The response to our I’ll Give You $50 for a Worse Brand Name Than Knol contest was great! We had exactly 100 replies as of the this posting. Many were fantastic, but we had to choose. It was hard, so we felt we had to list a few honorable mentions first. Then we’ll get to the winner. The honorable mentions go to…
Comment #24: Erud
From the root erudition. Since the Google idea is that people write articles about stuff they know, and attach their name to the article. The writers are experts in a field, and can show off that expertise. Erudition implies bookish knowledge that is above an average person’s comprehension, so right away the name can give people some unease while at the same time stroke their egos. Are they really smart enough to be reading, let alone writing for this thing? But if you do write for it, doesn’t that make you somehow better than other people?
Now this name doesn’t have the soft ending like Knol, but it does have the advantage of sounding too hard; too short. Erud; sounds like rude.
Comment #37: Knowr
A forgettable derivative of the word “knowledge”, hurts your mouth to say, a shameless implementation of Domain Naming 2.0 ™, the domain is parked, etc, etc.; a categorically worse brand than “Knol”.
Comment #45: nuur
How about “Newer”. Maybe “Nuir” or “Nure”. Nope. I’ve got it. The name for our salon should be Nuur!
Bonus points for involuntarily sounding like a retarded person when you say it! : )
Comment #68: phamthe
Comment #95: Vaio
wtf.
AND THE WINNER IS…
#30: Whol
(As in: something that contains the whol of our knol-edge. Ahem.)
* Silent letter. Could be either W or H, depending!
* Starts and ends with weak sounds.
* Unclear pronunciation. Hole? Hahl? Hall? Wole? Wahl? Wall?
* Potential homonym for “hole”, which yields TONS of awful-sounding spoken constructions. “You got that from a (hole)?” “I’ve got a (hole).” “Hey, look at this (hole)!” “Stick that in your (hole)”.
* One letter away from Whor.
Congrats to Drew Thaler. You should receive an email shortly to get your payment details. Then we’ll send you $50.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
UPDATE! Being an honorable fellow Drew has opted to donate the prize money to Cleveland Scholarhip Programs to help educate children about the perils of terrible branding.
There are 7 Comments Leave A Comment
Nope. Palringo is still the worst brand name ever.
Viao is an abbreviation (stands for video audio integrated operation). Creative’s oddly named MuVo is also a sort of abbreviation. It means Musical Voyage.
Fake Steve Jobs probably had the funniest ‘interpretations’ of one of John Doerr’s start-up companies. I would agree that it ranks high on any ‘Worst Brand Name’ list.
http://iamnotstevejobs.blogspot.com/2006/08/speaking-of-john-doerr.html
http://www.miasole.com/
i dont care if its an (awful) acronym, Viao sounds like shit and is nearly unpronounceable. its a bit shocking that an entire line of fairly popular notebooks by such a major company would have such a shitty name. course, sony has never been known for the quality of their brand names*.
*walkman excluded.
@Frito: VAIO is more likely a backronym, which is when the start with the name and then feel that making into an acronym somehow justifies its bizarreness. And even if it is actually an acronym, it’s awful. I had no idea it was pronounced Vay-oh the first time I saw it. I actually didn’t know until I saw a commercial that mentioned the name. Bad idea.
I’m with everyone on the brand names, besides Vaio. What’s hard to pronounce about that?
You know who’s the WORST at branding? FOSS folks. For all their good work and intentions, they’re not great at winning hearts and minds.
Worst example: The free audio format “Ogg Vorbis” sounds like a word in Vogon poetry, or possibly a communicable disease.