, please enjoy this entertaining

dish from Eat My Words®...

As vending machine junkies, we were floored when Frito-Lay called us out of the blue. The salty snack giant was attracted to our whimsical style and fresh approach to naming, which is a great fit for their new flavors and products. With brands like Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos, Frito-Lay is the snack jackpot and we're thrilled to have them as a client. Of course our projects are super top secret, but we'll let you know when we can let the cat out of the potato chip bag.

 

We just named a new frozen yogurt chain Spoon Me. How cool is that?! Spoon Me is fun, evocative, memorable and has unlimited potential for promotions and merchandise. (Spoon Me pajamas anyone?) In fact, our client is sure they will earn more selling Spoon Me merchandise than yogurt. In addition to pj's, t-shirts, and bumper stickers, we suggested they revive spoon bracelets and sell them online with custom engraving. What high school girl wouldn't want a "Spoon Me, Babycakes," bracelet from her boyfriend?

 

What NOT to name your product or company. We're continually amazed that people trademark names that are spelled differently than they sound. In today's word-of-mouth world, what you hear is what you type in your browser, so it's imperative that your name is easy and intuitive to spell. Case in point: Takkle.com, a high school sports website. When Jeff says, "Yo Steve, check out Takkle.com," Steve hears "tackle" and when he types it in his browser, he lands at Bass Pro, a fishing tackle website. So Takkle loses a customer and Steve thinks Jeff is a dork. During a panel discussion at the recent MashUp teen marketing conference, Alexandra asked Takkle CEO David Birnbaum if, in hindsight, he would have chosen a name that was easier to spell. He said he would stick with Takkle, because among other things, "Made up words like Google are cool." (As you may know, Google is a real word.)  Proving Alexandra's point, RockYou.com founder Lance Tokuda jumped in and said that RockYou loses thousands of customers a day who type in "rocku." We wonder how often the Takkle guy has to say "that's Takkle with two K's," when he isn't sporting a Takkle baseball cap that he can point to.

 

Introducing Cake Financial. Easy. Money. We were asked to create a tagline for a new investing service called Portfolia, which doesn't exactly stand out in a sea of Wall Street websites. So we convinced them to let us rename the company. This easy-to-use site lets you check out the actual portfolios, watchlists and real-time trades of top investors and your family and friends. Plus you can see how you stack up against others, which is fun unless you suck in the market. And you can do it all safely, securely and anonymously. For free. It's cake. And that's what we named it - Cake. If you're an investor, check out the alpha version of this "social investing revolution."

 

Other names we're cooking up... A lot of our current naming gigs are for products that don't make you fat or drunk - like software, schools, and sportswear. We're doing name explorations for sound pioneer THX, Knowledge Learning Corporation, a luxury goods retailer, and lots of Web 2.0 start-ups. Of course we still have a lot of food on our plates including healthy snacks for kids and two new Star-kist products which we have to keep under wraps for now. Sorry, Charlie.

 

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, . And thanks for keeping us in mind when you need powerful, evocative, memorable names and taglines. To see more examples of our work, poke around our fun new website.

 

Alexandra & Sherry

Eat My Words

 

P.S. Remember, it's not who you know, it's who knows you, so thanks for not keeping us a secret from your friends and colleagues.