Lazy Marketing - Number Two

One of the surefire cliches of the last 15 years has been to attach an 'e' to the beginning of a product name.

In some respects it makes perfect sense as an abbreviation: eCommerce, eBooks, eVite. But what was once the preceding vowel of old crap that needed to sound new has yielded to the next one in line...

The letter 'i' makes everything hip and technologically superior. Blame it on Apple all you want, but they did personify things well before the iPod. The Mac OS X operating system had iPhoto, iMovie, iChat, iMail and so on.

The iPod opened up the floodgates of overseas knockoffs and unimaginative packaging designers' abuse of the poor letter. I did a search for the following words and was not shocked with the results:

iPuppy [iPuppy Search]
iBike [iBike Search]
iShoe [iShoe Search]

For a short time it seemed like 'u' might be on a roll, with college financial assistance program uPromise and AT&T's uVerse. But most people would rather focus on 'i' than 'u' any day.

I challenge people in the marketing and development of new products to use new letters. the there's plenty of natural ties to products. Comment with some ideas that pop to mind and I'll share some of mine.

Reminds me of my spelling bee days when we put i before e except after c when it sounds like 'ay' in neighbor and weigh.