Sometimes a business name functions simply as a name, like Constant Contact, the email service that delivers newsletters. Look at their web site and you won’t easily find any images or wordplay that take off from the words “constant” or “contact.”
On the other hand, Named At Last, my company, uses the idea of storks bringing clients a new name both in the images of storks flying and in phrases like “Head Stork,” my title, and “Storklets,” for the company’s freelance namers. When images and words work together to develop one concept in several different ways, that’s an extended metaphor.
Extended metaphors give readers pleasure, make a company more memorable and have unlimited creative potential to help a company stand head and shoulders above the competition.
To understand just how unlimited that potential can be, consider a tech support company, Geek Squad. On 19 pages scattered through a 44-page supplement glued into the August 2006 issue of Wired magazine, this company brilliantly riffed both verbally and pictorially on the theme of its name. You can get a sense of how they do this also at their web site, GeekSquad.com.
In the Wired supplement, extended metaphor techniques that they used to develop the Geek Squad as a techie version of the 1950s FBI include:
A group of creative aces obviously had a blast generating all these spinoffs of the central metaphor of a squad of geeks. I certainly had great fun consuming their inventiveness, and I don’t think I’ll soon confuse them with competitor Rent-a-Nerd.
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Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a company that brainstorms creative business names, product names and tag lines for clients. For a systematic process of coming up with an appealing and effective name or tag line, download a free copy of “19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line” at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm
Read more articles written by Marcia Yudkin
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