PROJECT: Re-name the online education service company Coursekit to create a broader, higher-level, evocative brand that will become synonymous with learning.

THE NAME: Lore is 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.

POSITIONING: Coursekit began life in the fall of 2011 as an online course management service for college students and professors. Offering a experience far superior to all existing course management products, Coursekit was a big hit, and its growth and word-of-mouth buzz has been tremendous. But the company’s mission was 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.

Joseph Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of Coursekit, hired Zinzin to create the perfect name for his Big Idea, and we delivered with Lore, a transformational name for a transformational company. Here’s how Lore announced their new name to the world: “Coursekit started as a toolkit for courses. Courses became communities of learners. We’ve seen that people learn by sharing. Our mission is to connect the world’s learners and educators. We need a name that reflects our ambitions. Lore means knowledge shared between people. That’s what we are about.”

Simple, direct, and to the point. The company also created an advanced blog to function as “a discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity,” which is all about exploring knowledge. The added bonus of the name Lore, after having secured the exact-match .com domain name, is that this discovery engine, edited by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings fame, is called Explore, and can be found at the  subdomain exp.lore.com.

Here’s a powerful bit of knowledge: Lore is going to revolutionize the higher education and learning experience. Pass it along.

VISIT: Lore | Explore

PROJECT: Create a new company name for Medical World Conferences, providers of continuing medical education (CME) for primary care professionals.

THE NAME: A cure for the common name.

POSITIONING: The new name had to be warm, human, distinctive, eye-catching, memorable, and yet map back to medicine and the core service of continuing medical education. It also needed to work outside of the medical sector. Antidote is positive, proactive, unique and remarkable in the world of CME providers, and works on several levels for both the CME audience and future audiences. Antidote is also the remedy for medical professionals who dread the thought of compulsory CME. Further, because Antidote literally conveys “cure” and “remedy,” it is an aspiration shared by all medical professionals – indeed a big benefit of CME is to learn about new cures and treatments.

VISIT: Antidote

PROJECT: New company name for The Training Camp, a UK and Germany-based IT training company that decided to go out on its own and become independent of the American company that shared the same name.

THE NAME: A concept, idea or person that challenges outmoded beliefs and methods.

POSITIONING: Going independent required a new name, and the company wanted a powerful name that captured its spirit as philosophical and tactical disruptors within the IT training industry, pioneers of an intense, immersive, accelerated approach to IT learning that is far ahead of its competitors in the European market. The new name had to work specifically in the UK and Germany, as well as across the whole of the European IT community that the company serves. Firebrand perfectly suits the company’s philosophy and the way it delivers industry-leading training.

VISIT: Firebrand

PROJECT: Re-name an online university.

THE NAME: A three-pronged featured widely in mythical, historical and modern culture.

POSITIONING: TUI, an online university founded in 1998 that serves all members of the U.S. military, needed to differentiate themselves from an old TUI entity they had split off from, and they wanted a more evocative name that reflected their spirit. But they also needed to retain the acronym “TUI” in respect to all their alumni with degrees from TUI. The new name, Trident University International, perfectly captures their spirit, fits well with their mission and constituent military community, and satisfied all the functional requirements of the project.

VISIT: Trident University

PROJECT: New university name.

THE NAME: Named for the school’s home region and links to nearby Stanford University.

POSITIONING: The Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (PGSP), located in Palo Alto, California, is one of the premier graduate schools in the United States for the advanced study of psychology. The university intended to keep the PGSP name in place for the graduate school of psychology, but wanted a broader name, preferably with a regional basis, for the umbrella university name. The new name, Palo Alto University (PAU), links the school to the local community, the region in general, and by association to Stanford University’s School of Medicine and Department of Psychiatry, with which PGSP has cooperative relationships.

VISIT: Palo Alto University