Thu, June 23, 2005
Markething—3:19 PM
More dividends from the practice of typing a random word (or, in this case, neologism) into a web browser:
I was nostalgically re-reading Salon's excellent 1999 exposé on the expensive, high-stakes practice of naming companies and products (The Name Game) – I still make frequent use of "Mescalanza" – and this lead to some quick online research into a lot of the companies that do corporate naming and brand strategy. (An astonishing number of the companies named in the article survived Clinton's dot-com bust and economic freefall, and continue to do the same work today.)
It's some interesting reading. There's a lot to be said for concepts like "speechstream," "notational visibility," and "phonetic transparency," as silly as they sound. I can tell you from experience that as phonetically transparent as "onebee" would seem to be, it is not. I constantly have to spell it out for people.
Anyway, my reaction to all this was pretty typical: "I can do that; easy!" I mean: Jamcracker, Calibrus, Spherion? Anybody can come up with gibberish like that! My first crack was "markething" – which I thought would score highly on speechstream and phonetic transparency, if not super-high on notational visibility. I figured it would be good for a boutique marketing/PR firm that takes a touchy-feely freeform approach: it appears to say "marketing" but also has "thing" in there, which kind of sounds like "whatever," sort of whimsical.
So, step one these days is to type it into a web browser. Sure enough, it's in use – although not the way I envisioned it. Still, pretty neat car sculpture!
