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?

Retailing had a good long run.  It was fun while it lasted.  But it’s over.

A world where few purchases are made at physical stores?

Think about it…

-Consumers learn about products in great detail from manufacturer or etailer sites, with ratings, cautions, and opinions at increasingly wiki-like mass-input product info sites.

-The declining world economy (a long-term situation economists now call “the new normal”) is diminishing the scale of retailing.  For cost efficiency, there are fewer SKUs – soon we’ll have to make do with 30 styles of red stilettos rather than 300.

-Conspicuous consumption has become uncivil, our new lifestyle is “blending in” rather than “keeping up with the Joneses”.  To quote a line from a previous LabNotes: In this new pattern of social behavior,   profligacy has become…thinking hard here…what’s a word that combines “dumb” and “impolite”?

-Delivery systems like USPS, UPS, and FedEx have become more efficient as they’ve scaled up to meet home-delivery demand.

-Daily food no longer requires bought and stockpiled ingredients…these days it’s take-out, delivery, or eat at chain feed troughs.

-Complex, fast-evolving electronic products are far better suited to internet sales than retailing.  (Other than the Apple Store, part of a uniquely closed products and services ecosystem, mall electronics stores are fading away.)

-Mobile phones that transact with vending machines will cause those machines to proliferate.  Because every consumer will have a mobile phone, they’ll buy picture hooks, pantyhose and pajamas from a nearby machine.

-As retail margins and sales volumes have waned, corporate managers have been cutting costs: dimmer lighting, fewer window cleanings and tightening the wage and benefit screws on store employees.  So the register clerk you’ve waited longer to come face to face with is more likely to be the type of passively hostile, minimum-wage “sales associate” you’ll buy your next shoes at Zappos.com to avoid.

Now for the good part (for us brand pros anyway).  On the internet, your brand is the universal icon of what you are and what you sell.  Without the distraction of adjacent shelves of similar stuff, that icon is pure and potent on its web page.

Never has branding – especially the “good behavior” that underpins online brand value – been more important.

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: