As founder and president of Berkeley-based Master-McNeil - a corporate and product branding and naming company - Master helps businesses through identity crises.
"People who find us have usually tried internally to address or solve a naming problem and failed," said the owner with the mysterious initials about her nine-year-old company. "They haven't defined what it is they want to express ... We try to objectify the process, but it can be very emotional. People can get very involved."
Tina Crisci can relate. As brand manager of Brita, a division of Clorox, Crisci worked with Master-McNeil to come up with a name for a product that was otherwise ready for market.
"It's such a subjective process," she said of naming the Mägnum - which came close to being dubbed the Grande - a large water filtration pitcher that hit stores a few weeks ago. "We needed the fresh brainstorming, and it was good to have an objective opinion." Out of 50 or so annual projects, up to 50% of the names generated by Master and her team have already been spoken for.
"It's gotten so hard," said Master. "You have to work at it all day, every day."
And that's the reason most companies - including Sybase, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Dreyer's Ice Cream and Walt Disney - look to Master-McNeil for help. While public relations companies put out fires and ad agencies work more and more with visual imagery, Master said her business can focus all its energy on naming names.
One might imagine a team of linguists, translators and technical writers hashing it out around an oblong table, eating fast food while lobbing paper pellets at one another during a rousing session of brainstorming. Not so, said Master. Rather, their research is usually conducted alone with nothing more than dictionaries, Internet search engines and CD-ROMs to keep them company.
"They are solitary creators, working to express their individual interpretations of the project," Master said. The group does convene evetually to bounce concepts and name off one another and discuss future strategies for the projects.
Some of the names they've come up with include "Armada" for Compaq's portable machines, "Netopia" for Farallon's high-speed ISDN modems and routers, and "MemBrain" for Marmot Mountain's latest line of specialized outdoor clothing.
"Except for the unprofessional, ugly or obscene names, there's no quintessential 'good' or 'bad' name," Master said. "We need to ask, does the name speak powerfully to the people it's supposed to speak to?"
Java, Sun Microsystems' programming language for World Wide Web applications, is "short, easy to say ... reminiscent of a beautiful place and has been a cool word for coffee since the beatnik era," Master said.
Copyright 1997 East Bay Business Journal
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