Are Manufacturers Running Out of Names for Their Phones?

It was just the other day that I was bragging to telling my friend on how harsh the Xperia Neo is... OK I have access to all the Sony Ericsson phones but do I say. Thank you Sony Ericsson. Back to the story, she seemed to be excited by the fact that a pal of hers was to get her an HTC and I must say I envied her at first. I had to ask of the name and she said "I don't know ehhh the latest!" bwahahaha. I guess she was just not sure/ blonde but who am I to judge, It's getting a hell lotta difficult to come up with phones and any person who has ever tried to come up with a name for anything will believe me.

Well its rumored that HTC is running out of names for its smart phones. This should not be a surprise given the fact that some companies quit a hit just by the fact that they got their product names right. Lets look at companies like Apple with its Aple i...brand, Safaricom with it's M-Pesa brand and even political parties such as ODM (impartial). They got it right with the name and they always a point of reference in there area of specialty. You might as well be having a classic example of success of failure as a result of product name and please feel free to share with me. Just imagin of a hard hitting Japanese name with a weird Swahili meaning with the same spellings and you will know what I am talking about. Microsoft did suffer the same fate with its not so successful Zune music player.

One of the biggest complains about HTC over the past year or so has been that HTC releases too many phone models in the market, for anyone to treat any single model seriously anymore unfortunately this has been the same case with Sony Ericsson and Nokia. One of their upcoming phones, which was supposed to be a quad core Tegra 3 phone, was first named Edge, then Endeavor, and now we hear it will be called Supreme.

I don’t know whether this is happening because they were not happy with the original names, or because they aren’t allowed to use those names, just like Asus is not allowed to use the Transformer name. Either way, this is also a symptom of the fact that HTC releases too many phones in the market.

Every company needs to plan major releases like every 6 months or so for every price range. And those prices ranges should have a difference of at least $100 between them.  Even this way, they’ll probably end up with at least 6-12 models per year, which I believe is more than enough. Do they really need to release more than 2 high-end models per year, when new chips already come up around every 6 months?

Releasing phones faster than that just means you’ll release multiple models at the same price range, with more or less the same specs. That’s very boring for the consumers, and it just dilutes their marketing and brand power, because it creates more confusion for the consumers in the market, and they have to split the marketing money for multiple models, which means fewer people will hear about their phones.

The fewer the models the stronger the brand and the easier the hustle of naming your product.

Below are some of the funniest logos that will justify my story and just for fun.