Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business
by Alex Frankel
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"Five little words: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, Cayenne, e-business. Two of the words are appropriated (BlackBerry and Cayenne); two are completely made up (Viagra and Accenture); and one (e-business) is a composite word made of a word and a letter that already exist. . . .These five words are the characters in this book." Words shape and move the modern marketplace; they are at once ubiquitous and invisible. But where do words such as Saturn, PowerBook, and Tylenol originate? How did we show more come to "xerox" our paperwork and "have a cup of Starbucks"? Which names work, and why? For journalist Alex Frankel, what began as an exercise in curiosity--tracing the evolution of a handful of the most successful brand names from the marketplace to their places of origin--resulted in a year-long journey in which he gained access to a previously undiscovered world of forward-thinking creatives: professional namers, the unique group of marketers responsible for inventing words that ultimately become a part of our everyday vocabularies. Wordcraftis Frankel's in-depth look at how companies name themselves and their products and, in the process of defining their business through words and language, develop narratives that define the way they present themselves to the outside world. His lively, fly-on-the-wall narrative takes us into the conference rooms of Lexicon, the world's largest professional naming firm, where we see how the highly successful email pager known as the BlackBerry got its name. We travel to Germany to learn how Porsche approached the naming of its controversial SUV, a car that challenged the company's famously sporty image. The creative team behind Viagra explains how they took a completely fabricated word and turned it into a powerful idea. We witness how IBM assumed ownership of the word and story of "e-business" and in so doing turned around its corporate mindset and returned to a dominant industry position. The book is filled with stories about how things get their names, but it's not just tales of business meetings and product launches. We meet the characters who populate the naming world, "information age neologists" like freelance namer Andrea Michaels, who plays professional Scrabble and competes on TV game shows when not brainstorming for corporate clients. And we learn about the civic unrest that erupted in Denver when the naming rights for Mile High Stadium were sold. Frankel laces his narrative with cultural and historical references and quotations from thinkers as diverse as Marianne Moore and Lawrence Lessig, all of which add a layer of richness and depth to this book's multithreaded and engaging stories. For anyone intrigued by the power of words and ideas in today's marketplace,Wordcraftis a captivating tour of a fascinating world. show lessTags
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RABCK from hostile17; The author studies 5 words that didn't exist in the present context in 1994, but did in 2004: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, Cayenne and e-business. He investigates the business of "naming", which I didn't even know WAS a business. And delves into how and why a name is picked. Is it trademarked or not? What is it supposed to do? Mean? Emotional or not? Something that gets added to the Oxford English Dictionary or not? Fascinating story, but the chapters don't need to be read sequentially, so it tended to get put down and burried periodically. Now off to MyssCyn as a tag. Sorry for the long wait!
I just started this book but I probably won't finish it. I wish I had a word for non-fiction books that should have just been a magazine article. I don't think this topic can really support a book-length treatment. I really don't care about the author's moods/life quest/search for a job/what have you. This is greatly overblown.
Tells the stories of several companies work to define themselves with new names (Accenture, the consulting arm of the now defunct Big Eight accounting firm Arthur Anderson) or terms such as e-business (IBM in the mid 1990's as they transitioned from big computing to network computing and were attempting to re-launch their company around this emerging technology).
Frankel spoke about his work in business journalism, in 'Wordcraft' and his recently published 'Punching In', while visiting Norfolk Academy this April.
For more info see www.alexfrankel.com
In Wordcraft, Alex Frankel, a business writer who once briefly worked as a namer, tells the
story of how five major brands got their names: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, the Porsche
Cayenne, and IBM’s “e-business.” Behind each name is an account of how words and language
infuse the products we use every day with meaning, and how great words actually succeed in
changing people’s behavior. The book is filled with stories about words that come from every
corner of our world: technology, health, sports, food, business, and more. --from Amazon.com
For more info see www.alexfrankel.com
In Wordcraft, Alex Frankel, a business writer who once briefly worked as a namer, tells the
story of how five major brands got their names: BlackBerry, Accenture, Viagra, the Porsche
Cayenne, and IBM’s “e-business.” Behind each name is an account of how words and language
infuse the products we use every day with meaning, and how great words actually succeed in
changing people’s behavior. The book is filled with stories about words that come from every
corner of our world: technology, health, sports, food, business, and more. --from Amazon.com
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