Name Trends

TRENDS

Historic

Recent

Near Future

Regional

Name trends are influenced by many factors, but the principal ones are the native language of the name and the current fashions and brands in a given industry. However, all of this is in the context of the national region of the world where the name originates, with some variances for the local birthplace's provincial subtleties that creep into a name. These latter effects are fun to spot nowadays as mass market communications has all but eliminated the common traditional ones that used to occur.

Names have historically followed certain styles and trends. Normally we need a large body of work to see these trends, but the recent Internet Bubble was an extreme example of a sudden trend to (a) .com names and (b) wild and out there names.

(a) Nowadays the pendulum has swung back to the other extreme. Of course ".com" names are practically taboo and there has been a rush to drop that moniker. Luckily, most of the companies with good individual brands (that survived) can simply drop the ".com" suffix and extend their legal tradename.

For example, the high flying Garage.com is now the conservative Garage Startup Ventures. Unfortunately they have some problem protecting their rights to the word Garage, as it is generic and has been used a lot by H-P and others before. Even IBM has a garage ISV program now.

(b) The wild and woolly days of the 1999 Internet Gold Rush are over, and so too are the crazy way out there names like Gadzooks. Unfortunately, executives are overreacting and trying to go back to plain simple names that are in a basic dictionary. This is fine except it is very, very difficult to find a name that is trademarkeable and distinctive in your industry that meets these criteria. Price Waterhouse Cooper's consulting group was going to adopt the name Monday when they finished their separation, so it is not impossible. (In the meantime, they sold themselves to IBM instead). But expect to see more verbs and adjectives being converted to proper noun usage.

In due course the pendulum will return to a resting place between this present extreme and the other one from the late 90's. After all, we still have to keep the lawyers happy - or more appropriately, own a unique word in our customer's minds. Coined words like Verizon, Pentium, Accenture, Cisco or Cingular. New and unique, but conservative and strong enough to hang a good message on because there are implied messages and values in most of them.

And on a worldwide basis, visit Name Regions to see the subtleties of different name styles in different areas, right down to the country, city and state in some cases.