Dick Youngblood: What's in a product name is key to their success

When Wendy's International Inc. was ready to introduce its new double cheeseburger, an imposing concoction adorned with six strips of bacon, it sought out a small Twin Cities company to help come up with a name that reflected the burger's formidable qualities.

You've seen the result in recent TV commercials that implore you to wrap a lip around the Baconator, an impressive addition to the fast-food menu that offers two quarter-pound beef patties and two slices of cheese, along with a significant bite out of a pork carcass.

"We were looking for something that could be trademarked and also convey a unique product in an unusual and clever way," said William Lozito, a veteran of the marketing wars and founder and CEO of Bloomington-based Strategic Name Development.

The result was a perfect fit, said Diane Prange, Lozito's wife and business partner, not to mention the company's "chief linguistics officer": The prefix describes the burger's key distinction and "the suffix suggests something large and compelling, as in Terminator," she said.

It is in such fashion that the company's revenue has been growing at a 20 percent annual rate in recent years, reaching $2.1 million in 2006 and heading for $2.5 million this year.

In the process, the firm has acquired a blue-chip client list that also includes Texas Instruments, Bayer Healthcare and such local heavies as G&K Services and Gold'n Plump.

Lozito started the company in 1993 after stints as brand manager for General Foods' Kool-Aid and Pillsbury's Hungry Jack and as a marketing executive at Pizza Hut and Land O'Lakes. But his smartest move arguably came in 1996, when he added Prange, who is fluent in four languages and revels in arcane data and word usage.

"My idea of a good time is to crawl into bed with printouts from the Oxford English Dictionary," she confessed.

Or maybe with a selection from the odd library that covers one of her office walls, offering upward of 1,000 tomes ranging from language dictionaries, linguistic textbooks and anthologies of famous quotations to volumes on idioms and word stems and collections on fables and slang.

That resource helped her name the high-end, golden-hued rum that a Caribbean distillery recently introduced. It's called TØZ, which Prange discovered means "troy ounce of gold" when she stumbled across the abbreviation in a dictionary of math terms.

Again, it was a perfect fit, she said. There's the T, an explosive speech sound that lends power to a word. And the Z, which her research on the use of consonants shows is viewed by consumers as conveying a strong, contemporary sense. The Danish Ø was thrown in "just for visual interest," Prange said.

Consonant research? Yup, in 2005 the company surveyed 414 consumers to gauge the meaning they derived from certain letters.

Among the results: "Words that begin with X or Z tend to convey masculinity, innovation and complexity," in addition to the contemporary feel, Prange said. Think Xerox, for example, or the X-Type Jaguar.

Similarly, the letters L, F, W and V were interpreted as feminine, as in L'Oreal, Faberge and Victoria's Secret.

The husband-and-wife duo has complementary skills: Lozito, the marketing guru, sits down with a client "to get them to focus, not on the product itself, but what it means to consumers in emotional terms."

Thus, Bayer Healthcare officials thought the new product they wanted named was simply a pet-tracking chip that can be accessed by any reader in the world. Instead, Lozito argued that "it's really a peace-of-mind product for pet owners."

Which is where Prange stepped in with her focus on words and letters. If the product offers to locate a lost pet, she reasoned, then the word "rescue" comes to mind. But that's hardly a word that can be trademarked.

Which is why the product is called resQ, a phonetic spelling that not only can be protected, but "contains the little-used consonant, Q, which attracts attention, Prange said.

Similarly, a graphing calculator recently introduced by Texas Instruments for young students is not just a product with a screen that allows teachers to view work in progress.

No, "it's a cool tool that motivates kids to learn," Lozito said. So naturally, they named it "Nspire," another eye-fetching and phonetic spelling that also can be trademarked.

The effort was appreciated: "Their unique process ... helped us arrive at a very different product-naming direction -- one that has been very well received ... with educators and students," said Randy Smith, director of marketing communications for Texas Instruments' education technology group.

All of which leaves just one question: If coming up with clever names is your specialty, how do they explain the company's mundane moniker?

"Our research showed that 'name development' was the highest-ranking phrase" in this category when it came to winning a prominent position on search engines, Lozito said.

"A cool name might sound more interesting," he said, "but in this case a descriptive term pays more dividends."

Dick Youngblood • 612-673-4439 • yblood@startribune.com