BADEN-BADEN, GERMANY (dpa) – Prospective parents will appreciate the problem: finding a name is a real challenge. Yet compared to carmakers, parents have an easy time of it.
While there is a huge choice of names for babies, baptising a car can be a really difficult delivery. After all, the name needs not only to match the vehicle, it must also sound good in all markets and it must not be already taken.
To meet these demands, carmakers often engage professional agencies who set to work as “name-givers”. But despite the experts’ estimates that the names of half of all cars have been chosen by scientific methods, there still appears to be no remedy for the seemingly inevitable hiccups.
The latest example is Volkswagen’s new top-of-the-range Phaeton saloon. The carmakers in Wolfsburg have conceded that they sought to create a link to both the sumptuous carriages of bygone years and Greek mythology – which describes Phaeton as the “lighted one”.
However, laughter and mirth greeted the announcement of the new name by VW’s Ferdinand Piech. Why? Because sooner or later in the Grecian tale comes the episode in which sun god Helios’s son Phaeton comes to grief in his father’s chariot – setting himself and the earth aflame.
Since then VW has been asking itself whether Phaeton is really such a good name for its entry into the luxury class. But the link to Ancient Greece is just one of the problems dogging VW over its choice of name.
At least as worrying is the criticism voiced by American VW dealers that insists that the customers cannot get the word “Phaeton” past their lips to order one. And then there’s the previous project name of D1 that VW kept alive for so long. That will only be driven from people’s heads at huge advertising expense.
But the competition also has a tendency put its foot in it. Mitsubishi’s successful 4WD has another name in Spanish-speaking countries, where Pajero has an obscene connotation. Toyota’s MR-2 has been dragged through the muck in France due to its phonetic similarity to another rude word. VW’s Vento, meanwhile, is having a hard time making headway: its name suggests not only maritime winds but bodily ones too. Finally, Chevrolet in South America made the glaring admission with its Nova jeep that “it doesn’t run”.
Steering wide of these hazards is the task of professional godfathers such as Manfred Gotta, whose agency in Baden-Baden shares the German market with Nomen International of Dusseldorf and Interbrand Zintzmeyer & Lux of Hamburg. Their approaches, says Gotta, are all fairly similar. First, the godfather is locked away in a room with the new car for 10 minutes to plumb its “soul”.
After that begins a process which Interbrand in Hamburg describes as follows: you develop an insight into the philosophy behind the product, determine the potential target group and then explore the world of the targeted purchasers.
Within this framework, begins the real process of finding a name. It is a process which draws copywriters and other creative minds across Europe into its web. At the end of this stage, according to Nomen International, there are frequently up to 10,000 suggestions.
These are successively filtered and whittled down until a final two or three dozen remain. These then have to perform well in tests with the public. After that, linguists get a say.
They have to ensure that the name will be correctly understood in all markets because it is not only problems of pronunciation and the technical sound of it that need to be examined; the sense of the product also has to be kept present.
But the decision in the end of course lies with the manufacturer. And when the boss has already decided what name his new child will bear, it’s often too late to persuade him otherwise.
To avoid disasters, many carmakers and agencies take names from the animal kingdom (Opel Manta), geography (Seat Ibiza) or music (Skoda Octavia). These names are not only understood everywhere, they also tend to carry the same associations.
But when the dictionary or the encyclopaedia are no help, the computer and its “shaker” gets to work. Gotta says that it juggles real words as long as it takes to come up with an artificial word that hasn’t been used before.
Only rarely are the creations as clear as the Interbrand invention Mondeo for Ford’s global car or the Gotta creation Avantime for Renault’s futuristic van saloon that really does look ahead of its time.
Anyone unwilling to take any chances, can always stick with brands like Mercedes, Audi and BMW and their alphanumeric systems. All the same, even the Audi A3, the BMW 540i and the Mercedes S Class don’t get by without names altogether as equipment systems such as Multitronic, iDrive and Linguatronic also need to be called something.
