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Bostonians are famous for the "r"-lessness of their speech: Pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd. But online and in your hand, the "r" is making a comeback in product and company names for websites and mobile phones. Think Flickr, the popular online photo social community, and ROKR, Motorola's iTunes-enabled mobile charmer. You might say, then, that today's web and electronics marketers are "r"-ful, or at least their target audience is.
Marketing to Millenials
In the simplified view of the marketplace, yesterday's demographic groups like baby boomers and Generation Xers are creating product and company names for today's demographic group, the Millenials.
Born between 1980 and 2000, Millenials are numerous, and they spend: They are the largest consumer group in the history of the United States.
Raised on SMS (text messaging), IM (instant messaging), and an always-on broadband lifestyle, Millenials delight in secret code, brevity, and shortcuts in language. On their mobile phones, they use coded forms like "4.20" (marijuana) or initialisms such as WTF ("What the f***") to fool parents' eyes or to quickly share a mocking joke across a classroom.
They favor bravado, feigned or actual, and they share a coded language much like the secret argot of 18th-century criminal misfits. They are a sassy, diverse group, for whom mice are always plastic and webs rarely hold spiders.
Get "-er" done!
When we look at the "-er" suffix in English, we probably see one of two things: (1) the second degree of comparison (better, faster, stronger, louder); or (2) an agentive noun ending (doer, winner, player, talker). The two senses, if combined, provide strong identity when creating a name. The related suffix "-ster" is even stronger with its sibilant/plosive combination: consider Teamster, spinster, jokester.
Perhaps the most successful early iteration of online social software was Friendster, a place for a person (agent) to befriend someone. Several other "-er" communities have surfaced, for example, Revver and Grouper.
It's getting hot in -er! From "-er" to "r," courtesy of the Millenials
What have Millenials done to this tried and true naming strategy? Well, much like their IM style would suggest, they shorten. The "e" disappears in form but not in pronunciation, a boon for namers, who toil tirelessly to turn tongue twisters into trademarks. See Flickr and Frappr.
Not only do Millenials shorten, they also initialize and capitalize in their covert text messages. GTG means "got to go" while CUL8R means "see you later."
It's no wonder, then, why Motorola named its last three flagship mobile phones the way it did. The "e" is gone from RAZR. The vowels are missing entirely from SLVR. And ROKR is as hard to pronounce as ROTFL ("rolling on the floor laughing").
But Millenials as consumers are not turned off by vague—or even confusing—names. They enjoy blog debates concerning the correct pronunciation of Motorola's ROKR: Is it "rocker" or "roker"?
The outlook, or What's crackin' with my peeps?
Before marketing executives plunge headlong into a crash course in the sociolect (that's social dialect) of the millennial generation, it is worth noting that Millenials change linguistic styles as often as they do hairstyles. Vogue forms have a shelf life. It's OK to be a mom who embarrasses her child by misusing the word "crunk," but don't get caught naming the next mobile phone CRUNKR.
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