PROJECT: Renaming a legal services company specializing in process serving. The old name, Amicus, was too generic and cloaked in legalese.
THE NAME: Let there be light. Illumination. Warmth.
POSITIONING: The name Firefly evokes the company’s vanguard corporate culture filled with bright people and bright ideas, and differentiates the company from all other legal firms that almost universally have either cold, legalistic names or sound-alike strings of multiple partner surnames. The name supports the brand positioning of openness – illuminating and demystifying an area of the legal profession that many people do not understand. It is warm, friendly, and illuminating, and broad enough to work with any direction the company might take it in the future.
VISIT: Firefly Legal
PROJECT: New solid state drive (SSD) product and product family name.
THE NAME: A evocative astronomical term meaning “one of several hundred known celestial objects, generally believed to be rapidly rotating neutron stars, that emit pulses of radiation, esp. radio waves, with a high degree of regularity.”
POSITIONING: Seagate needed a name for a new product family that captured its futuristic essence and conveyed key concepts of speed, small footprint, power, capacity, durability and reliability. Pulsar is the perfect metaphorical name for this product family.
VISIT: Pulsar
PROJECT: A defense contractor that developed vision systems for soldiers, police officers and firefighters, needed a new company name to reflect broader product offerings.
THE NAME: The earliest, original and most elemental state.
POSITIONING: The company provides simple interfaces to complex technology with a minimalist design. This results in ultra high-tech systems that work with the operator in an intuitive, organic and primal way. Primordial was the best word to capture all of those ideas in an interesting, never-been-done way, provide the company with clear separation from their competitors in the defense industry, and be a strong competitor in the consumer market.
VISIT: Primordial
PROJECT: Name a selective brush control herbicide product.
THE NAME: Ease, precision, reliability.
POSITIONING: The name Streamline underscores the precision with which this product attacks only invasive brush, not native plants.
VISIT: Streamline
PROJECT: Name a new sales/CRM software platform. So successful was the chosen name it ultimately became the new company name too.
THE NAME: Overwhelming success (a landslide victory); great energy; a force of nature; powerful and unstoppable.
POSITIONING: Maps to software and service that prepares you for a shifting sales landscape, setting you up for overwhelming success, a Landslide victory over your sales quota. The name has great depth and multiple meanings; the negative meaning adds friction, which helps make the name even more engaging and memorable.
VISIT: Landslide
PROJECT: Texas Pension Consultants, a financial services company, was ready to re-brand and re-name.
THE NAME: Financial freedom and independence (4th of July); joy of summer.
POSITIONING: The company provides business services such as payroll, pension and human resource management to businesses of all sizes. One of the key positioning points the name had to capture is “the freedom to focus on your core business.” The name also needed to be fresh and different, yet fall within the parameters of the types of names associated with the financial services sector. Financial companies are most often identified by names that conjure nature, stability, or longevity. July is a name that covers all the established financial services cues, is fresh and different, and infers — rather than shouts — “Freedom,” making it very engaging.
VISIT: July
PROJECT: Naming a revolutionary new advertising display media.
THE NAME: Zeno of Elea was the famous Ancient Greek philosopher (circa 495-430 BC) who formulated paradoxes that defended the belief that motion and change are illusory.
POSITIONING: This startup company required a name with global trademark availability, reach and pronounce-ability. They created a unique new advertising display medium that delivers moving ads to moving people. Still frames from short video clips move optically with the viewer, following and responding individually to each and every viewer, without the use of any electronics or moving parts. The perceived “motion” is illusory. A paradox. A Zeno box. Zeno is the perfect name for an enigmatic paradox of vision, a uniquely personal interactive experience coming soon to a public space near you.
VISIT: Zeno
PROJECT: Naming an insecticide product for rice and vegetable growers in the Asian market.
THE NAME: Long lasting (“marathon”) prevention.
POSITIONING: The name connotes long-lasting crop protection and is easily understand across diverse global markets.
VISIT: Prevathon
PROJECT: Name a new integrated XBRL software product.
THE NAME: Lots of activity coming from multiple directions.
POSITIONING: Crossfire is a powerful name that maps to the enterprise cross-functionality of this breakthrough integrated XBRL product. When corporations fire up Crossfire, they can be assured of the highest quality financial reporting every time, in full compliance with the SEC, in a user-friendly package that makes it all much easier. All of the financial activity of a large enterprise reported from points across the globe can be translated into the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) language using Crossfire.
VISIT: Crossfire
PROJECT: Name for a full-service web and interactive design agency.
THE NAME: Emphasizing the depth beyond the “skin deep” beauty by referencing the surface in the name.
POSITIONING: Anybody can make a pretty website, but Veneer goes deeper, focusing first on the visual and interactive foundation of a brand, then mastering all the geeky details that make their beautifully designed websites actually work. What better way to create a conversation between front-end design and back-end power, between surface and depth, between form and function, than with the name Veneer? Because great design is more than just a pretty picture, and the beautiful surface is only as strong as the underlying structure that supports it. Plus, Veneer is a cool, mysterious, playful name whose value no designers outside the simulated wood grain industry seemed to recognize.
VISIT: Veneer
PROJECT: Selective weeding and invasive species management herbicide product name.
THE NAME: A broad view.
POSITIONING: The name Perspective underscores the concept of seeing the broad view, the “big picture,” and the full control obtained by clearing out weeds and invasive plants from public areas.
VISIT: Perspective
PROJECT: New name for Fontana Lithograph, one of the most respected and innovative printing shops in the Washington D.C. area.
THE NAME: Putting all the pieces together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
POSITIONING: For a variety of reasons, Fontana Lithograph knew that it was time to rebrand the company. The company wanted to define an entirely new business segment, Corporate Print Collateral Consulting, while retaining their core identity as printers. Their new consulting business is all about managing the printed collateral that a large enterprise produces to establish their image. Mosaic conveys the idea of arranging many visual pieces into the most effective presentation possible, creating an artistic whole that is greater than the sum of its constituent parts.
VISIT: Mosaic
PROJECT: Name a new internal hard drive optimized for recording high-definition movies and TV programs.
THE NAME: “Fat pipe,” surf’s up!
POSITIONING: The name Pipeline HD conveys the “fat pipe” of high bandwidth and massive storage required by high-definition content, as well as evoking the legendary Banzai Pipeline a metaphor for “channel surfing.” Adding the descriptive appendage “HD” conforms to company functional requirements to clearly differentiate this as a specifically high-definition product, which also conveys that it is designed and optimized for home DVR and media center use.
VISIT: Pipeline HD
PROJECT: Rename Aucent Corporation, a software startup.
THE NAME: Strength, reliability, dependability. Old-fashioned stability in an often fluctuating high-tech environment.
POSITIONING: Aucent’s core business is XBRL business reporting and financial data analysis. XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) is the new standard to prepare and analyze financial information. The company’s new name, Rivet, grounds it in the real, physical world, through the construction metaphor, tying things together, and building immense structures (or data reports) one “rivet of data” at a time. This name is Riveting.
VISIT: Rivet
PROJECT: Re-name XOsphere, a mobile phone software company.
THE NAME: A joyful expression.
POSITIONING: The company had created a powerful new mobile content platform that was truly phone- and carrier-agnostic, and they wanted an exciting, exuberant name that would match their vision and serve as a lightning rod for companies and the public to adopt this content platform. The name had to be a short verb, as well as exciting, inspiring, fun to say, memorable and extensible. The name Whoop accomplishes all this and more, allowing the company to redefine the conversation in the mobile content space.
VISIT: Whoop
PROJECT: Brush control herbicide product name.
THE NAME: A broad view.
POSITIONING: The name Viewpoint underscores the concept of seeing the broad view, the “big picture,” and open vista after clearing out the toughest brush species.
VISIT: Viewpoint
