THE MAKING OF A NAME: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy

The naming industry sprang up in the 1980s to deal with the complexities of brand identity, the legal maze of eligibility and the pitfalls of translation. In this encyclopedic compilation, Rivkin, proprietor of a U.S. naming consultancy and Sutherland, a Canadian author and editor, mix business with linguistics in an attempt to demystify the name game. In Part I they distinguish among the basic types of names: descriptive, allusive and coined. Part II, on the naming process, offers a massive amount of recycled information, from right-brain/left-brain functioning to obvious brainstorming methods à la marketing 101; a blizzard of lexicographic, phonetic and linguistic factoids; a brief dissertation on the origins of speech; a litany of familiar cautionary tales about the perils of translation; and much more. All of this is exhaustively researched and appropriately cited; while some of it bears a direct relation to naming, a great deal comes across as too much icing. Part III, an overview of naming firms and alternatives, concludes with Rivkin's own finding that companies consider naming consultants less effective than internal task forces or agencies. If this overstuffed volume is representative of the field, that comes as no surprise. (Jan.)