Naming Innovation 2
Morpheme – The Innovation Consultant is back. This time he’s helping Intrateck find a new name for it’s product. This is the sequel to Naming Innovation. If you haven’t already read it, we suggest you head here first.
Morpheme Strikes Again
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE INDECISIVE COO
“Do you know where I’m standing?” The voice boomed over my cell phone. “Umm, no sir.” “I’m standing on the vestibule of my flight, waiting for my turn to be frisked and you’re telling me that the launch of my product is delayed by a name? Are you mad Bhattacharya?”
I couldn’t forget the tone of the voice and it followed me home and back to work the next day. The disembodied voice belongs to Niren Gupta my boss, the CEO of Intrateck. After almost a year of working in stealth mode, Intrateck was about to release a device that would blow the socks off the wireless industry, and as Murphy would have it, the juggernaut snowball came to a sudden stop a month before the launch. See, we didn’t have a name for the product, and in the retail industry – especially the home segment the name meant everything.
I signaled to Padma that I don’t want to be disturbed for a bit. Shut the door on my cabin and sat down to think. An internal naming exercise had thrown up about 120 names and none of them could be substantiated. In the group discussions that we had, every single named turned out to have a flaw, some strategic some plain stupid. My logic is to just pick the most sensible of the whole lot and just go, see what the test audience has to say and roll it out. But Niren would have none of that. He needed the product out in time for the annual IT.com event, and a market test we just didn’t have time for.
Hey, don’t look at me. I’m just the COO.
Sigh.
