Silly name, silly company, silly product?

By P.C.

FOLLOWING on from our recent entries about horrible words, here's one about horrible names. Unfortunately there seems to be no end in sight to the tiresome habit of companies giving themselves and their products novelty names that contain unnecessary punctuation, bogus foreign accents and diacriticals, random use of capitals or lower-case letters, and so on.

This week, when Cisco launched its new video-telephony product, “ūmi telepresence”, The Economist's graphics department tied itself in knots trying to make the first letter of its name render with the correct diacritical (a macron, if you really wanna know) in our print edition. Our publishing platform refused to recognise it, insisting on rendering the letter with a circumflex (û) instead. In the end we decided not to bother. So the presumed point of adding the diacritical—to make the product's name come out sounding like “yoo-mee” (linking you to me, geddit?), which it doesn't even do since ū is pronounced "oo", not "yoo"—will have been totally lost on readers of our publication and presumably others that had the same problem. (For this online article, published on our blog platform, just copying and pasting the name from Cisco's press release did the trick). We were sorely tempted to headline our print-edition piece, “Tech firm launches product with untypesettable name: Surely doomed to fail”.

We try our best to humour companies' whimsical ideas about what to call themselves and their products. When we write about Yahoo! and Yum! Brands, the result is slightly goofy mid-sentence exclamations. EBay is a particular pain to write about: the company calls itself eBay but at the start of a sentence like this one, it would seem odd without a capital letter. There is an added complication in the print edition, where we usually typeset any bunch of initials, such as IMF, OECD, BBC, in small capitals (“scaps”), to improve readability. The problem is that when you have a company like JPMorgan Chase, which bunches together a lot of upper- and lower-case letters without dots or spaces, neither scapping nor not scapping looks quite right. In this case, we have settled for not scapping.

The trickiest situation comes when companies cannot themselves decide what they are called. The retailer which used to be called J. Sainsbury now seems to have dropped the full-stop and calls itself J Sainsbury in many parts of its corporate website. But not on its supermarkets: they now have “Sainsbury's” written over the door. Even some press releases talk as if Sainsbury's were the company's official name. Likewise, America's biggest retailer regularly calls itself both Walmart and Wal-Mart in the space of the same press release. The company seems to have been in some sort of transition from one spelling to the other for ages now. Meanwhile, the name over its stores is WAL*MART.

The rash of tiresome company names is not limited to the Anglosphere. Some big German firms seem to like adding random punctuation: there's E.ON, an energy firm (whose corporate logo is in lower instead of upper case and uses not a full stop but an interpunct; not even the company tries to typeset that one), and Nord/LB, a savings bank. The French, too, like to mess around with cases: one of their biggest energy firms calls itself EDF except in its logo, when it is eDF, with the lower-case “e” made the same size as the two capitals. Another insists on calling itself GDF SUEZ, even though the second word is not in fact an acronym. We have (so far at least) drawn the line at this, calling the company GDF Suez.

Why do they do this? One can imagine it being the handiwork of self-satisfied marketing types in the mould of the Financial Times's fictional Martin Lukes, who took great pride in having his company renamed “a-b glöbâl” because this would make it look culturally aware, or something. Such people probably think their brilliant typographical innovation makes the company or its product look distinctive. Yes, it does: distinctively foolish. Novelty names like these are the typographical equivalents of wearing a rotating bow-tie: they attract attention but subtract credibility. Customers may not say anything, but subconsciously, they may be thinking: silly name, silly company, silly products.

On a purely self-interested level, attempting to get all these trivial matters of spelling, case and punctuation right takes up far more of our time than we'd like. Therefore we would like to encourage more public mockery of absurd corporate names, in the hope that this will discourage firms from adopting them. So, which for you are the most irritating, off-putting or cringe-making examples? We'd like to hear them. Maybe we could give some sort of award to the worst.