Topic: Where "Wii" came from

[ruby_onix]

I'm sure we've all seen where Jonny mentioned in the Blah blah blah that Rick got a tip that "Wii" was made for Nintendo by the same naming firm that came up with the "Lexus" name for Toyota, right?

Well, here's a great article about these kinds of naming companies. It seems very relevant to this past week's news, and you'd hardly notice that it was written back in 1999.

http://salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print.html

Here's some quotes.

Quote
The exercise got off to an unpromising start. NewCo executives volunteered that they wanted the company to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring. "We've done this process with hundreds of companies," Redhill says wearily. "They all say, 'We want to be perceived as strong, innovative, dynamic and caring.'" And therein, it seemed, lay the problem. Though top NewCo executives had avowed their intention to be different, to change the paradigm, to think outside the nine dots, "the qualities they were aiming to project were in fact common currency," Redhill sighs.

Quote
Michele Lally, global marketing director for Reuters-Dow Jones Interactive, recently renamed Factiva, is grateful to her naming company, Interbrand, for helping her stand out in a world of Factevas and Actevas. She has sought refuge in, as she puts it, "the semiotics of the letter i." "Have you seen our letterhead?" she asks. "We do the i as a biacron. An i with a circle on top. Or 'the bubble,' as we call it internally." Lally herself is bubbling over with enthusiasm for the bubble. "The brand circle denotes infinite possibilities," she says. "We very much hope that bubble, that icon, will come to symbolize business information in airport lounges worldwide."

Ron Kapella, head of Enterprise IG, seems to be pursuing a similar tack with Naviant, an online data-mining company. Eager to distinguish his brainchild from its sound-alike cousins Agilent and Navigent, he, too, has honed in on the letter i. "Notice that the letter i is exactly in the middle of the word," he says. "Notice also that it has a circle over it. An i with a circle over it is the international symbol for information. It's a visual symbol we've created. Consumers will come to associate it with endless inspiration, endless possibility."

Unless, that is, they associate it with googly eyed teenage girls who dot their i's with hearts and smiley faces. And indeed, among some companies, a backlash against the naming companies has taken hold. For some, the fact that they came up with their names all by themselves, without recourse to professional help, has become a point of pride. "I love our name," Jeff Mallett, president and CEO of Yahoo, recently told an industry newsletter. "It's fun, irreverent and consumer-focused. And it wasn't conjured up by Landor, or some huge naming agency."

It's this sort of chutzpah that makes the namers at Landor see red. "The Internet is filled with arrogance," says Amy Becker coldly. "You might have a provocative, fun name. But do you have the basis for a lasting brand? We still don't know how compelling a brand Yahoo will be 10 years from now. I sense a real missed opportunity."

Quote
Bachrach recently completed a renaming project for MacTemps, a specialized talent agency that provides print production experts who are proficient on Macintosh computers. Bachrach didn't much care for the name. "It didn't function well," he says. "It didn't suggest a brand." Bachrach thought he could help. "What MacTemps needed," he says, "was a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him."

Bachrach and his team of constructional linguists rose to the occasion. They presented MacTemps executives with their recommendation -- Aquent. Aquent? "It doesn't mean anything," Bachrach cheerfully explains. "But if it did mean something, it would mean, 'Not a Follower.'"

Quote
Lu Cordova, president of TixToGo.com, is among the CEOs who roll their eyes at this sort of hubris. "Let's face it," she says. "We know who's in these big naming companies. We went to college with some of them. They say they're experts at this and experts at that. But they're really just our peers. They don't have any special mystical powers."

Cordova learned this the hard way earlier this year, when she sought out a new name for TixToGo, a popular online booking, ticketing and reservations service. After several months of probing and crunching, the naming firm she'd hired came back with a strong recommendation: YourThing.com. "The first 10 people we mentioned it to all said, 'It sounds like your, um, thingy," Cordova says drily. "So we said, whoops, OK, that one's gone."

[Ian Sane]

"a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him."

God I hate it when business idiots say sh!t like this.  "I think we need a dynamic, pro-active approach.  Not just a name, but a POWER NAME."

The English language doesn't mean anything when used by corporate stooges, lawyers or politicians.

[wandering]

ahahahahaha.

And I thought the psychiatric field was bad.

(still like Wii, though.)

[Artimus]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
"a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him."

God I hate it when business idiots say sh!t like this.  "I think we need a dynamic, pro-active approach.  Not just a name, but a POWER NAME."

The English language doesn't mean anything when used by corporate stooges, lawyers or politicians.

Sounds to me like you need a power tie!

[denjet78]

The thing is, Wii isn't really a power name. It just doesn't exude arrogance. Well, unless you want to make inferences based on Nintendo's past record, which is completely subjective if you ask me. It isn't "a name that was aggressively novel, shockingly different. A name that grabbed the perceiver by the throat and shook him." Novel yes, but nowhere near that level of power.

What probably happened is they came up with a list of names and tossed "Wii" in there as filler from one of the low level grunts who still has a certain level of idealism that hadn't been beaten out of them by the industry yet. When Nintendo latched onto it though, they probably crapped their collective pants.

And that's why Nintendo choose it, because it's not a "power name". They're trying to be approachable to everyone, all of us, "we". The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. This isn't a marketing gimic or a catchy name. This is truth in advertising for one of the few times that you're probably ever going to see it.

[Kairon]

THAT... was an awesome read. Thank you!

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[Sir_Stabbalot]

I hate those "engineered" names. I don't want names to be empty buz words, I want them to mean something. "Lexus". What the hell kind of meaning does that have to it? I like anmes that are directly relevant to what the company/product does:

Microsoft: Based off the word 'Micro' for small and 'Soft' as in software. Considering it's a software giant, the name fits.

Oldsmobile: Name comes from Ransom Eli Olds, a automobile engineer. It includes his last name and 'Mobile", as in car. Fits like a glove.

Nintendo: According to Wikipedia, Nintendo "roughly translates as "leave luck to heaven", "heaven blesses hard work" or "in heaven's hands". A different, more loose translation was brought forth to be "We work for the people to make the people happy." (from Nintendo Power magazine)". So there's a reason there, too.

Wii: So, the root of the word comes from 'We', as in multiple people? Honestly, I swore I'd never buy a product that misspells its own name. I hope they change the name.

Revolution: Means a violent upheaval of the system. With the controller and all, it fits the bill.

I think I'll call it the "New Nintendo" for now...

[Kairon]

Dude, Nintendo is SOOOOOOO an engineered name. I mean, heck, they re-engineered kanji to make it, they went to the Japanese phoneme bank to piece it together. Nintendo is as engineered as Altavista or Aquilent is.

Besides, I liked the Lexus name. It sounded like it was a real word, except I wasn't sophisticated enough to know it. Good job for a luxury car.

~Carmine M. Red
Kairon@aol.com

[slacker]

I think that's the point about made up name. It means nothing so it gives you an opportunity to construct its image and meaning. Nintendo use to mean video games in the US back in the days. It doesn't any more and in some ways invoke an image of a toy manufacturer by the current crop of gamers.  So what if people poke fun of the name because of the way it sounds. Sooner rather than later, the jokes will feel dated and rather unoriginal. Nobody, but the gamers who govern their behavior base on idiotic principles will care in the end. The name doesn't make the system, but its the system that makes the name.  After so many jokes about the Wii, I no longer chuckle at the jokes and have found it rather boring. The Wii is just now The Wii to me.  A name that means nothing offers a blank slate for a company to build its brand from the ground up.  In the end, if the system is wildly successful, the name itself will take on a whole different meaning. The challenge for Nintendo is to build The Wii's image up before it gets destroy by outside forces (competitors, fanboys, the press, etc). I think they have done it well by trickling out bits of good news to build the hype up. Sure some of us may not like the name, but we already know what's going to drive the name forward.  To say that it will fail because of the name is just plain stupid.