First I find out that F = ma only works some of the time. Then I get the news that the Sci-Fi Channel will now be called Syfy. I guess nothing lasts forever, even the immutable laws of physics.

IP lawyer wonk that I am, however, the first thought that popped into my pea brain was that the Sci-Fi move must have been spurred on by trademark considerations.

I was right.

However, if you work at a company that has to change its name for any reason (e.g. AIG), you don’t want to come right out and admit that you are doing so for some proletarian reason like “the new name is easier to trademark,” or “we helped to nudge the world towards financial cataclysm.” No, you need a good branding story, like this one:

Craig Engler, senior vice president and general manager of Sci Fi Digital , says the alien-looking word points the way to the future for the cable channel and its growing galaxy of web properties.

“It’s a brand that catches up with our programming,” Engler told Wired.com by phone. “It is our stake in the ground. Last year was tremendous for us, with Battlestar Galactica getting recognition as one of the best dramas on television. But I also judge our success by how much I see people in media and life use the word frak.”

Now that’s a frackin’ good story. Not the real reason for the rebranding decision, but a good story nonetheless.

This one’s pretty easy. The term “sci-fi” is generic and not easy to protect for the cable channel’s activities. The new word “syfy” is very easy to trademark and allows them to capitalize on the brand. Case closed.

If you scroll way down the article, past all the talk about new programming and pics of new shows, you finally get to this jewel:

A side bonus of the new name: “Syfy” can be trademarked.

Aha! I’m surprised it even got in the article at all. Seeing as how it was sufficiently buried, though, congrats to Mr. Craig Engler on selling his rebranding story. The company does seem to have learned the generic term trademark lesson, though:

The network has branched out online with sites bearing equally creative spellings: gaming blog Fidgit and gadget blog Dvice.

This does lead me to a China issue, though, in case you were wondering why I’m talking about a name change of a US cable channel (aside from the fact that I’m a nerd and it’s Sci-Fi).

Actually, it’s more of a Chinese language issue, and it has to do with phonograms versus ideograms. An example of the former would be the letters of the Latin alphabet, while an example of the latter are Chinese characters.

There is a tradition in the West, predating the Internet boom by many years, of inventing new words for branding/trademark purposes — ‘Xerox’ is a good example. Xerox was a fabulous brand, although the company eventually allowed the name to become a generic term through improper usage. Oops!

Made-up names became much more common in recent years with IT companies like Microsoft and YouTube. A phonogram-based language makes this easy, just string together some letters, prefixes, suffixes, etc. in a new combination, and you’ve got yourself a distinctive new name suitable for trademark protection.

This is a bit more difficult with an ideogram-based language. Sure, new words circulate in Chinese all the time, but they are limited to the application of existing words/characters to new concepts or stringing together several characters to approximate a particular sound (e.g. transliteration of a foreign term). This allows for a great deal of flexibility, although I would argue not as much as you get in a phonogram-based language.

Trademarks of course encompass a lot more than what are referred to as “word marks.” They can include artwork/logos, color, sound, smell, and shape, at least in some jurisdictions. But word marks remain extremely important as company and product names, arguably more important than logos.

As I’m neither a native Chinese speaker, nor a particularly diligent language student, I wonder what bona fide bilingual folks would say about branding options between English and Chinese (or any phonogram-based language versus one based on ideograms). Is Chinese less flexible with respect to branding choices? Has the Net boom brought us a lot of cool new company names or just 1,000s of names that include ’soft’ or ‘tech’? Any good examples of Chinese companies adopting made-up English words as names (on purpose)?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Intellectual Property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.