It’s All in What You Call It!

By Taylah Hasaballah

There’s often a lot of stigma around a name. A name gives you something to identify and classify, a way to compare to what already exists.

Humanity is addicted to classifying and that has served us well. We’re quantifying our knowledge, learning about what everything means and recording it in a way that is ‘real’. But could you imagine for a second of this didn’t exist?

Apple recently got slammed because their Maps App wasn’t as good as Google’s Maps App. Google is a more frequently used search engine than Bing because it’s ‘better’. So what if these things had never been named to begin with? Would there be so much direct competition if they were never called the same thing?

Conventional advertising aims to convince potential buyers that ones product is better than another within the same category. There’s no point trying to sell a phone by saying it’s better than a pie. So how would we advertise if this mentality of comparing apples with apples never existed?

I think maybe there would be less companies focused on beating each other, having a 10X better product, in such a black and white closed minded. By trying to out do your competition, it’s easy to forget that there is an infinite amount of possibilities out there. Imagine if your product was one of a kind, simply because you never measured it against someone else’s. For example, Instead of Apple trying to improve by making better Maps than Google, what if they had of put that time into making something completely new, something we’ve never seen before.

We’re so lucky to be living in a time where cross disciplinary design is bigger than ever and the potential to create new and amazing things is limitless. I think the heart of a company should be filled with the goal of redefining what we know, instead of ‘beating’ each other. After all, anyone can spend a lot of time copying and adding one feature to some else’s work but it takes true talent to create something new and that is where an amazing company will be born.