Is That a Cell Phone in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

I have two eyes, a mouth, and people are always pushing my buttons. Who am I?

By design, the first to shout his answer to the riddle will be wrong. Reason being, the solution has no name—not one that can be enunciated, anyway.

Samsung recently announced a new low-level messaging phone, called the “ :) .” How the name is meant to be verbalized, we’re unsure; the Colon-parenthesis? The Smiley? The Happyface? For the remainder of this blog post, you make the call.

We can see the SNL skit unfolding now: customer, expressionless, approaches cell phone salesman and says, “Hi, I’m interested in the--,” [breaks into a closed smile]. Predictably, the salesman gives a questioning look that probes for more information; the two repeat this exchange several times with little progress. Enter Customer No. 2, a high-on-life, smile-flashing bottle of bubbles who is thinking about upgrading to the :) model, but the salesman insists that the store does not carry the Samsung :D. Customer No. 3 dips further into his depression when his request for the : / goes unmet, and Customer No. 4, heavily Botox-ed, is let down (though you could never know) when she hears that the : | is not in stock. By the conclusion of the spoof, all four customers leave carrying the cell phones they arrived with and the camera cuts to a zoom-out shot of the stockroom shelves lined amply with Samsung :) boxes. End scene.

Jokes aside, titling a product with a name made of punctuation marks has enough shortcomings to—sorry—wipe the smile off your face. From a naming perspective, the :) fails to meet The Naming Group’s core tenet: brand names must be timeless. Emoticons were presumably first conceived as recently as 1982, and given the rapidity of colloquial change there is a fair chance that the shorthand form of expression has already exceeded its half-life. We know that the slider-style phone is unlikely to be around forever, but the name in our opinion has already missed the emoticons-are-the-ish boat.

The :) cleverly sidesteps being judged on The Naming Group’s additional criteria. Traditionally, the team critiques names based on euphony and other mnemonic traits, neither of which the cell phone name possesses. Also integral to our list of great-name criteria is “stickiness,” which is a name’s ability to persist in consumers’ minds, enhancing recall and forging a connection between the name and the product itself. Lacking these imperative characteristics, the indistinct name fails to take advantage of a precious consumer touchpoint.

Regarding SEO, the good news for :) is that there’s no competition for keywords. The (really!) bad news? Typing “:)” into Google yields nothing more than this message: “Your search - :) – did not match any documents. Suggestions: Try different keywords.” What’s worse, entering the punctuation into the Find field on the Samsung website returns, “Sorry no results were found for “:).” Whoopsie!

We’re not here to pass judgment on whether the :) is a good cell phone choice from a capabilities standpoint. For all we know, it could be the key to mobile, uh, happiness. But how could Samsung have so horribly misnamed its new offering? Riddle us that!