What's In a Name? Plenty, If You Trade In the Global Marketplace

WHEN a snazzy new product goes on sale in many countries, its name must be one of a kind. Yet today it has become increasingly difficult to find a name for a company, a product, even a new shade of lipstick that has not been taken.

"Finding names today is a total headache," said Bernard Fornas, the president and chief executive of Cartier. "Once you come up with a name that's interesting, you'll also discover that it's already registered." In the end, "it's all a legal game," said Joseph Gubernick, chief marketing officer for Estee Lauder, who has been with the company for more than 30 years and recalls when the naming process was much easier.

What has changed, industry specialist say, is that companies and the distribution of their goods have become more global. Now names have to be registered in a company's home country and secured in several others. And the Internet, with its vast reach, has complicated the process.

In addition, many products, particularly in the luxury and fashion categories, need a name that conveys a feeling or a sense of emotion -- and do that across many cultures and languages. "The word 'Viagra' is really meaningless," said Jasmine Montgomery, the deputy managing director in London of FutureBrand, a branding and marketing business. Viagra and other made-up brand names acquire meaning only when backed with a lot of advertising and marketing.

"But if I am launching a new fashion label, the task gets really hard because I have to find a name that communicates the creative style, or lifestyle, that the brand is supposed to embody," Ms. Montgomery said. "There's this high degree of emotion," which beauty businesses also require, that is not an issue for other industries.

For a global brand like Estee Lauder, as many as 40 new products are trademarked every year -- something the company has been doing for the last 35 years. The number does not include the hundreds of new products or colors that are the result of Lauder's line extensions or expansions, like a second kind of mascara within an existing group of cosmetics, a company spokeswoman said.

As for the Internet, the growth of trademarked Web addresses or Web sites is exponential, said Delphine Parlier, a founder and partner in Quensis, a company in Paris that goes through the process of choosing a name at the same time that it does the legal, cultural and linguistic screening.

"Today, there are over 64 million domain names," Ms. Parlier said. "This compares to 45 million in August 2005." "Naming is not a problem for a small company with local distribution, but it's a big problem for global brands," she said. "Before, it used to be like climbing a hill. Now, it's like crossing the Himalayas."

For companies, it's best if a Web search goes directly to the proper name of their site or their product's site. But for years entrepreneurs have been registering many dot.com names, dreaming that one day some company will need a name and be willing to pay for it.
In mid-January, the luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton came upon such a legal snag in China, a country whose population of luxury consumers is on the rise while counterfeiting runs rampant.

According to The Changjiang Times, a Wuhan businessman named Wang Jun had trademarked the phonetic translation of Louis Vuitton in Roman letters and Chinese characters. There were even reports that he was preparing to offer the trademarks to Vuitton for 120 million yuan, or about $15 million.

Louis Vuitton said last month that it was not trying to buy the trademarks and that it would appeal a 2002 decision by the Chinese Patent Re-examination Board that upheld Jun's rights to make a handbag with various Vuitton motifs and logo. In any event, naming is a costly endeavor. Fees for simply coming up with an unregistered name can range from a few thousand dollars for a one-market venture to more than $70,000 for a global name and a dot-com counterpart, according to industry estimates.

In addition, there are the legal fees for the registration, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. "It's a real puzzle," Mr. Fornas of Cartier said. "The investment for a name can go from nothing to a very high price. A company has to decide what it wants to invest: how important is the product vis-a-vis the price to register its name."
Despite the challenges, companies do have success stories.

In 1998, Cartier developed a unisex fragrance that it wanted to call Declaration. Members of the development team proposed the name, then crossed their collective fingers.
"For a perfume, it was actually available! We wondered: How on earth could that be available? Such luck," Mr. Fornas recalled.

Success also occurs when managers come up with obscure or very hard-to-copy names.
When Cartier wanted to name a watch La Doa, for the late Mexican actress Maria Felix, once among Cartier's most extravagant jewelry customers, it found that the name, not surprisingly, was available.

Ms. Montgomery of FutureBrand gives the nail care company OPI kudos for its clever, hard-to-copy nail polish color names like Didgeridoo Your Nails, a mauve hue from the brand's Australia collection for 2007. Choosing the right name can also help in the creative process, said Jim Nevins, the creative director at Clinique who in 1997 came up with the name Happy for a perfume. "The fragrance was being developed before we had a name for it," Mr. Nevins recalled. "I was watching a biography of Judy Garland on the A&E channel one night and the song came on, "Come On Get Happy." I thought to myself: "Who doesn't want to be happy?"

He said the name helped direct the final stages of the product's development. An orange note was added to the fragrance and orange was chosen for the package color because, Mr. Nevins said, several consumer studies indicated that the color and smell of orange evoke happiness. The fragrance, however, could not be marketed under the single word Happy. The company had some concerns it would be too generic, a spokeswoman said. And, when Clinique was registering the name, it learned that a small company had already registered a similar name, although for an item in another product category.

As a result, the perfume is called Clinique Happy, a phrasing combining the brand and the product name in what the industry calls a "lockup."

Consumers, however, generally refer to the product as just Happy.

Printed in the March 8, 2007 edition of The New York Times.


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