Name design?

Yes, it exists. This great old (1999!) article popped into my head so I figured I'd add a link to it. I think it's hysterical — a view into an industry that's so nuts it almost reads like satire.

“What a crummy name,” he says. “[Agilent] sounds like a committee name. ‘Who’s your competition?’ ‘Lucent.’ ‘Well, we want to play off Lucent — only we’re agile.’ I mean, if you wanted a name like that, I could come up with that kind of name in about four seconds.”

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Landor, for its part, is quick to defend its handiwork. “To our critics, I can only say, vive la diffirence, vive the competition and vive individual entrepreneurialism,” says Redhill, in his gentle, grandfatherly voice. “We have the utmost confidence in our model.” To drive home that point, Redhill put me in touch with Darius Somary, the research director who had confirmed to an empirical certainty the allure of names like Agilent. “From a quantitative standpoint, it’s a very appealing name,” Somary told me. “On all the scalar measures of distinctiveness and appropriateness, it tested right off the charts.”

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