It remains unsaid how important branding is for the sale of a product. Though many people might deny this, the marketing of a commodity is very vital for it's appeal and hence sale. It's strange that major manufacturers come up with such weird names that reducing the selling quotient drastically. A very good example is the Television market. Vizio XVT3D650SV. Oh come on, who would remember that? Even certain auto manufacturers like Acura have model names as RL, TL, MDX, RDX ,etc. Except RDX, the rest are boring ( I am sure RDX was a coincidence!). A name should be catchy, easy to remember and describe the product. Take the case of Apple. iPhone, iPod, iPad. They are such obvious names for the gadgets they represent, yet so appealing. Mac OSes are named after animals of the cat family (excluding the cat, Thank God!). This is what Apple does. Simple and elegant, be it their products or their marketing. Not to forget the name Apple itself is ridiculous for a tech company, but the fame it has acquired all these years subside the stupidity of it's name and now 'Apple' is synonymous to cool and awesome and is the best prefix a gadget name can get. So for a company that cannot talk just with its innovation, adequate and apt branding is very important.
Now, Microsoft comes up with this fancy OS and what do they name it. Windows Phone 7. It's not that bad after all considering the fame of Windows 7 but is not that great a name either. OSes like Android, webOS are real good names. Google does a great job by naming every Android release with bakery items viz. froyo, gingerbread, honeycomb, etc which follow an alphabetical convention. Even Ubuntu / Canonical has some cool names for it's distros like jaunty jackalope, hardy heron, karmic koala, lucid lynx, etc. Motorola too comes up with very catchy names especially the four-letter ones. RAZR, ROKR, SLVR, CLIQ and XOOM are a few examples. On the internet, FaceBook, Twitter are perfect names for the services they provide.
Name convention is sensible when it comes to branding. Putting an 'i' before a regular word makes it an Apple product. Alphabetical iterations for product release names like Android or Ubuntu. Omission of vowels to fit the four or five letter naming in case of Motorola products. Such conventions make it easy for the consumer to associate a product to the company and it's previous products.
Coming to captions. Following are some great examples:-
- MacBook Air: "Thinnovation", "World's thinnest notebook"
- HP webOS: "Now available in S,M and L", in the context of Veer, Pre3 and TouchPad
- HTC ThunderBolt: "This isn't your dream phone. It's the one after that"
- Motorola Mobility: "Life Mpowered", the letter M as in the logo for Motorola Mobility
Other important parameters that add to the name game are company / product logos. Logos of companies like Apple, Motorola, HP, Dell, Samsung, LG, etc are ones that people are very familiar with and find immediate connection. Others like the logo of Nvidia (Click for logo), Snapdragon processor (Click for logo) are interesting.
