New name for your merging company sir? No problem. We’ll have one in the morning for you.

... as soon as the marketing team has opened a nice bottle of red wine, rolled up their sleeves, told their partners they’re going to be an hour or two late coming home tonight, got the dictionary and thesaurus out and sent out an invitation to that brainy girl from the typing pool who did Latin at university in the UK. Names are easy to conjure up aren’t they? Especially when the bosses of the two merging companies have finished their pre-celebration lunch and suddenly realised that they haven’t got a name for the ‘new entity’ and need it the following day.

Organisations have widely differing views on the value of names. Some company leaders think their marketing team can dream one up overnight. Other global brand leaders will happily invest tens of thousands of dollars creating a name and, over several months, engaging extensive testing to ensure its uniqueness, cultural appropriateness, multi lingual potential and ability to be registered around the globe. And it’s the same when it comes to creating a new identity for the merged entity. Some leaders think it just needs a new logo to replace the two old ones. “Get one from the marketing team, and tell them I want some decent colours, and I want it tomorrow to show the Board”.

For the ‘overnight name’ brigade, reality comes home when someone points out, usually rather late in the piece, that:

> the name is rather similar to another in their industry
> the URL is not available
> the lawyer cannot register it in ‘the other country where we operate’
> the Board thinks it bears a resemblance to a certain brand of dog food
> the bright young accounting graduate from Barcelona thinks that in translation it suggests some form of genital mutilation in Spanish
> the CEO’s wife doesn’t like it
> the CEO’s teenage son came up with something better

Such things are best left up to the experts. There are time honoured procedures that must be followed. Strangely enough it does help if your have some intellectual prowess guiding the process. Fancy name generation software is usually only useful to tell you what not to recommend. Consulting with an Oxford University Latin scholar can be a good start, but names like mensarum, dominus and castrati don’t always sit comfortably. Greek anyone? As you would expect, there have been plenty of blunders over the years – see my March 27 2008 blog post.

In the case of a merger two sets of decision makers can complicate matters especially if you’re not already past the “let’s use our logo because it’s better than yours” phase in the merger discussions. Consult an external expert... you know it makes sense. Would you change your own TV aerial?


Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Australia, United Kingdom and India, and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.

PS
Even couples celebrating their new addition to the family could take some advice. Years ago I remember meeting the daughter of Mr and Mrs Rainey from Texas. Struggling a little to comprehend the heavy Texas drawl, I thought she was introduced to me as Wendy. On later inspection in correspondence, I noticed her name was spelled Windy. Oh dear.