Careers for the Coming Recovery

With unemployment and underemployment at near record highs, finding a job is tough. Why not use this time to develop an independent career that will take advantage of the coming recovery?

Become a naming and branding specialist.

Just follow these few basic rules and soon giant multinational corporations will be begging you to name their newest brand of soap, cell phone or social networking site.

1. Make sure the names you come up with are both meaningless and interchangeable among product types. (Practically any successful car nameplate, for instance, can be switched with a brand name from a totally different product category. Say an anti-depressant, as in the following sentence: "I was so anxious trying to decide whether to buy a Chevy Cymbalta or a Hyundai Effexor, that I needed a prescription for Escalade 200 mg.")

2. The name should be based on a word taken from a Latinate language, preferably Italian.

3. Ideally, the final product name should have 3 syllables-never fewer than 2; never more than 4.

4. Whatever word you choose as your root, the product name should have a feminine ending. C.f. Corolla, Sonata.

5. Previous practice allowed for the use of an actual word. In today's fast-paced, competitive market place, at least one consonant or vowel in the root word should be changed to render it meaningless.

Okay, let's see how these rules work in practice.

You've been contracted to develop a name for a new online gaming system. You therefore want a meaningless Italian sounding word that has nothing to due with the internet or games. The first Italian word you think of is "pizza."

Pizza already ends in the feminine sounding "a." However, it is a recognizable word and has only 2 syllables. Take care of that by adding an "e" after the "i," and we come up with "Piezza." Easy.

This ends the creative process. All that remains is busy work to justify your bill.

First, hold a strategic retreat with the client CEO, the VP of Marketing and the ad agency's Creative Director and Account Executive, at a posh yet expensive resort in New Mexico. There you lead the other participants through a long weekend of brainstorming, market identification and emotional resonance goals. This is followed by 6 months of focus groups and consumer surveys.

Next, issue a progress report identifying the issues and goals arising from the strategic retreat as refined by market testing. Three months later present a final report identifying "Piezza" as the definitive brand name, along with suggestions to guide the ad agency in designing the logo and other elements of the product launch and marketing campaign.

The final step:  bill the client at least half a million dollars, plus $247,386 in expenses.