Name and shame

One of the first lessons in Marketing School (a bit like Hogwarts, only based in Hammersmith) is how to name new products. The advice goes roughly like this

Make the name:

• Usable
• Meaningful
• Distinctive

It's all quite simple and it all came back to me when I saw a poster for a car called a cee'd. That's right, a cee'd. No, not a ceed, or indeed a Ceed. A cee'd.

How? Why? Who sat round a boardroom table and dreamt this one up? Those responsible should be named. And since the readers of this blog are regularly involved in naming new products and services, I thought it was worth analysing this carcrash of a naming exercise and asking how the name 'cee'd' measures up against those three objectives.

Is it usable? Answer: no. People don't know how to pronounce it (like "seed" apparently). People don't know how to spell it (or search for it in Google). People won't naturally use it. The apostrophe is confusing, unnecessary and obstructive. No, no and no.

Is it meaningful? Well, erm, no. According to the Kia website, it is derived from the fact that it was the first Kia car designed and built in Europe, hence cee'd. Still need it explaining? You know - as in CEED. As in, CE and then ED. Still guessing? Community of Europe. European Design. Ah, I see. Makes so much sense once you know.

Is it distinctive? The only shred of plausibility here lies in the fact that they were trying to 'break the mould' in terms of car naming. But what else about the car goes beyond the norm? The innovative hatchback format? The fully integrated audio system? Face it guys - it's a cheap, normal car. A perfectly valid proposition - so why name it as if it has turned the motoring world on its head? It hasn't.

As a final point, the very construction of the word is deeply wrong. It has an apostrophe for no reason. (People struggle with them at the best of times - so why make life difficult?) It also ends with a 'd'. To most people, that suggests a verb. And this illusion is reinforced by the fact that someone somewhere piped up with the idea that it should also be in lower case, making the whole thing look less a product name, and more like an entirely unremarkable word. But then, given that it seems to be an entirely unremarkable vehicle, they maybe got it right after all

This is, however, fairly old news. I'm a year late on this one, since the cee'd came out in mid-2007. But then, if they had given it a proper capital letter, I might have noticed it earlier.