The Perfect Name to Embody a Shift in Direction

Pivot, created by Zinzin, is the name of a new entertainment and social action television network. To pivot is to turn or rotate, like a hinge. Or a basketball player pivoting back and forth on one foot to protect the ball. Beyond just turning and rotating, pivot (lowercase) is the one central thing that something — maybe everything — depends upon (it is pivotal). It can be a structured course correction or a re-alignment of priorities. Pivot is all about thinking on your feet, adaptation and informed change.

The pivot brand is empathetic, and connotes the dance of collaborators, the auteurs and the audience, learning to work together, to understand and inspire each other. The pivot network doesn’t strong-arm or browbeat you, it uses compelling, entertaining stories to get the audience to gently pivot in their thinking, and to inspire them to action. The name pivot is perfect for this ambitious network that is both television and post-television. The old ways of thinking, acting and relating to each other and the world are not working anymore. It’s time to pivot.

pivot. it’s your turn.

[ Pivot: case study | website ]

A Playful, Singsong Name to Surprise and Delight

Larky, created by Zinzin, is the name of a company and mobile app that keeps track of all your perks and reward program memberships in one place. The name plays off “lark” — a carefree or spirited adventure, harmless prank, or family of melodious songbirds — in fun, playful, singsong way, and also conjures up a “lucky” feeling. It also alludes to “perk,” but in an associative, non-literal way. It is the perfect, carefree name for an app that is ever-vigilant about alerting you to special deals sure to surprise and delight you with all the perks and discounts you deserve from your memberships.

Get Larky and get what you deserve.

[ Larky: case study | website ]

A Name With Character For An Ice Cream With Attitude

Humphry Slocombe is a unique, “adult oriented” ice cream shop in San Francisco’s Mission District that makes quite possibly the best ice cream on the planet. If you’ve ever had their “Secret Breakfast” flavor ice cream, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Humphry Slocombe is an ice cream pioneer, mixing unusual flavors to great effect, using ingredients such as bourbon and toasted corn flakes (the aforementioned Secret Breakfast), Huckleberry Crème Fraîche, red wine and Coke (Jesus Juice), or Boccalone Prosciutto. They have over 100 flavors that rotate every day, sometimes 2-3 times throughout the day.

As incredibly good as this ice cream is, however, we wouldn’t be talking about it here if the company didn’t have an amazing name, a name that sets this shop apart from all other ice creams and magnifies their social media draw. Founder Jake Godby worked as a dessert chef at several outstanding San Francisco restaurants before opening the store, honing his craft as a crafty experimentalist. According to a profile in the New York Times (I’ll Take a Scoop of Prosciutto, Please), “With Humphry Slocombe, Godby continued pressing food buttons, beginning with the name, which is aggressively obtuse. (Mr. Humphries and Mrs. Slocombe were characters on the bawdy old British sitcom ‘Are You Being Served?’ Godby insists that if Alice Waters could name her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, after a highbrow French film, he could name his ice cream store after a lowbrow British farce.)”

In our opinion, the name Humphry Slocombe is not so much “aggressively obtuse” as it is strange, distinctive, memorable and totally original, just like their ice cream. It is a name with attitude, a name that establishes a character, with a handcrafted, old-timey feel that plays perfectly against the avant-garde nature of their ice cream. It is also similar in its construction to the name Pink Floyd, creating a new character out of the recombinant parts of old characters. As a testament to just how good and unique are Humphry Slocombe’s ice cream AND brand name, ask yourself how many small, one-store ice cream parlors are there with over 300,000 followers on Twitter? With an unbelievably great company name and product, and some brilliant flavor names, imagine how far they could go if only they would just address the issue of their graphically-challenged logo and website.

Humphry Slocombe is a company that has created the perfect brand name to represent the very unique thing that it does. A name with character for an “ice cream with attitude.” And that’s just aggressively brilliant.

[ Humphry Slocombe ]

A Juicy Name That Really — and Metaphorically — Flows

Gravy is a hyperlocal event listings mobile app we named that is all about finding great things to do near you, wherever you live or plan to visit. Gravy is the good stuff, the “secret sauce,” a source for discovering all the juicy things going on around you. Like the gravy you eat, the event listings in the Gravy app flow smoothly to your mobile device, and the feeds are customizable in a variety of ways. It is all about serendipitous discovery, finding your fun, getting the scoop with “insider information” about cool happenings near you. Think of it as your very own hipster tipster!

Pass the Gravy, please.

[ Gravy: case study | website ]

An Evocative, Metaphorical Name That Rewards Curiosity

There are thousands of Internet radio stations, but only one with the amazing name of Pandora. You probably know the story. In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman, who, possessed with the gift of curiosity, couldn’t refrain from opening a jar–which in later stories became a box–full of dangerous gifts from the gods, thus unleashing evil into the world. Like Eve’s lust for apples, another strong-willed woman had opened up a can of worms for humanity; such are the fears of men, apparently.

You can easily imagine how a theoretical corporate naming committee might have dismissed this name: “We have a cool Internet radio product, but it’s sometimes buggy — the last thing we need is a name that suggests a whole lot of headaches are in store for users who ‘open’ the app.” Or, “Pandora is a woman’s name, so it skews the brand too much toward the female, and our users are 75% male.” Powerful names, however, transcend such literal and “negative” meanings, and Pandora instead promises to reward the curious listeners who use the service to discover new music. A bold service that demonstrates its boldness by having a bold, memorable name that also maps strongly to the idea of curiosity.

Such an evocative name works not in spite of its meaning, but because of it, and, crucially, because its meaning in some way runs counter to the literal function of the brand (“opening” the app shouldn’t release “evil”). When the metaphorical associations of an evocative name are employed merely as symbolic shorthand toward a “deeper meaning,” such as the moon named Pandora in the movie Avatar, the name can easily degenerate into cliche (“if we ‘open’ the planet Pandora for exploitation, we’ll unleash the evil in our cold, capitalists hearts”).

And don’t forget your mythology. After Pandora inadvertently let all the evil out of her “box,” one precious thing remained inside: hope. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson famously, “That perches in the soul.” Pandora gives hope to companies every day that powerful, evocative names can set brands free from their bland, sound-alike competitors. Let that knowledge perch in your marketing soul.

[ Pandora ]

An Amazing, Cool Name Employing Alliteration and Poetry

Manufactured by Corning, Gorilla Glass is “an alkali-aluminosilicate sheet glass engineered specifically to be thin, light and damage-resistant. Its primary application is portable electronic devices with screens, such as mobile phones, portable media players, and laptop displays.” (Wikipedia.) It’s a cool product with a lot of potential, but of course its name is what really turns us on. By metaphorically evoking gorillas, which are the ultimate combination of strength plus intelligence, in a name with a great sound, look and poetry through its effective use of alliteration, Corning has created a winner that has already become the standard-bearer in the industry.

[ Gorilla Glass ]

A Name That Transcends “Negative” Meaning With Humor

Zinzin was hired to create a name for a new content marketing agency that solves the paradox of companies that have become too busy to create the valuable content that made them busy in the first place. Quandary is a great word that is very unique, yet easily understood. It is mysterious, elegant, and humorous. It is one of the funniest names we have ever created, and uses irony to great effect: it positions this agency not as a Quandary, but as possessing the solution to their clients’ quandary. Quandary is the key to escaping the content quandary.

Of all the names we developed and presented to the client for this project, Quandary was the most difficult for a typical naming committee to adopt as a brand, because most such committees would assume that the “negative” meaning of the word would be taken literally by clients. Fortunately, our client was smart enough to realize that once a name has been put into a brand context, people don’t take “negative” definitions literally, and with minimal effort will make the leap of understanding that Quandary is all about solving quandaries, not creating them.

Only a company that is supremely confident that it can solve “dilemmas with no easy solutions” could pull off a bodacious name like Quandary. And isn’t that the kind of the company you’d want to hire? That makes Quandary an amazing name, and the perfect one for this upstart agency.

[ Quandary: case study | website ]

An App Name That Warmly Dips Into Our Collective Soul

Fondu is a mobile app that’s “a fun and easy way to share bite-size restaurant reviews with your friends.” Think Yelp + Twitter + Instagram for restaurants. Says Fondu CEO Gauri Manglik, “I wanted to make people feel like food critics the way Instagram makes people feel like photographers.” (Fondu app combines best of Yelp, Twitter). Fondu enters a crowded field, and there’s no guarantee it will succeed in the long run, but at least it has a great name. This app could have been called something very boring and predictable, like “QuickBites” or “DineSocial,” but fortunately Manglik had the good sense to name it Fondu, which not only maps to food, but to food as a social experience. “I named Fondu after the food,” Manglik said. “Fondue is a social food experience. You don’t eat it by yourself, you share it with your friends.” And the name dips into the collective soul of the past, cajoling warm, hazy memories of swinging 1970s fondue parties to come back out into the dark of night to play. Very smart, and very tasty.

[ Fondu ]

A Great Brand Name That Transcends Its Literal Definition

Yelp is the restaurant and business review website and app service that has become tops in its class, the go-to source for information and reviews for many kinds of businesses, at home or on the road. And while a great name is no guarantee of success, in the case of Yelp it has definitely helped propel it above the fray of literally-named competitors like UrbanSpoon. What makes this name so compelling is not only its brevity, but that its dictionary definition is entirely negative: a short, loud, high noise that you make when you are excited, angry, or in pain; a sharp high-pitched cry, especially by a dog. Think “yelping in pain” or a “cry for help.” Most companies would have steered clear of this name, or any other with such “negative” definitions and no positive meanings. But Yelp correctly understood that people don’t literally deconstruct the meanings of brand names, and by now Yelp has been re-defined to stand for user reviews, just as Amazon has been re-defined to mean e-commerce first, big river second. And even though people don’t take negative definitions literally, the friction they create is still there, operating below the surface, tickling the subconscious mind, which makes the names that have them  memorable and emotionally engaging. And that’s something worth Yelping about.

[ Yelp ]

Renaming Turns Education Company Into A Powerful Brand

Coursekit began life in the fall of 2011 as an online course management service for college students and professors. But from the beginning the company’s mission has been greater than just the nuts and bolts of course management; it is about the bigger idea of sharing and transmitting knowledge itself between people. The name Coursekit was too narrow, linear, and failed to rise above the goods and services being offered, which is a requirement of powerful brands with full audience engagement. Even though it had just launched, a brand renaming was in order. Rather than shy away from this challenge, the company chose to meet it head on, for the good of their business.

Coursekit hired Zinzin to create a broader, higher-level, evocative brand that will become synonymous with learning. Call us biased, but we feel–and the reaction of the world has agreed–that the new name, Lore, is amazing. The word “lore” means knowledge acquired through education or experience, shared between people and passed down across generations. Literally the body of knowledge, especially of a traditional, anecdotal, or popular nature, on a particular subject; folklore. Learning, knowledge, or erudition that transcends book learning.

Lore is a deep name that’s a perfect fit for what this company is all about. It is simple, direct, and to the point. Instead of being painful or distracting, the process of renaming their company was exciting and enlightening, and led to a vastly more powerful brand, greater focus, and a clarified sense of purpose. This is a company that is on its way to greatness and, we believe, will be the stuff of business Lore for years to come.

[ Lore: case study | website | Explore blog ]