"Shirley Shirley bo Birley, Banana Fanna fo Firley, Fe fi mo Mirley, Shirley!"
—"The Name Game"

Allegis—the name is meaningless, yet somehow portentous. Index, a consulting firm, was offered that moniker by a famous name-creating agency in the 1980s. The firm passed. Executives at the holding company for United Airlines, though, loved the name when the same agency presented it to them. The company changed its name to Allegis in 1987, then, amid a storm of ridicule, bagged it. Index fared even worse. Sticking with a name that conjured up images of staid librarians and file cards, Index closed up shop in the late 1990s.

Selecting a name is fraught with danger—whether you are under pressure from a rich uncle to call your kid Gus or looking for a grabber for a new dot-com. Choosing a corporate title or brand involves a stupefying number of legal, cultural, and international considerations. Potential land mines are everywhere.

When Coca-Cola began marketing soft drinks in China, it discovered that some shopkeepers had created handmade signs with phonetic transliterations of the words "Coca-Cola." The shopkeepers, however, neglected to consider the meaning of the combined characters. Although the characters were pronounced "Coca-Cola," they actually meant "female horse fastened with wax" or "bite the wax tadpole." Coca-Cola’s marketers, in react mode, quickly discovered a character combination that loosely translates as "permit the mouth to be able to rejoice."

The Internet name game is especially jumbled—at midyear, there were between 2,000 and 3,000 legal proceedings over domain names, according to Icann, the Internet-naming group. The problem will get worse as we toss in additional Internet suffixes beyond .com, .edu, .net, and so on. Pending suggestions call for new suffixes such as ".sucks," ".biz," ".shop," ".bank," ".sex," ".firm," ".info," ".ecology," ".geo," and ".union." How about www.hoover.sucks?

Trademark law adds another layer of complexity. There are 42 trademark classifications (categories for which a name can be secured, such as pharmaceuticals, vehicles, or telecommunications services) in the U.S. and internationally. Registration in one locale does not necessarily reserve the use of the name in any other locale around the world. Common-law use of a name can trump (not to be confused with The Donald^TM) a formal registration of a name or mark. Some common phrases and names cannot be protected under the trademark laws—but might be covered by copyright laws. You get the drift. The law can seem more ambiguous than some of the names out there.

I think it was Shakespeare’s Juliet who said, "A rose, by any other name, creates brand confusion," or something like that. So, employ these rules when playing the name game:

Start the naming/branding strategy early in the business plan. You may have to go at this more than once. Allow time.

Think outside the box. The competition for interesting names is intense, so you have to be creative.

Be thorough. Use search services, online searches, and the like to determine if your prospective name has been trademarked. These include Register.com, NetworkSolutions.com, and DomainDirect.com.

Do not give up on names that might be in conflict. There may be strategies to fight for names (a cash offer often works wonders) and variations that might be worth using even at the risk of some controversy.

Think of variations on the prospective name and be sure they do not create problems. Allegheny Airlines changed its name to USAir partly so it would no longer be known as Agony Airlines. (However, some now call it Useless Air.)

Develop practices, policies, and procedures (legal, business, and otherwise) to maintain and protect the name.

So what’s in a name? Think of the branding power of Pentium (a word made up by a brand-name consultant) or Kleenex (a name so powerful it’s practically generic). Then there’s Amazon.com. Can anyone name any of the 400 or so other online booksellers?

Allegis, anyone?

Gordon says he answers to the names "Mark," "Mr. Gordon," and "Hey, you." He is a managing partner of the Chicago information-technology and e-commerce law firm Gordon & Glickson (www.ggtech.com). He can be reached at mlgordon@ggtech.com.