Naming Architecture

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Schwab Institutional division In a continuation of our long relationship with Charles Schwab, we recently revamped the naming architecture of the entire Schwab Institutional division. While less known than its retail business, the institutional side of Schwab provides services to tens of thousands of investment managers and financial advisors, accounting for billions of dollars of assets. Our work simplified the Institutional product offering, established a new product line structure, clarified and modified existing names and created new ones, and set up guidelines for future new product naming.       SanDisk Working closely with Phoenix Brand Analytics, in this engagement we researched and analysed customer needs and expectations related to future cellphone use, in particular, the need for more memory. The implications of our research for the Sandisk mobile memory product line, including naming opportunities around the "Wake Up Your Phone" initiative, was a key part of this work.       Real Networks RealNetworks, a leading Internet media delivery company based in Seattle, had been so successful in reinforcing the "Real" brand, that almost every one of its names contained the word "Real"—which made it difficult for customers to tell the difference between consumer products and services, business-to-business products and services, and underlying technologies. Our naming architecture is straightforward, and flexible enough to accommodate future products and services. Marketing emphasis is now focused on a small number of proprietary product and service family brands.       Cisco Systems Master-McNeil had an ongoing relationship with Cisco Systems for branding strategy management and name development. In 1994, we created the Cisco brand architecture, which remains in place today, and continued to work with Cisco for six years on new name development and naming strategy issues. Our architecture emphasizes and builds on the Cisco brand by allowing only descriptive naming, accommodating the exponential growth at Cisco during the course of our relationship. Since architecture implementation we have worked with Cisco to create hundreds of descriptive names as well as proprietary key branding elements such as the Cisco Powered Network ingredient brand.       Procket Networks Procket Networks' seasoned executives decided to put a naming architecture in place prior to releasing the first product of this young company. Their proactive vision enabled all marketing resources to be applied in a strategic manner, rare among start-ups. Procket was aquired by Cisco.       Cadence As part of a major corporate naming architecture project for Cadence Design Systems, Master-McNeil greatly simplified the Cadence product line by grouping products into six branded product families. We then created the names Cierto, Affirma, Assura, Envisia, and Intrica to create a clear and cohesive family of sub-brands.       StorageTek For this leader in information management and storage, Master-McNeil developed an innovative, collaborative naming architecture process. Taking advantage of StorageTek resources, we "employed" StorageTek senior marketing and branding managers as our own project staff. Together we developed naming architecture alternatives, refinements, and the naming architecture. StorageTek is now part of Sun Microsystems, another one of our naming architecture clients.       Navision Navision, a Danish-based European software company focused on integrated business solutions, wanted to clarify and articulate its use of product, service, program, and event logos. Creating guidelines for third party use was also an issue. Our recommendations establish a hierarchy that emphasizes the corporate name, while reducing the number of allowed logos and making clear distinctions among the company's different offerings, and those of third parties. Navision is now part of Microsoft.       Akamai Akamai, a provider of outsourced e-business infrastructure services and software, wanted to establish guidelines for naming all aspects of its business - from its platform, product families, product suites, and technologies, to its partner programs and the offerings within those programs. Our recommendations led to their adoption of naming policies requiring the use of highly descriptive terminology which reinforces the Akamai brand.       Intraspect As a result of our work, Intraspect, a leading maker of inter-enterprise collaboration software, decided to not create and support multiple proprietary product names. To help Intraspect reach their conclusion we created a variety of naming architectures, illustrating the pros and cons of the various approaches. Committing to this naming architecture and eliminating other naming options saved Intraspect time and money as the company grew. Intraspect was aquired by Vignette.       Sun Microsystems Master-McNeil created the corporate naming architecture for Sun Microsystems. We have continued our naming architecture implementation at Sun with the development of highly detailed product identification architectures for several Sun divisions. Among our names created for Sun are the Sun Ray enterprise appliances product family, the Sun Blade workstations, and the Sun Fire family of servers.       Apple names Master-McNeil has named much of Apple Computer's product line. Our naming for Apple includes several stand-alone software products, a number of proprietary technologies, various imaging products, and many products in Apple's desktop and portable CPU line. Some of the many names we have created for Apple include: Macintosh Classic, Macintosh LC, Macintosh Performa, Macintosh Pippin, AtEase, Apple FontPack, PowerBook Assistants, One Scanner, FinePrint, PhotoGrade, ColorSync, PowerLatch, TrackPad, GeoPort and StyleWriter.

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