Name Recognition

Functional to Fictional

A useful way to look at the various species of names comes from Yamamoto Moss, whose creative team considers five major categories.

Descriptive. Straightforward, descriptive names—AutoZone, Toys “R” Us, Discovery Channel—are advantageous when a company or its products are first to market, allowing them to own the position in customers’ minds. As Al Ries and Jack Trout observe in their 2000 book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, “The name is the hook that hangs the brand on the product ladder in the prospect’s mind.” A local example is the name that Yamamoto Moss developed in 1980 for a new type of hearing aid, the Miracle-Ear, which also became the name of the Plymouth-based company that produces the device.

Functional. Think law firms, ad agencies, and financial services firms sporting the last names of partners. But even with such tight naming parameters, there’s room to be creative.

When Minneapolis-based ad agency Martin Williams hired Glenn Karwoski to start a PR firm as a separate operating group in 1992, it fell to him to name the new company. “A professional services firm is typically named after the professionals who work there in order to capitalize on the positive equity attached to their names,” Karwoski says. “However, our research showed that a name like Karwoski & Associates or Karwoski & Partners could lead people to think I was a lone freelancer.”

As a creative exercise, Karwoski picked up one of his favorite books, The Courage to Create, by Rollo May, flipped it open, and started reading. “I opened to a page where May was talking about courage,” Karwoski recalls. “I liked the sound of that, investigated further, and found that cor, the Latin root, evolved into cuer, or heart, in French, and then to the French word, corage, which can mean heart, mind, and spirit. I thought, ‘Those three would be pretty good partners.’” Thus was born Karwoski & Courage Public Relations, which now employs 15 people.

Roark Kramer Kosowski Design, a Minneapolis architectural firm, has a senior partner who’s a fictional character. “I founded the company in 1976 as The Design Collective, but in 1985 we thought the name sounded too communist,” says firm Principal Peter Kramer. “We decided to come up with a snappier name, and Howard Roark seemed like the perfect person to add as our senior partner.”