Monday, December 29, 2003
Branded, for life
They're part of a growing trend toward naming children after products -- brand-name babies.
There are kids named after cars: Corvette, Acura, Camry, Celica, Infiniti. Little designers: Armani, Dior and Halston. Alcohol brand names abound: Courvoisier and Hennessy could be coming soon to a preschool near you, joining Killian and Guinness and Ronrico.
"Picking unusual names is more popular than ever, because people are willing to choose from all sorts of sources, including brand names," says Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska who discovered the surprising number of brand-name babies in a massive database of names registered with the Social Security Administration in 2000.
Evans, a longtime member of the American Name Society, an academic group, got hold of the list, the only time the SSA has released a full list of all names given five times or more, and noticed how many products there were.
Children now about 3 years old are named Delta, Avis, Disney, Ikea, Evian, Hyatt, Breck and Delmonte.
There's a little boy in Texas named ESPN. Connie Brown of Atlanta has a granddaughter in Washington, D.C., named Cambria, after a brand of wine. It's also a type of kitchen countertop, she notes.
"Increasingly, brand names are being used as a metaphor for something else," says Lucian James, a business branding expert in San Francisco. "You say 'Gucci' to anyone in the world, and they know what you mean.
"When you're looking to name a baby, you're looking for something that sounds familiar and aspirational," he continues. "Parents are projecting onto their children the things they want to have themselves."
Nike Disney Wrigley's Jones
posted by chris at 5:17 PM
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