August 27, 2003

A rose by any other name would be an AROmaZaPo960-D ...

For my my birthday Charlene bought me a Canon CanoScan LiDE 30 scanner. So far I'm quite pleased�it seems to pack a lot of value for a trifling price. Also, it's very slim and the only cord is the USB cable, which also powers it. So you can easily stash it away, and just grab it and plug it in when needed.

But I have to say that it's incredibly stupid marketing to give a product a name that people won't know how to pronounce! There goes the word-of-mouth advertising. And what kind of word is "LiDE" anyway? Something that made sense in Japanese, but didn't translate? Something that made sense to the engineers? Words are important, and products need good names. A null-word like LiDE makes it hard to think about the product, hard to talk about it, hard to remember it, hard to spell it if you are trying to Google...

The worst name-morass is with digital cameras. If you read a favorable review of something called an SBZ-601-Zoom, how likely is it that you will remember that name? And how likely is it that you can keep from confusing it with the SBZ-401-Zoom or the SBZ-901-Zoom? Blehhh. It probably means that the engineers are running the company. And while I yield to no one in my admiration for engineers, there are certain teeensy-weensy little slivers of life where their skill-sets are not optimal, and where they would be advised to hire someone who loves words...(My consultant fees are very reasonable high�that proves that I'm valuable.)

Posted by John Weidner at August 27, 2003 6:05 PM
Weblog by John Weidner