Whats's in a Name?

Johnson & Johnson is one of the country’s largest pharmaceutical companies and is among the best-known brands in the world.

But last year, the company announced it would split its pharmaceutical business from its consumer products division into two publicly traded corporations. And since the pharmaceutical division will keep the Johnson & Johnson badge, the consumer products will exist under an umbrella company that, until corporate recently revealed its name, nobody had heard of.

According to AdWeek, J&J and its agency invested a great deal of time and trouble into coming up with the name, Kenvue. The project took some four months to complete, because it involves some of the biggest brands in the world, including Tylenol, Benadryl, Listerine and Band-Aid.

So how did they go about doing it?

The new company would immediately have a presence in more than 100 countries, which meant that its name couldn’t run afoul of existing trademarks in 10 different product classes in any of them. So there were lawyers doing trademark searches. Lots of them.

But what about the name itself?

Many of today’s best-known brands use made-up words that did not previously exist. Branding professionals try to be imaginative - combining words and parts of words to evoke feelings of trust and efficacy in customers.

Intel, for example, is a mashup of “integrated” and “electronics.” British telecom giant Vodafone pieced its name together from “voice,” “data” and “phone.”

Viagra is a mashup of “virility” and “Niagara." The name for cough remedy NyQuil arose from the union of “nighttime” and “tranquility.”

In assembling Kenvue, J&J took a similar approach. The brand name is a blend of “ken," a rarely used noun that means knowledge, and “vue,” the stylized spelling of “view.” J&J hopes the name will present the image of a seasoned company with an eye on the future.

The creation of a name that’s never existed before entails its own risks, however, and that led to the next major task facing J&J: making sure that "Kenvue" didn’t carry an absurd or offensive meaning when spoken in other parts of the world.

We’ve all heard the stories of how the Chevy Nova failed to sell in Mexico because Nova translated to “won’t go.” And how Pepsi’s “Come Alive” campaign flopped when Asian consumers interpreted it to mean that soft drinks help the dead rise from the grave.

J&J applied what it called “linguistic and cultural screenings” to Kenvue in 89 languages and dialects to make sure it wasn’t too difficult to pronounce and, more importantly, didn’t conjure coarse or foul suggestions.

Finally, since Kenvue’s portfolio will contain products that are already among the best known in the world - each with its own positive associations, the name for the corporate umbrella had to complement those brands.

Time alone will tell how well the new name works. Kenvue will become a standalone company in 2023.

Personally, I think it sounds like a washing machine from the 1950's.

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