Naming in the age of SEO
Naming things for a living gives you a skewed experience of the world at large. When it comes to names I encounter in the world, more often than not I feel an opportunity was missed. A visit to nearly any store will almost always include a cringe or two, albeit sometimes with the joy of schadenfreude.
Most of my internet searches start with the word “define” and a colon, followed by whatever word I’m looking up: zarza, taraval, sigil. You might think this practice has given me an extensive vocabulary. Maybe it has. Or, more likely, it means I rely on my external brain to store all the cool words I know. One thing I know for certain is that my search history has given the various search engines I use a very confused sense of who I am as a “user” — they have no idea what to sell me, and I kind of love it. (That said — if someone started serving me ads for obscure dictionaries, books of etymology, or vintage thesauruses, I have a feeling I would prove to be a high return on their investment.)
This is all just to say that the bizarre ecosystem of the internet has the ideal growing conditions for cognitive dissonance.
Which brings me to an experience from a couple weeks ago, when I found myself turning to those same search engines to learn what I could about the devastating news of the South American rainforest in flames. (Like a character in one of David Sipress’s drawings so wisely says, “My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”)
While a couple of stories did appear under the news heading, the vast majority of results had nothing to do with the Amazon rainforest. Rather, they were links for an Amazon product, a tablet called Fire. Of course, when the tablet first came out, nobody was thinking about the potential for an actual fire in the rainforest. They were probably just trying to communicate something like warm glow, excitement, something you can’t stop staring at.
I know enough to know that, surreal as it may be, the electronic device and the ecological catastrophe can exist simultaneously. No one is going to confuse the one for the other. It turns out that we have all gotten pretty good at finding what we’re looking for on the internet.
Our clients at A Hundred Monkeys are often wary of potential connotations that names might have. There’s a desire to protect themselves from anything that might be even remotely negative. This is the equivalent of trying to make sure your child isn’t teased on the playground. Try as we might, there are no guarantees — kids are really creative when it comes to insults, even if you pick a super safe name like Joe. You can certainly attempt to safeguard your brand, but eventually that brand is going to intersect with the world. Like I’ve said before, you’re never really in control. The world can change tomorrow. Chances are, it will.
