Local firms take risk in re-branding

A rash of name-changing swept through local companies in recent weeks. There's always a risk in such moves — will the new name resonate with customers or investors? Does it distinguish the firm from its rivals?

We called the best-named naming company we're aware of, Igor International in San Francisco, for reaction to these new monikers.

• Local icon Redhook Ale Brewery says it will combine with Portland's Widmer Brothers as Craft Brewers Alliance. The name "describes who we are. We're craft brewers, and we are an alliance. It may not be sexy, but it's quite concise," Kurt Widmer told Seattle Times reporter Melissa Allison.

"Could that be more dull?" asks Igor's senior brand strategist, Andy Valvur. He theorizes Craft Brewers Alliance "was a compromise, because of large egos. The Widmer Brothers didn't want to disappear into Redhook and Redhook wasn't going to become Widmer Brothers, so they ended up with something cold. Sounds kind of like a trade union or a trade association for brewers."

• Labor Ready, the Tacoma-based provider of temporary manual labor is now TrueBlue. It's meant to evoke the blue-collar nature of the jobs.

"Very cool ... very American-sounding, hard-working, apple pie," Valvur says. "It straddles the line of evocative and experiential." Those are two of his firm's four categories of name types, the others being functional/descriptive and invented. Qualms about TrueBlue: It's also the name of JetBlue's mileage program, and American Express "really owns the Blue landscape" with programs like Blue Cash, "so it's been done."

Valvur isn't impressed with the new brands chosen by some smaller firms here:

• Mobile Web information company Zenzui, which was spun out of Microsoft, has been renamed Zumobi.

"My question here is, what's the difference?" Valvur says.

• Meanwhile, publicly traded biotechnology company Biomira, which plans a move from Canada to the Seattle area, has become Oncothyreon. The name comes from the Greek words for cancer and shield.

"From a relatively bland name to one that is almost unpronounceable! Brilliant!" Valvur says. "There must have been a committee and focus groups involved."

• Finally, Veritas Solutions renamed itself SARS after recently combining with a public shell company.

It's an acronym for the company's asset-tracking business, Secure Asset Reporting Services; shareholders were told management "believes that the name change communicates the company's intent to adequately brand the company and describe its image."

Unfortunately, the choice seems to violate a cardinal rule of branding — don't name your company after an epidemic. What if Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome sweeps through Asia again like it did in 2003?

Valvur recalls Ayds, "a diet candy that was doing well and then, when AIDS hit, they started losing business. They tried to re-brand as DietAyds but eventually pulled the product."

Clise Properties still working on sale

Back in June the Clise family, Seattle pioneers, put more than 12 acres of prime real estate in Seattle's Denny Triangle up for sale, saying it was looking for a buyer with the chops to design and build a master-planned community on the scale of New York's Rockefeller Center.

Five months have passed since that blockbuster announcement. Clise Properties President Richard Stevenson offers this status report:

After fielding numerous offers, he says, Clise has narrowed the list of potential buyers to four or five "who have the capability of developing the whole property as it ought to be done."

It is hoped that a sale — if there is one — will come in the first quarter of 2008.

But that's a big if, Stevenson adds, given the nation's financial jitters.

He repeats what the company has said all along: "If we don't get the right price and the right buyer, we won't sell. We don't have to."

Clise's 12 acres sit between South Lake Union, Belltown and the downtown retail district, in a triangle bounded by Fifth Avenue, Denny Way and Westlake Avenue. The properties are mostly parking lots now, but they are zoned for office and condo towers of up to 40 stories.

— Eric Pryne

Software meters cost of meetings

PayScale, a Seattle company that compiles comparative salary data using online information from users, has come up with an intriguing new software toy that calculates the "time is money" equation for meetings.

If you have a laptop with wireless access, think of this as something to do while in a meeting. Or maybe a tool to help excuse you from going in the first place.

Tell Meeting Miser you've got three sales associates and their Seattle district-sales manager sitting down for a chat, and the site suggests that your face time will cost the boss $1.54 per minute.

Add a CEO, and suddenly the meter starts running at nearly twice that rate — $2.78 a minute.

One hour of five sales associates and the district manager listening to the VP of sales rattle on about something? That's about $185 in payroll expense, according to Payscale's estimate.

A click on the little people icons shows what salaries the software is using for its calculations; users can adjust the numbers.

The Web gadget also has some handy features — start, pause and stop buttons; an alarm that can notify when the session hits a certain cost; and, for registered users, the option of saving the data — so they can start it up again at next week's staff meeting.

— Rami Grunbaum — rgrunbaum@seattletimes.com or 206-464-8541