Naming Process
Zenzu online Oriental Furniture store is about to branch out with a new website focused on solid wood doors handcrafted by a Chinese furniture supplier in the Zhejiang province. As yet we have not settled on a brand name or logo for the company and as with the naming procedure for the Oriental furniture business the process is proving to be an arduous task. Perhaps we are being a little too perfectionist in placing too much importance on a name, but it is something that we could be stuck with for many years and is somehow feels central to the marketing message that needs to be conveyed. The current process has served as a reminder of the methods we had to resort to in order to find a suitable name for the oriental furniture business. The first method is of course to sit and brainstorm brand names off the top of the head. However, unless you are of a particularly creative bent, it is surprisingly difficult to make the brain think laterally and focus seems to keep looping back to some relatively narrow confines. Having struggled with this method we decided that the Chinese furniture name choice needed a catalytic input from elsewhere. Firstly we tried the names of Chinese Kings and Chinese place names, and then we tried Chinese pinyin translations of classic English home furnishings nomenclature such as living, live, design, etc.
With a selection of almost 200 different pinyin words and goodness knows how many combinations that were filter through a spreadsheet we decided primarily to focus on something that simply had the most apposite sound to it; then hoping, given the type of names that were on the list that the combination would have a comprehensible and appropriate meaning. An added complication was that pinyin does not have an entirely intuitive pronunciation for English speaking peoples; thus, names that sounded fantastic pronounced correctly in the Putonghua mother tongue had an entirely different aural outcome when pronounced with a phonetic English language intonation.
We finally settled on a group of words which although not too imaginative seemed to conjure up the correct image for the niche Chinese furniture image that needed to be conveyed. Among these words were “Zen” which has obvious positive oriental connotations in the English language, Zhen meaning “really” and ‘Zhu’ or loosely changed to suit the English tongue ‘Zu’, meaning to live. We actually stumbled across the name of an ancient king Zhen-zu and having changed this to Zenzu we had a name which also meant “Pearl” any very loosely “To really live”. First and foremost the name was easy to pronounce by native English speakers, it conjured up images of the Eastern world, and also, rather fortuitously had a triple meaning all relevant to the marketing slant required for oriental furniture. After a lot of hard work we had our brand name.
Following a similar process for wooden doors we are hoping that the Chinese furniture brand naming methodology will save us a bit of time and effort. Our focus this time will be on Greek and Latin nomenclature for such words and phrases as “open door”, “gate”, “artisan”, “wood”, “forest”, “tree” etc. We don’t expect the process to be quick and easy but hopefully more efficient than our first effort for the oriental furniture market!
