Name games: Microsoft by any other name would sell as well.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy - Book Review

The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy

By Steve Rivkin & Fraser Sutherland

Oxford University Press, $20.00

It's odd that a book about the naming of products would have so misleading a rifle, but The Making of a Name: The Inside Story of the Brands We Buy has bait-and-switch written all over it. Ever since Theodore White poked his notebook behind the scenes of presidential campaigns, the magic words "the making of" have promised readers a definitive explanation of how brainy, stalwart, hard-working people accomplish something of importance--in this case, perhaps, how the people at General Mills thought up the name Wheaties or hipsters at Apple conjured up the moniker iPod. The portentous phrase "Inside Story" that authors Steve Rivkin and Fraser Sutherland have stuck into the subhead certainly reinforces that impression. Well, there's no inside stow, In fact, there's no outside story, no beginning, middle, or end. There are not even any characters. It's hard to think of another title that so misses its mark.

The book really should have been called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Naming Products, Along With Much Fort Didn't. It is chock-full of information and examples, indefatigably packaged into types and themes and categories and other time-honored social science boxes that suck the life out of even the most fascinating subjects. The writers--two serious, bespectacled gentlemen sporting distinguished facial hair--tell us that there are so many brand names in America that our landscape is actually ... wait for it ... a brandscape. They apply labels to various types of names: initialized and acronymic names (IBM, Alcoa), allusive names (the Mach3 razor), arbitrary names (Apple), and the coined names currently in vogue (Agilent, Lucent). They write about how names influence--and are influenced by--the other modes of language, and how namers come up with names. "We've taken brand names apart ... auditioned the rhetoric of brandspeak ... circled and perhaps corralled the topic of brand names' symbolism ... sketched the long and short of creating lists of brand name and made name nominees." And so, so much more. They even invoke morphemes and lexemes, and, just as you're inching for the door, they launch themselves into some of the more fascinating lacunae of trademark law. At least they didn't show home movies.

It's not all boring. There are, for example, several pages in which the authors discuss the perils of...