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SKRILL CASE STUDY
BACKGROUND
Moneybookers was being re-named. Brand Union had come up against a potentially negative meaning for the chosen name SKRILL which in more widely-known colloquial New York English means ‘money.’ Appella was asked to provide an age-stratified analysis of the word using English speakers in New York in order to elicit any negative meanings and their significance. We had five days to complete the review.
PROJECT
We asked five New York residents, comprising a younger group between the ages of 25 and 30, and five comprising an older group between the ages of 30 and 50 to provide details on SKRILL via three metrics:
• Ease of pronunciation
• Aesthetic appreciation of the word
• Any meanings they were aware of
In the meaning category, half the correspondents, predominantly from the younger group, knew the word as meaning ‘money’ and most importantly none recognised the negative meaning. It could therefore be easily deduced that the negative meaning that had emerged during Brand Union’s research was purely idiosyncratic with no market relevance. There were no compromising responses from the other metrics. Nor were there any significant hits on our Electric Eel 100 language automated negative word check. SKRILL continues to be a world-leading payment platform.
