That device in your pocket is smart but it’s no longer a phone.

As name guys, what to call it interests us.  “Phone” is wrong because person-to-person voice communication is a shrinking part of smartphone usage. Voice calling will soon be demoted to “an app” alongside Angry Birds and Find A Pizza.

In Japan, text messaging alone accounts for more smartphone usage than voice calls.  This trend was kick-started by NTT Docomo (the leading service provider with a 50% market share), who bundled unlimited texting into every account at the launch of its i-mode service on the smart handset below in 1999.

On a level voice-text playing field, the Japanese consumer opted for texting.

In the U.S., tariffs and rules remain tilted toward voice. Cellphone providers see themselves as “phone companies” – perhaps reflecting the views of senior telecom execs who learned the business in the halcyon days before Ma Bell was rent asunder by deregulators run amok.

The decline of voice calls is easy to understand.  Voice is “synchronous communication” – both parties must be willing and able to talk and listen at the same moment in time.

Text, mail, and just about every other act of socialization possible on your smartphone are “asynchronous”.  Each party reads, writes, or whatevers at their convenience.

So the smartphone is not a phone. Pocket computer is accurate but uninspired.  iPhone is inspired but proprietary and (forgive us Steve) inaccurate.

What to call that thing in your pocket?  The need for a new generic word cries out to us at NameLab.  It’s not a job – alas, the English language is not a paying client – but we’re on it like brown on rice (this is California, after all).

Your ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Science author James Gleick (Chaos, Genius, Faster) recently published The Information, a history and analysis of the systems humankind has created to comprehend our world.

It’s a brilliant book (someone will eventually find another adjective to describe Mr. Gleick’s works) that includes Two Wordbooks, a chapter devoted to historical linguistics.  This isn’t the intellectually radiant heart of the book (that would be the chapter on memes), but as linguists it floats our boat.

Beyond wondering why it never occurred to any of us that there was a pre-alphabetized world (with sequential alphabets but without the idea of using them to organize lists), the chapter seems to bear upon the management of identity in packaged goods marketing.

It tells the tale of Robert Cawdrey, a village priest who published a book in 1606 “for the benefit and helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull persons…whereby they may more easily understand many hard English wordes which they shall heare or reade in Scriptures, Sermons, or elsewhere…”

While this wasn’t the first book of English words, it was the first alphabetized dictionary.  The concept of organizing any list by notational sequence (a, b, c…) surely occurred to someone before Cawdrey, but this is the first recorded instance that has survived (via a single copy of the book in an Oxford University library).

Are we proposing that Dannon alphabetize its yogurt flavors in supermarket chill cases?  Maybe we are.

Gleick’s book is about the importance of information to human behavior.

Wine marketing is afflicted by weak information structure.  It’s clear that the chaos of wine identity drives consumers to other, more comprehensible beverage categories.

It seems impossible to us that the same eyes and brains won’t prefer a better-organized brand to a disorderly one.

Do you market soups? Detergents? Painkillers? Tampons?

Is your shelf of subtypes more clearly organized than the other guy’s?

This wordless café sign in a stairwell on a Fukuoka alley may reveal an earthquake fault under Starbucks’ business model.

In Japan, as in America, Starbucks stores are so pervasive and consistent that they define the coffee urban experience.  That sounds great…at first glance.

A small café like this one is often a one-man operation run by a young owner who knows the young adult audience by being part of it.  Gaze at the sign for a moment and think about what the guy pulling espressos upstairs was thinking when he designed it.   Such a place doesn’t advertise.  The sign is its only way of attracting customers. What’s message did he choose to bring them in?

We think the sign says “not Starbucks” in no uncertain terms…and we suspect that this message attracts young consumers who think Starbucks coffee tastes fine but find the Starbucks experience boring because it is and (in their adult years) has always been the same.

In the café biz, Starbucks is a high-overhead retailer. They need a premium price to pay the rent.  Us packaged goods guys know that coffee is coffee – the price premium derives from the experience.

It’s not a comfortable question for NameLab, but there’s  enough weight on the “no” side of the scales to make it necessary to ask.

Today’s 30+ adult has spent maybe 15 years using the internet to learn about everything from sex to laundry detergent. These are the core consumers we all chase after.  Their attitude toward laundry detergents is converging on “there’s not enough difference to justify a premium price for a specific brand”.

Shoppers aren’t abandoning brands wholesale.  Even among savvy consumers, comfortable familiarity moves the orange Tide package from the shelf to the shopping cart.  But most packaged goods marketers face steady consumer migration to store brands and generics.  While the shelf view is pretty, all the fish seem pretty much the same.

This doesn’t seem to be a temporary effect of hard times.  It showed up in segment research in the 70′s; grew some in the 80′s; accelerated in the 90′s; and shows no indication to slow down in this century.   It’s not merely a U.S. market phenomenon.  At NameLab, we don’t have access to data to suggest it’s worldwide, but we’ve observed similar consumer behavior in Japan.

Because defensive strategies are the order of the day, you find more and more national brands at far-less-than-retail prices in Wal-Mart, Costco and other discount retailers.

Offense would be innovation.  Not “new lemon zest” in soap products, but meaningful new features and radical product ideas.

Package goods isn’t dead, it just needs a few companies like Apple to get consumers interested in brands based on important new products.

So the internet is disrupting conventional retailing structures.

Ho hum. So what else in new?

Infrequently, we stumble across something that demonstrates how our electronic nervous system can evolve a new business model that solves important problems for producer and consumer.  Better product, better distribution, and (we assume) a nice profit for those with the smarts and the guts to try something more complex than re-selling SuperBowl trivia.

The case in point is CleanFish Alliance – a company that sets standards for producing high-quality, eco-friendly “artisanal seafood” – helps members meet those standards; helps manage distribution; and directs restaurant buyers and quality-driven consumers to sustainable sources for these products.

It’s a new and important business model potentiated by the internet.

And no, we didn’t make the name.  Wish we had, though.  It couldn’t be better.

Have a look at their site at CleanFish Seafood:

As media advertising fades away, the value of a clearly defined brand grows.  In our not-so-humble opinion, McInhenny’s Tabasco Sauce is a paragon of clear, consistent, and forceful branding.

Launched in 1868 by Edmund McIlhennny, the product is a hot sauce made from tabasco peppers, a Mexican variety planted on an island in South Louisiana.  From the beginning, McIlhenny realized the value of brand identity. His first batch was sent to stores in cologne bottles from New Orleans warehouse.  The package remains unique and evocative:

This 19th century McIlhenny print ad is an icon of graphics arts education.  Imagine its effect as a point-of-purchase display alongside today’s bland supermarket labels:

Whenever we get to thinking we’re the smartest guys on the block, somebody comes up with an idea that we wish we had had.

In this case it’s a company called Solve Media. They’ve developed a system to replace that distorted letter sequence called a CAPTCHA that you must interpret and type in to prove you’re human rather than a bot in order to register at a website.

So, rather than squinting at:

You can be carefully copying out something useful and memorable like:

The slogan appears in the CAPTCHA box in display typography masking a non-visible distortion element that defeats the bots.  Carefully reading and typing the slogan is supposed to embed a meme somewhere in your cranial file of “important things to remember if I ever need to hire an identity consultant” – and we suspect that it does.

We assume that the company will soon be selling CAPTCHA placements to savvy internet marketers worldwide.

We didn’t even know that CAPTCHA is an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart until we discovered all of this on the singularly informative Fast Company website:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1690163/effective-ads-to-replace-captchas?partner=rss

If you’ve been wondering how the widely-distributed Newman’s Own food brand would fare after the death of Paul Newman in 2008, here’s an update – it’s doing fine.

Founded in 1982 by Newman and a partner, the company eventually produced products ranging from salad dressing to lemonade.  Still privately held, its sales are estimated to be running at better than $100 million a year, with no drop off since Mr. Newman’s demise.

Since Mr. Newman was a screen actor – a celebrity rather than a food icon like Colonel Sanders or Wolfgang Puck – many marketing professionals expected his brand to wane once he was permanently off the public radar.

But a combination of early dedication to healthful ingredients and Mr. Newman’s promise to “donate every cent of my share of after-tax profits to charity” has created an enviable level of consumer loyalty to the brand.

It’s a clear example of the  fact that in this century brand behavior influences consumers more than claims.  Newman’s behaviors  (healthful ingredients, charitable giving)  add a positive patina to the consumers’ ideas about what a “brand” is.

Bravo!

What’s the capital value of your website?  Why would you want to know?

Why?  Increasingly, the capital value of a website is a meaningful part of the capital value of a brand.  When a company, division or brand is sold the website is often a big part of what the buyer wants to acquire.

We are occasionally engaged as “a neutral 3rd party” to offer an opinion on the value of a brand in negotiation or (never again!) litigation.  We consider a website to be an important element of a brand’s footprint on the world, but haven’t run across a method to value sites in real dollars.

Thus we were interested to learn that a research company called Japan Brand Strategy recently surveyed close to 20,000 internet users to estimate the value of various brand-related websites in Japan.

Valuation factors included number of site visits; what visitors did on the site; why they visited; opinions of the of the site’s contents, appearance, ease of use and information quality; whether they made a purchase or researched purchases; and so forth. Japan Brand Strategy then assigned yen values to these factors and came up with a list of Japan brand-related websites by value.

By their estimate, the most valuable sites in Japan are Panasonic – ¥81 billion, Honda – ¥66 billion, mobile phone company NTT docomo – ¥65 billion, airline ANA – ¥58 billion and Toyota – ¥57 billion.  (At 80 yen per U.S. dollar, a billion yen equals $125 million.)  For details of the survey and a list of the most valuable 200 sites, click Japan Brand Strategy Web Survey.

NameLab’s two cents worth: To marketers, site value seems primarily related to internet and/or sales at other locations (supermarkets, dealerships) mediated in some way by a site visit.

Since the majority of airline ticket sales are made online, it’s hard for us to believe that any U.S. site has more dollar value than the internet hub of a major airline.

Despite sporadic attempts at branding, meat and fish and produce are largely generic…when prices are more or less equal, the consumer buys the t-bone or tuna or tarragon that looks best.  So when consumers suddenly cleave one of these fresh food categories in twain, it’s worth a marketer’s attention.

With the possible exception of cut flowers, no purchase decision has been more immovably focused on “looks, feels, smells fresh” than choosing from a case of fish.  Until now.

As technology and industrial fishing depletes the oceans, fish sold in U.S. supermarkets has quietly shifted from mostly wild caught to mostly farm-raised.  The “farms” range from cages moored in saltwater bays to feedlot-style arrays of machine-tended rectangular pools; to marshes, ponds, and rice paddies stocked with efficient, hardy catfish and tilapia.

Surprisingly (as source is feebly displayed in “8-pt myopic” on typical supermarket fish department labels), many consumers care a lot about where it swam before it got to the frying pan.  Her interest is demonstrated by an unarguable behavior – she votes with her charge card.

In the past few months, a yawning gulf has appeared in fish pricing.  Around here, when farmed salmon (which looks as good in the package as its wild brethren) sells for $12.99/lb, wild salmon costs $19.99 or more.

A case can be made that the wild animals taste better, or are healthier food, or are eco-friendlier – but we don’t think any of these explains the dramatic price divergence. We believe that a new branding mechanism has arisen…branding by consumers.

We’re thinking about it.  You should too…