Name That Brand

Versys
No, it’s not a new filing cabinet. We could almost forgive an office product for a name this insipid. The Versys is a motorcycle from Kawasaki, so named because it’s a “versatile system” designed for different riding styles. Impeccably rational reasoning. But painfully absent in this brand name is any hint of the fun and excitement of motorcycle riding.

Zevia, Truvia & PureVia
While racing to bring stevia, a natural no-calorie sweetener to American consumers, three different companies made the same naming mistake: creating a brand name too much like the original descriptive word. The result is a trio of similar-sounding names, certain to cause confusion among potential customers and likely to wind up in court with trademark issues—an unfortunate sour beginning.

Yatt’it
In naming its online community for seasoned travelers, Hyatt tried too hard to invent a hip, slangy variant of its brand name. “Yatt’it” manages to transform Hyatt’s elegant, familiar name into a word that sounds like a yak bleat. Nicknames for brands, such as “Mickey D’s” for McDonalds and “Beamer” for BMW, are best coined organically by customers as an outcome of interacting with the product. We suspect “Yatt’it” is a test tube baby, conceived under the fluorescents of Hyatt’s marketing department.

Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform
This name makes our list because of what might have been. During its development, this powerful processor platform—a total of eight 3.2GHz processing engines—was codenamed “Skulltrail.” To the early adopting audience of hard-core gamers, “Skulltrail” evoked massive power and performance, and the name spread rapidly by word of mouth (and blog) as techies eagerly awaited the product’s introduction. When it came time to go to market, however, Intel abandoned this lusty brute of a name in favor of the safely corporate, “Intel® Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform.” Would the “Intel® Skulltrail” have been so wrong for the business audience? Ask yourself which platform you’d rather have crunching a 60,000 line spreadsheet.  

Cenovus
EnCana Corporation, a $60 billion energy enterprise located in Calgary, split off its integrated oil operations to form a new company this year, which they named “Cenovus.” This name warrants a spot on our list because it represents thousands of company names spawned over the last three decades, all with the same fatal flaw: zero meaning. If Cenovus wants their name to mean something to the world, they will need to spend some of their billions on an extensive ad campaign.

Vivaty
A deadly dull name for a new 3D virtual environment, “Vivaty” holds none of the intrigue inherent in the name of its biggest competitor, “Second Life.” With an invented construction based on the Latin word for “life,” “Vivaty” is the kind of safe, unobtrusive and ostensibly logical name a committee would approve unanimously—and an audience would forget immediately.