Charlie O’Donnell, CEO of Path 101 posted this image on his blog. I laughed, a little… Just days before I had had lunch with the founder of one of the first – if not the first – naming firms During our conversation, he mentioned he had met with Bimbo maybe 20 years ago and the [...]

The folks over at Strategic Name Development explore the naming of premium and “whole” foods in response to two other blog posts. Two trends of note: 1) Foods that are named the same as the company that manufactures and markets them. 2) Popular snack foods are investing heavily in the concept of the personalized brand [...]

Of the many, many medical dotcom businesses, WebMD (technically, a health information portal) survived. And thrived. And because they’ve existed for several years, they built some brand equity. Now, the folks at WebMD have decided to throw all that intangible brand equity and start all over again with a new name: Emdeon. Their reasoning? Economics. [...]

Interesting article in today’s NY Times Chinese companies building global brands by acquiring well-known, existing brands. Because they’ve been in the news, the article mentions the Lenovo acquisition of IBM’s laptop business, Haier’s bid for Maytag and the CNOOC bid for Unocal. The reason for the global business shopping spree? “Chinese companies are now facing [...]

We’re going to comment on this Knowledget@Wharton article a little later today, but the authors conclusions have some interesting implications for the medical device industry: ...the use of odd names seems to work best in products thta rely on the senses, such as food or fashion, and would probably not work in a high-stakes product [...]