As a USC Trojan, I have a twisted interest in the Ohio State University football team this season. I was thrilled when my Trojans throttled them earlier this season 35-3, but this weekend, I’ll be rooting for the Buckeyes as they play Penn State. (Penn State is ranked higher than USC, and therefore must be vanquished.) Will Ohio State win? No idea. But I can make one prediction with 100% certainty… At least one Ohio State player on TV will call his school “The Ohio State University” — with an emphasis on the “The.” I hear that’s the official name of the school, but no one outside of Ohio calls it that. And I haven’t heard players from Penn State or Oregon State or Any Other State pump up a “The” before their school name. It doesn’t bother me that they do that — it’s kind of amusing — but the emphasis implies that there’s a copycat school out there calling itself “Ohio State University” and that’s pissing off the original.

To be fair, I can’t explain why schools whose names start with the word “University” automatically get preceded by a “The” — as in “the University of Southern California” — but those that start with state names don’t. Also inexplicable: when the University of Southern California is shortened to “USC,” the “The” disappears, but we still use “The” before both “American Civil Liberties Union” and “ACLU”…

Ah, you’re nodding off. You can tell I’m not obsessed with readership figures when I devote an entire article to a preposition. So I’ll get to my point…

The reason I bring “The” up in a marketing blog is that it seems to confound companies when it comes to naming their products. As a copywriter at Saatchi & Saatchi, I used to disagree with the power dweebs over at Toyota who insisted on dropping all prepositions in front of car names. They would have hissyfits if you put an “a” or a “the” in front of Camry, Tundra, Corolla and the rest of their lineup. We were expected to talk about their cars as if they were people: “Drive Camry today!” “Check out Tundra!” “Been inside Corolla?” The problem is that no consumers or even salespeople speak that way…

“Hey, Bob, what kind of car do you have?”
“I own Land Cruiser.”
“Could I interest you in Escalade?”

Speaking that way makes you sound like a unitard or a certain California governor with an Austrian accent.

Today, while reading another witty car review by the brilliant Dan Neil, I noticed that he uses prepositions before car names. And who’s to argue with a Pulitzer Prize winner?

So here’s one of the rules of naming: Unless being bizarre is your objective, go with what sounds natural, otherwise your marketing will clash with real world usage. Coca-Cola is one of the greatest brands in history, and they don’t insist on treating their products as people. (Of course, maybe it’s because if someone were to say “give me Coke” at a restaurant, they’d get gang-tackled by a nearby DEA team.)

Imposing odd prepositional rules on the general public is a recipe for confusion.

That said, I’m off to drive Maxima to the Starbucks to pick up Venti Latte. Go the Buckeyes!

Related Articles:

• Notes on Naming: Don’t Make It Personal
• 21st Century Identity Crisis: Naming Strategies for the New Marketspace