Who is responsible for Inprise, Borland International Inc’s new name? It turns out to be Lexicon Branding Inc, a Sausalito, California-based product naming specialist with just 20 staff. Lexicon, which does 65% of its business in the technology field, took around two months to come up with the Inprise name, and although the firm won’t say how much it charged Borland, it says its average price tag for coming up with a name is around $40,000. Lexicon was founded in 1981, and has been responsible for the Pentium brand name for Intel Corp, PowerBook for Apple Computer Inc, PageMill for Adobe Systems Inc and DeskJet for Hewlett Packard Co, among many others. The Pentium name, which Lexicon CEO David Placek styles as a breakthrough – the first time a coined word was used to brand a microprocessor, has given Lexicon a greater visibility in the IT field over recent years than its two main competitors. They are NameLab, a San Francisco- based firm which came up with the names Sony, Compaq and Acura; and InterBrand, the London-based design consultant responsible for Compaq’s Prolinea brand and 3M’s 1996 data storage spin-off Imation Inc. Following its Pentium success, Lexicon also won the contract to name Intel’s latest Pentium II chips, Celeron and Xeon. Celeron, it says, is derived from celer, the Latin word for swift, and from the word cell, for a small enclosed unit. But the Celeron also evokes echoes of the word cellar, an unfortunate allusion in connection with a low-end bargain- basement chip that hasn’t been received too well. Lexicon’s naming doesn’t seem to have helped the joint Intel and SAP AG electronic commerce company Pandesic LLC, which has got off to a very rocky start since it was formed last year. The Pandesic name came out of pan (everything), and geodesic (a many sided shape) – a somewhat unfocused name for what, so far at least, looks like a somewhat unfocused company. Placek, who points out that most of the real words have now been taken, somewhat expansively styles his coined word style of brand names as vessels that carry the marketing and technology inside them. If that’s the case, then Borland/Inprise appears to have shifted dramatically from the technical credentials built up around its original name over to the overused marketspeak of buzzwords such as enterprise. The company claims that quite a number of customers and analysts asked it to change the name, to get away from Borland’s association with desktop products such as Quattro Pro and Paradox which it doesn’t even sell any more. The Borland name itself is not the name of some highly respected technical guru, but actually means Land of the Deep Forest in ancient Celtic, or at least so company founder Philippe Kahn claimed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. And Placek doesn’t think that customers will view the new name as just marketing hype. Will the name take hold? Placek says we won’t know for around two years. But it’s worth remembering that as well as the high profile, Pentium-style successes, there are numerous naming failures we don’t hear about. Who’s heard of 3Com’s Red brand, for instance? We’ll have to wait and see which side of the fence Inprise turns out to be on.
