What’s in a (badly spelt) brand name?

Matthias Oesterle/Alamy Live News via Reuters

When I was editing a Dubai-based magazine covering the advertising industry, a new agency launched with a name that began with ‿ a symbol known as an undertie. 

That is a punctuation mark so fiendishly difficult to type on a word processor that it generally has to be copied and pasted from somewhere else. It doesn’t even exist in most typefaces. 

Consequently, we preferred to leave it out when writing about the agency in question. Its founder would get in touch, claiming it was his brand’s house style; we would explain that it was our style to use commonplace characters and not give brand names special treatments.

On the rare occasions we did have to include the undertie, our designer would have to rotate a parenthesis bracket 90 degrees and move it to the base line of the text.

Every publication has a style guide containing rules such as whether “%” is written as a symbol, “percent” or “per cent”, whether job titles take initial capitals, and when it is acceptable to use “over” instead of “more than”. The standard rule for brand names is to use an initial capital on each word, and remove any punctuation marks. This is to keep things consistent, coherent and comprehendible for readers.

But brands – and their branding and PR agencies – like to feel special. Especially those in the creative industries.

A production company in Dubai likes to append the º degrees symbol to its name, and we would have the same arguments.

Then there are the companies that go fully lower-case, such as adidas and – in the Mena region – stc (Saudi Telecom Company). From an editing point of view, they get lost in the flow of text. And how do you start a sentence with one of those names?

Publications themselves aren’t immune to brand-name vanity. The UK-based design magazine Wallpaper* (created by Tyler Brûlé, who later founded hipster manbag monthly Monocle) has an asterisk that sends you looking for a footnote.

The originators of disemvowelment, like Flickr and Tumblr, are all short of a letter or two

What do punctuation marks in brand names do for the way they are spoken? The exclamation mark at the end of Yahoo! suggests that a reader should shout the web portal’s name.

What about Etisalat’s e&? (The question mark is a real question mark. The company is e&. But without the full stop. See?!) Perhaps the telco took its lead from Strategy&, the consulting unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC – don’t get me started on that capitalisation). It was once called Booz Allen Hamilton, then Booz & Company (ampersands are generally tolerated as a substitute for “and” in company names). It can’t even use its whole name in its website address, which is strategyand.com.

Strategy& is one of several consulting and financial companies that have rebranded to something quirky. In 2021, Standard Life Aberdeen became Abrdn, which sounds like a Doric dating app.

Those rebrands feel like a dad trying to be cool. They come a couple of decades after the originators of disemvowelment, 2000s tech companies. Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr, Scribd, Blendr and Mndfl are all short of a letter or two. Even Twitter began as Twttr. Say what you like about Musk; at least you can spell X. (However, he did name his child X Æ A-12, so let’s not let him off the hook.)

It’s not only actual brands that have odd names. Celebrities – who are themselves brands – have been messing with naming conventions since forever. The Weeknd is missing a vowel; will.i.am has a shift key that doesn’t work and a full-stop key that misfires; and Madonna and Zendaya have no surnames – although Meat Loaf was adamant that his name was two words.

Few stars went further than Prince. Do you remember when he was called Tafkap? That stood for The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, because he had changed the way his name was written to a bespoke symbol: the medical character for female, bisected by a trombone. He later reverted to his original mononym, perhaps in the interests of search engine optimisation.

The reasoning behind brands choosing non-standard names is often unfathomable. Some reasons must be practical. Twitter held off buying twitter.com until it became a success. Then it made the birdwatching enthusiast who had owned the URL a rich man.

Other brands think names look better without vowels, or with additional punctuation.

And some just want to be extra cool and unique, but there’s always a whiff of insecurity behind this need to peacock. Those brands tend to make the most fuss when editors don’t respect their special style.

Odd names can be hard to search online; try Googling will.i.am. However, the web is getting smarter, and a search for e& no longer returns hits on someone called Molly.

Unconventional names may seem daft but they still have us talking. And all publicity is good pblcty, right?

Austyn Allison is an editorial consultant and journalist who has covered Middle East advertising since 2007