or product)

• Navigator, Safari, TrailBlazer, Fidelity
• Intuitive but common, doesn't differentiate, a workmanlike approach for a product

Evocative names (names that evoke feelings about the experience you will have with the company—those feelings may even be initially negative)

• Caterpillar, Apple, Amazon, AirPort, Target, Yahoo, Virgin
• Connects emotionally with people because they have lots of previous experience with the word. "Scary" choices that are hard to get a committee to agree to

We often are are asked why we're named "Juice"—Igor is the answer. When we go places, people say "Heeey, Juice guys!"—if you're a client, be aware you're not the first one to use that line. We benefit from every dollar Nantucket Nectars spends on their "Juice Guys" ads and we love it. Every dollar Tropicana spends helps you remember our name. Even OJ Simpson is on our branding team.

If you're naming an internal product, steer toward descriptive names or evocative names. If you're creating a reporting portal, don't be afraid to call it "Report Portal". Or call it "Butterfly" or "Moonbeam." Brighten people's lives by delivering fun, or ease their lives by not making them remember some obscure acronym. Most of all, remember to be a servant of your customers and that clever is not equal to smart.

Today's post is brought to you by Andrew White of Gartner from an article in their 2007 CRM conference brochure:

What's the single biggest benefit of practicing MDM?

There are multiple drivers that help enterprises decide to embark on an MDM [1] program. Implementing a CDI-focused [2] MDM program will help implementations of CRM [3] achieve a higher return by enabling better cross-marketing and selling.

Implementing PIM [4] within MDM will help supply chains fulfill orders more timely [sic] and introduce new products more quickly. Embedding MDM in an SOA [5] environment contributes to business (process) agility through support of more rapidly developed composite applications; and others help cut costs by supporting better procurement practices.

Way to cut though to the heart of the issue, guys. Let's see if we can decode what they're saying:

Knowing more about your customers will help you find more products that existing customers want. It will help develop those products too. And let's not forget your web apps. They'll be easier to develop and easier for other companies to integrate with if you have your data well organized.

It's nice to be able to decode this, but semantically, there's nothing there. This response amounts to "Trust us, it's great!"

[1] Master Data Management is another salvo in the eternal battle between centralization and decentralization in organizations. The wheel turns; today it's MDM, in 5 years it will be called Centralized Metadata Integration.

[2] Customer Data Integration means centralizing how you track customer-related information

[3] Customer Relationship Management systems track interactions with your customers

[4] Product Information Management is CDI for products--see how easy this is getting?

[5] Service Oriented Architecture is a way of building computer services as little pieces rather than big integrated applications

Igor | Naming companies, naming products

Definitive essay on naming from the company that inspired our name.

Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming | 43 Folders

One approach to a tough problem that we all have.

Seth's Blog: Worst powerpoint slide ever used by a CEO

Pretty bad, but surely not the worst.

HARLEM-13-GIGAPIXELS.COM

Extreme data presentation in a different realm.

The best businesses connect with their customers. They build intimate relationships, learn, and extend their products using this knowledge. After Apple learned that customers were using iPods to save addresses and data, they incorporated this feature into their next release. Intuit heard their small business customers saying, “I need to keep the books without the complexities of accounting” and QuickBooks was born.

Many companies have a different story. For them, technology has been a killer app—it’s killed the ability of individuals in the company to see their customers as individuals. Customers are a list to be manipulated, a total in a spreadsheet. They aren’t seen as people, much less as potential innovators. Dependence on big information systems is a source of the problem. These technology solutions are built to be comprehensive; built for speed; built for anywhere, anytime access. They aren’t built to understand individuals one at a time.

Sometimes the inability to understand customers stems from a business' impatience and short-term focus on ROI. Tom Asacker pulls out an early marketing guru to make his point:

Abraham Lincoln on chopping down a tree: "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four hours sharpening the axe".

Instead, what do most marketers do? They take a whack at the tree, put down the axe, measure the cut, pick up the axe, whack the tree in a different spot, and repeat ad nauseum. Exhausting, to say the least.

If you are in an information-rich business with many customer interactions—you can know your customers intimately. You can look at individual customer behaviors and start to recognize important and startling patterns. It will take some time, but Abe would say it is time well spent.