Name That Fad

Quickly, what is a Navistar? Bet you don't know and neither does anyone else. It doesn't matter if you're selling combines and threshing machines. But you have to be a lot better with names if you want to be the genius behind the next Hula-Hoop.

Think if I had kept the name of the creature that arrived by mail that day: "Octopus." If you had the choice of marketing "Octopus" or "Wacky Wallwalker," which would you choose? More important, which would you buy?

It's all in a name. That's a great precept to go on when marketing a fad. Corporations can spend millions of dollars on naming or renaming themselves, yet they can afford to be dull; in fact, it's an advantage. Allegis (United Airlines) or Primerica (American Can) or Unisys (Burroughs and Sperry) prefer that their names not give away what exactly it is they do. Then they can do anything they want to.

But be vague with a fad and you're finished. Consider the "Photon" game. I asked at random among my friends to tell me what a Photon game was. Not one of them got it right. One guessed a camera, another a high-tech gizmo. No one guessed a game using lasers in which children strap sensors to their bodies and try to tag each other with beams of light, like bandits in the night. The Photon was a great game, but it never really caught fire.

Enter a smart marketing man who renamed the product "Laser Tag," which, at once, explains what the toy actually is-an old-fashioned game of tag-and gives it a glitzy, high-tech image with the word "laser." It takes off like a rocket at the toy stores.

There is a very important lesson here. As a book is judged by its cover, so a fad is judged by its name. You can have quality-the laser tag game was always a quality item-but without the right name, it can fail miserably. If you slap an empty name like Photon on something-except a unit of intensity of light at the retina equal to the illumination per square millimeter of a pupillary area from a surface having a brightness of one candle per square meter, which is what it is-it will stay on the shelf, no matter how worthy a game it is.

A catchy name conveys information, amusement, and curiosity all at the same time. In this age of instant gratification and USA Today factoids, you have about twenty seconds to get your point across. A name that quickly and clearly sums up what a product is fits into the split-second attention span of the buying public. If you can make them smile, all the better.

You also have to shoot for high-name recognition. Something repetitive helps. Consider Coca-Cola. This soft drink was named back in those days when corporations didn't send out for experts to make up names like Exxon. The name described the product, and also had alliteration. Don't think this was lost on the Wham-O Corporation the only company in America that specializes in fad toys, when it named the Hula-Hoop. And it's not accidental that Wacky Wallwalkers has three w's.

A name is particularly important for a product that isn't going to be advertised. The name on the package is your advertising. If the name doesn't convey the image of your product, what it is, and what it does, you're wasting the equivalent of a thirty-second spot on prime-time television.

Consider these great successes: the Hula-Hoop, Silly Putty, and Slinky. What they all have in common is that they say what they are, and they do it in an amusing way. People are hedonists at heart, and they are attracted to simple pleasures more than any other, from twirling a plastic, brightly colored hoop around their hips to slapping goo on a comic strip and twisting the picture out of shape.

Who would have thought that something as mundane as a Band-Aid could become a hot item? Not me, until I got a call on the Fad Hotline from a woman who had spent years looking for some everyday item that could be made more creatively. She decided on Band-Aids. She redesigned the old staple-made them into different shapes, some in the form of favorite storybook and cartoon characters. But the most important thing she did was to give these new-age Band-Aids a name that said what they did and could dry the tears of a child with a skinned knee at the same time. Owie Wowies struck just the right note, and now these funny Band-Aids are on their way to becoming a big marketing success.

Another item the world could have gotten along without went on to become a great success largely because of its clever name. A guy from Los Angeles called me with an idea for a new kind of can opener, but since it was an opener for flip-top cans, which don't require an opener,
the guy had a problem.

The problem was solved with a clever name. He called his opener "Ladyfinger" and made it look like a woman's index finger, long nail and all. The message: No more broken nails if you use my product. The name established instant rapport with potential buyers-women who had broken fingernails opening the new flip-tops, or men who wanted to be sympathetic to their loss-and took note of a universal, annoying, albeit minor malady. A product that might have had no market went on to sell close to a million units in a few weeks. A buyer from K mart gave him an order for six hundred thousand within minutes of seeing it.

I knew I had to use the name of my toy to grab the public. When I received the first shipment of octopus creatures that slithered down the wall, I let my mind wander over the words that described its attributes: slimy, crawly, creepy, mushy. But none of these words captured the essence of this mass of rubber. The octopus was comical, and I wanted a word that captured that as well as what it was.

Throwing it up against the wall again and again, I realized what it did. It walked on the wall; it was a wallwalker. There is no such word as Wallwalker, and I am suspicious of made-up words-such as Primerica and its ilk above. But I decided to overlook that in this case because "wallwalker" was so descriptive. Although it wasn't a real word, it combined two real words. I then wanted a word that suggested how crazy it was and that also was alliterative. The Wacky Wallwalker was born.

There was a lot of criticism of my choice at first. Friends said Wacky Wallwalker was a tongue twister. That just confirmed my sense that it was the right name. A jumble of syllables helped describe the tumbling nature of the toy. Others felt it was too strange to get the necessary recognition. But being different is all right if it captures the feel of your product.

In naming your product, don't be afraid to be silly. Much better to be productively silly than soberly stupid, as the Photon people were. Those six letters are a waste of space on the package. Better to have left the package blank and arouse curiosity that way than to put on such a meaningless name.