I recently heard Walt Mossberg say that calling Apple’s new laptop “MacBook Air” was marketing genius since they used that name instead of the MacBook X12G45.
I was wondering how come Apple seems to be the only company in the electronics industry not to suffer from this marketing brain damage? Everywhere else people seem to understand that the more people remember your product’s name, the more of that product you will sell. Yet everyone in electronics goes about naming their gear so that no one can remember the name of the product they bought.
Can you imagine Johnnie Walker, instead of using the red, black, green, gold and blue labels for their products calling them batch 200, 300GT, 300GTS, 400 and 400GTX?
I think part of the reason is the geek appeal in having the numbers - when you can say you have a 4400GTX video card or whatever the latest rage is, it sounds far more technically sophisticated than calling it the Video Wonder. Plus, you rapidly run out of names that aren’t too similar to your own or other competitors’ brands but still give you the brand image you want.
I think Apple intentionally bucked the trend, and for their demographic it worked; ultimately it’s all about marketing. If you look at Microsoft’s products, for example, all the ones for the business market have solid, totally uninspired, functional names, because that reassures people - SQL Server Analysis Services, PerformancePoint Server, Internet Information Server, SQL Server Reporting Services. Products for the mainstream consumer market have much funkier names: XBox, Zune and the like. It’s all about creating an image that targets your market.
One problem is that they’re constantly coming out with new versions of the product.
You tell me, which product is the latest: Cheetah, Panther, Leopard, Puma, Tiger, Jaguar.
It’s a little easier if you name them OS X 10.0, OS X 10.3, OS X 10.5, OS X 10.1, OS X 10.4, OS X 10.2
So too with hardware, since you’re coming out with upgraded versions every 3 months, it’s easier to increment a number or add a letter or two, rather than coming out with an entirely new name. If you have a very limited, slow changing product line like Apple, you can get away with fancy names. When you’re in a fast changing more commoditized market like PCs or consumer electronics, there isn’t enough distinguishing your product from the next to make people care what the name is. The most you can get is a brand, like ThinkPad, which is used in conjunction with the everchanging model number.
Auto manufacturers are moving toward naming cars with numbers or indecipherable letters: Audi S5, R8, S4; Volvo XC-70, Mazda RX-8, Lincoln MKS, Cadillac CTS, Chrysler 300. Coming from an industry that had a tradition of flashy car names, that’s a big change.
Cheesesteak. I’m with you on the “big cat” names, especially when you have to service a Mac and need to install Quicktime and don’t know whether the computer is Leopard, Jaguar, or Tiger.
True, although neither 10.0 nor 10.1 were really called by their “cat names” when they were current. I don’t think the boxes or CDs were labeled with them. And, they’re still rarely referred to that way now — though they’re hardly talked about at all really, at this late stage.
Anyway, put me down as someone who thinks the OS X cat names are endearing, but prefers using the version numbers for all the obvious reasons, and wishes everyone else would see the light. (I’m constantly mixing up Jaguar and Tiger in my head.)
There’s one thing that drives me crazy about Apple’s naming - they’ll use the same name for many product iterations. So, when someone asks me to get memory for an PowerMac G5, I need to ask a lot of questions to determine which series it was - PCI, AGP, Digital Audio, Dual Processor, Dual Core, etc.
When you’re repeatedly coming out with updated versions of your products and have different tiers of products, it’s useful to have names that make it easy to tell the order and tier of a product. For instance, 7800 is from the 7th generation, 8800 is from the 8th generation, and an 8800 is of a higher tier than an 8600. (However, the addition of GT, GTS, etc. seems unnecessary under such a system.) I wish more companies did things like this. To use your example: how do I know if red is better than black or if blue came out before green? With a numbered naming convention, at least I know that the 300 either came out later than the 200, or it’s of a higher quality.
Uggh. I know that pain. We have no internal naming standard within our company for software releases, and it is very painful to remember when people refer to Strauss what version # that is.
Oh, and we had two products released recently - one for Mac, one for PC. Their internal names? Felix and Helix. Way to make conversations confusing!
I work with LOTS of engineers. I COMPLETELY understand why they do this.
These guys can take something as simple as opening a carton of milk and turning it into something as complex as calculating the orbital trajectory of any given satellite.
In other words: Engineers are from the planet XTK770TPFTS. The rest of us are from Earth.
The joy of naming a product with a meaningless string of numbers and letters also means you don’t have to rename the damn thing in umpteen different languages if you’re catering to a global market.
In Canada, for example, most marketers need to figure out two product names - one in English for the majority of the country, and one in French to satisfy the language policy in Quebec. Language laws aside, product names aren’t as effective if the target market doesn’t know the word well enough to catch all the connotations that come with it (ie. Air = feathery light, single-syllable efficiency), so it only makes sense to pick an alternative that does mean something to them.
I can only imagine how hard it would be in Europe where you’ve got a plethora of languages crammed into a small geographic area. Yikes.
Ikea is perhaps the exception to this rule… but only because it fits so well into their Scandinavian-cool-hey-look-we’re-QUIRKY! image to use nonsense words to name their furniture. (quirky is the last thing you’d look for in a PC, no?)
I always thought that Apple designed themselves into a corner with their iPods. They have their different physical sizes (nano, shuffle, mini, uhm…regular?) but then the different iterations of the “main” iPod are kind of confusing to me as a person who does not own any of those models.
Like RealityChuck and Cheesesteak pointed out, an “iPod” is not really an “iPod” - you still need to say what “generation” it’s from and what size it is.
But these aren’t product names, but internal telecom geek names. Some have leaked out into the airwaves. Who out there knows what POTS means? And even worse, we have IEEE standard numbers as generic names also. I think that may be because which standard a product follows is more important than who makes it.
This is VERY true. Having worked on and off in and with Microsoft’s marketing departments, product naming is a religion there, and it’s mostly for the reasons you stated above.
Mahna Mahna nailed the other reason… globalization. Those names have to directly translate in over 140 different languages, there can’t be any ambiguity or question about what certain words mean in other languages. It’s also the reason Microsoft in-box Help reads funky for their software products; the words have to localize in an automated fashion, they can’t be rewritten for 140 languages, it’s way too costly.
