37 THE INCISIVE LETTER K

Naming, whether it’s a child or a brand, is a difficult business. In the end, it’s more subjective than objective, so it’s not surprising that there are many and varied strategies for choosing a name.

The most common approach is simply to take the name of the founder or founders. Birdseye and Woolworths are two from opposite ends of the alphabet. However, even with this most simple of approaches there are variations on the theme; while there was indeed a Mr Brooke, he invented his fictional partner Mr Bond, because he thought Brooke Bond sounded so good.

“Worgers” – or word mergers – are another favourite. Two appropriate words are taken and squashed together to create a new word. As an example, when Hasbro launched a new game in which players drew pictures of words to try to communicate their meaning, the company merged “picture” and “dictionary” to create “Pictionary”.

Ole Kirk Christiansen merged two Danish words: “leg godt”, meaning “play well” to create Lego. At the time, he was unaware that in Latin “lego” means “I build”.

When he introduced his first camera in June 1888, however, George Eastman decided he wouldn’t follow either of these routes. He wanted a name that meant nothing.

“I devised the name myself…I knew that a brand name had to be short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled to an extent that would destroy its identity and, in order to satisfy trademark, it must mean nothing.

“The letter K had been a favourite with me – it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. Therefore, the word I wanted had to start with a K. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with K. The word Kodak was the result.”

And the moral is that creativity thrives on a tight brief. Do you make sure every creative brief you write has clear and tight guidelines to guide the thinking and help your assessment of the work?