When late-night conversation flags among linguists, someone is bound to bring up the Voynich Manuscript, a 272-page book elaborately hand-written and illustrated around the year 1500.

Only one copy exists, carefully preserved in a rare-book library at Yale.

The illustrations are now-faded color drawings of plants, with one section of diagrams of the solar system.

What’s fascinating about the Voynich Manuscript is that it is written (in a unique phonetic alphabet) in a language that two centuries of scholarly research hasn’t been able to link to known living or historical language.

Legend has it that the cryptographers of Bletchley Park spent more time on the Voynich than on decoding Germany’s Enigma Cipher.

One school of linguists holds that in all ways the text resembles a natural language, and must be the only surviving example of a highly-developed culture.

Another group attributes it to Roger Bacon. (His notes for the plays of William Shakespeare?)

Between projects, our linguists are working hard on the Voynich here at NameLab (except for the pointy-eared guy compiling a Klingon-Esperanto Dictionary).

Check out the reams of material at this Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_Manuscript

Perhaps the most complex brand launch in marketing history occurred on the first day of 1999, when the Euro replaced local currencies in 11 of the 15 nations of the European Economic Community.

Equipped with a great name - short, punchy, logical - the new currency faced hostile local audiences who treasured and trusted their Drachma, Escudo, Franc, Guilder, Lira, Mark, Markka, Peseta, Punt, and Schilling.

Is a currency a brand?  Sure looks like one to us.  It’s a rectangle of paper or disc of metal bearing a name and a design (this one subject to a long-running attribution dispute between two designers).

The brand promise is that you can exchange it for a quart of milk or a loaf of bread.

To believe that promise, you have to be convinced that everyone else will believe it too - that it will be a universally popular brand until the end of time.  Talk about a tough sell!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro#Coins_and_banknotes

At NameLab, we’ve been pondering brand death.

A brand is capitalized as what accountants call “goodwill” - the dollar value of the brand to the corporation that owns it (and pays you).

Goodwill is no trivial matter - it represents more than a billion dollars of what Tata Motors paid for Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008.

In simple terms, goodwill is a combination of the “footprint” of a brand (how many people perceive it, and what values it embodies) multiplied by buyers’ willingness to pay a premium for those values.

So what should you do when, through no fault of your own, the great brand you live for dies?

Unfortunately, this isn’t an abstract question.

In the face of macroeconomic headwinds, it is conceivable that Rolls-Royce and Bentley (among the most valuable brands on the planet) will be unable to sell enough cars to keep factories and dealerships open.

Classifieds in big-city newspapers may soon feature columns of no-sensible-offer-refused Silver Ghosts and Continentals offered by newly-unemployed hedge fund managers and down-at-the-heels property brokers.

The in-your-face conspicuous wealth display of such cars may generate unpleasant reactions from out-of-work crowds on urban streets.

Companies may be unwilling to face questions about $400,000 executive sedans at otherwise bleak annual meetings.

In such a situation, what can a brand group do to maximize the economic value of a dying brand?

It’s an interesting problem for which there’s no brand management template. The obvious solution - hanging the Bentley marque on an ordinary luxury sedan - would permanently vaporize its ultra-luxe panache.

For no other reason than it’s an intriguing brand issue, we’ve imagined strategies to preserve some of the capital value of a brand with one foot in the grave - but these are so radical that presenting them to an executive committee might be a memorable experience.

Because of advertising focused on corporate source value (buy it because it’s a Sony) rather than on individual product features (buy it because it has a 37” screen), the identities of large Japanese companies are household names worldwide.

To a Japanese, their names are quite straightforward - often derived from eponymy or simple cultural symbolism. Why is the tv, audio, pc and mobile phone maker named Sharp? Because it’s first product was an “ever-sharp” mechanical pencil.

To an American, the identities of these electronics and auto giants would be interesting and comprehensible if a simple crib sheet were available.

Luckily, there is. To see for yourself, click Here

Unless your product addresses an age-specific demographic, like buyers of anti-wrinkle cream or family sedans, 18-29 year olds are the default bull’s eye of most new brand targeting.

Driven by internet and music language, the everyday English of this age cohort is changing rapidly.  These changes affect responses to product and service names today, and we believe they threaten the viability of existing brands in personal-identity driven categories like beverages, personal grooming, tobacco, and even automobiles.

What’s going on?

To see how language is changing among 18-29 year olds, check out the names of their children.

Like brand names, a child’s name is a proper noun.  The new names (as opposed to traditional names like Michael, Daniel, and James) an age cohort chooses for its children are powerful indicators of what they like and, far more important, how they identify “ours” as opposed to “theirs.”

The phonetic and notational brevity that characterizes the language of young adults is dramatically visible in the minimalist baby names they choose. These days, Daniel, Michael, and Sarah play with Ema, Jaq, Kol, Kyl, Lu, Ty, and Zak in preschool.

As “short and tight” defines “my language” from “my parents’ language,” selling Maybelline eyeliner or Impreza sedans to this generation is an uphill battle. To young adults, a long, loose name like Maybelline or Impreza says, “It’s not for me.”

With generational savvy and consumer research, some marketers have figured it out. Honda has a model for this audience called Fit. Shiseido has a brand of cosmetics for young women named ZA.

Smart marketers will follow suit.

Contrary to brand orthodoxy, we have long believed that brands are organic.

Your brand’s footprint is constantly changing…altered by your input, by customer experience, by competing brands and by the ever-changing world we inhabit.

Unprecedented changes in the global economy are reshaping consumer behavior and their relationship to brands. Now, more than at any recent time, it’s important to re-examine how you define, manage and communicate your brand.

A timely study, “U.S. Economy and Its Impact on Americans” by Olson Zaltman Associates, provides insights that could help. Using metaphors to create stories, it looks beyond what consumers say…probing the unconscious anxiety that influences their behavior.

More than simply illuminating, the metaphors provide a tool that could help reframe your dialogue with consumers.

Have a look.

http://www.olsonzaltman.com/ZMET_Study_on_the_US_Economy.pdf

Making a company or product name is like building a stone wall.  The stones are the morphemes and words of the English language. Often they seem craggy and unbalanced - unwilling to fit together into a cohesive and coherent noun that will stand out in thought and speech.

At NameLab, we know the history of most of the word elements we assemble in the course of a name development project.  Such knowledge helps predict how the new word will be pronounced and understood - and what emotional affect it might have.

This short article by Suzanne Kemmer on the Rice University website condenses the entire history of English into a few hundred words.  It contains no linguistic jargon. Nothing important is left out.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/history/

The world has changed since Coke and Xerox and IBM completed their respective world brand systems by posting billboard-scale logos at the centers of Asian cities 30 years ago.

Communications channels are more numerous today.  Urban citizens of every commercially significant country are plugged into myriad media channels…from digital posters on taxicabs to satellite tv and the internet.

There’s so much competing media noise in Ulan Bator and Hobart and Capetown that the new generation of world brands…companies with the ideas, performance, quality, and operating scale to join (or supplant) the world brands that emerged from the integration of global commerce in the late 20th century…find it daunting to carve out a world brand position in the minds of the billions of humans their products and services touch.

At this moment, such companies as Tata (autos:India), Lenovo (technology:China), and Cipla (drugs:India) have the size, strategies, and iron will to attain the benefits of world brand status on both sales and equities.

But the cost and complexity of carving out a brand position amidst the howling cacophony of media and messages bombarding 21st century humans will, we at NameLab expect, lead to exciting new concepts of branding.

Conventionally, the 20th century world marketer downplayed his home nation in brand identity…seeking to make his product “a citizen of the world” rather than natively British or Chinese or American.

But in the ever more complex perceptual matrix of 21st century branding, a company’s home nation can convey useful and unarguable character attributes which could contribute to the company’s strengths. The 21st century world brander may adopt a denotative - the Chinese flag for Yi Quan (discipline of mind) or the Russian bear (strength and persistence) - or connotative (Roman alphabet notation of phonetically Chinese or Russian words) symbols of national character as a “where we come from” element of 21st century brand identity.

Developed before Java and Flash and lively digital banners and signs, the signatures of existing world brands are static and shallow.  In the 21st century, we can animate colors, digits, geckos or blinking eyeballs in brand identity…using kinetic choreography to define ourselves while reflexively repositioning existing static brands as yesterday’s news.

However the new world brands do it, they won’t do it like Toyota or Schweppes or Nokia do it today.

We think it will be fun to watch.

As you read this, a clever car manufacturer is working feverishly on a “can’t miss” new model for the U.S. market - a simplified car. No navigation computer, no sunroof, no digital displays, no tv screens, big round dials, detent knobs that click when the heater is actuated.

A smart food company is designing packages for simple breakfast cereals, corn flakes, wheat flakes, rice flakes, and so forth. No frosting, no berry puffs, no cartoon characters, just whole grain cereal in a package that looks like real food is inside.

A savvy mobile phone maker has prototyped a phone that just remembers numbers and makes calls. No camera, no web browser, no global positioning system, no music downloads, a ringer that sounds like a phone.

In the past decade, many types of products have become so over-featured that consumers find them laughably (or painfully) difficult to use. To take advantage of this opportunity, simplified products - simprods - are on the way.

While new companies will surf into a few categories on the simprod tsunami, existing marketers will launch most of the forthcoming wave of simprods - but we don’t expect these to be extensions of existing brands.

For trust and traceable heritage a source identity like Nissan, Kellogg’s or Samsung will be displayed somewhere, but a simprod brand name should exemplify its definitive quality… Car One, Just Oats, Fõnlet.

Simprods are on the horizon in categories as diverse as tv sets, tampons, cosmetics and retailing itself. (The vulnerable Achilles tendon of Wal-Mart’s gigantic heel is the complexity of the superstore shopping experience.)

Think your brand is safe? Think again.