mobile phone names

We had look at the mobile phone market and discovered an interesting difference in naming strategies between the main competitors. First thing to note was the preference they all had for one word names. More stand out and faster communicability.

Blackberry focused on their own highly prominent brand name but use two figurative English words: TORCH and CURVE. CURVE instantly jumps out as being very similar to a common word for ‘bitch, whore’ (kurva, kurvë) in most of the main languages of South-Eastern Europe including: Czech, Slovak, Serbian, Croatian and Hungarian .

The global approach taken by HTC may have occasionally given them names that are not a perfect fit brand identity-wise. But with names like RADAR, TITAN, SENSATION and MOZART, the added value of world-wide recognisability and, therefore, appeal has meant that more borders can be crossed and more consumers reached for less extra branding. SALSA is an interesting one in that, in addition to the dance and spiced tomato sauce meaning, it also means ‘mud’ and ‘volcano’ in Italian and ‘parsley’ in Brazilian Portuguese. It isn’t commonly used in Czech or Polish either. So it is something of a global enchufla. (This is a salsa dance step where partners facing each other change positions around the same point by 180° keeping contact with one or two hands). That is to say, a lot of noise and not very much global mileage to show for it.

The figurative and abstract word variant option taken by Samsung probably meant easier and cheaper trademark work but probably slightly less global appeal compared with HTC. For instance BADA is very similar to pada Bengali and Hindi for ‘to fart’.

Motorola’s masculine and youthful approach covers a range of name types but sticks with a largely English language provenance.

LG’s VIEWTY and OPTIMUS are a bit of a mish-mash name wise, one clever one but that tends to makes you feel as if you have a speech defect and one ultra traditional namer’s kind of name that seems to come from the age of Dickens. Either that or the namers sent the name for their multi-national business services name down the wire instead of the phone name.