Looking for a Brand Name That Will Stand Out? Try Finnish

April 18, 2022 5:03 PM

American companies are increasingly mining the language for short, simple, and unique words. U.S. brands typically employ foreign-sounding names to convey certain cultural associations (for example Au Bon Pain, which seeks to re-create French cafe bakery culture, or Häagen-Dazs, a nod to Danish). The draw of many Finnish words is the opposite—their lack of affiliation for the average American. They can be seen as more neutral and harder to place, says Pekka Mattila, professor of practice in marketing at the Aalto University School of Business in Helsinki. “Having a Finnish brand name is an easy pick if you want to be different in a large market that is English-speaking,” he says. When consumers don’t have a preconceived idea of a word, brands can use it as a near-blank canvas. “The word raaka means raw in Finnish,” writes Brooklyn-based chocolatier Raaka on its website. “We claim no Finnish heritage, but the cadence of the word and its meaning capture the essence of our chocolate and our process. When we make chocolate we’re after something that feels the way Raaka sounds: strong, wild, playful, and most of all, different.”
posted by folklore724 (47 comments total)

My cat is called Eero, but he comes by it semi-honestly since his cat-mom is of Estonian heritage. He of course destroys furniture, rather than creates it. It was a bit odd to see the name pop up a few years ago as a router brand...
posted by Jon Mitchell at 5:11 PM on April 18, 2022 [11 favorites]

Oh my all these years later and I realize kitos is the name of the restaurant I'll never open.
posted by vrakatar at 5:21 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

strong, wild, playful, and most of all, different

This is how I'd describe chocolate with salmiakki, incidentally.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 5:25 PM on April 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

As it happens, I was looking for a name for my new ultra-bleak black metal band. Thanks Finland!
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:26 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Seems sorta off somehow. When I think of Finnish, I don't think of fun notable words, but really the opposite: the tendency for it to dissolve, in the ears of non Finnish-speakers, into that beautiful babbling brook sound which surely contains meaning, but doesn't seem to require anything so prosaic as words to convey it.
posted by howfar at 5:38 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wonder if this relates to how some Japanese products use English words for branding.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:46 PM on April 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don’t live in an area with much exposure to Finnish but every time I’ve encountered Finnish names and words they have indeed stood out to my English ears as “interesting and memorable words”, for instance the iconic Hoito, a giant Finnish pancake diner in Thunder Bay Ontario (sadly recently damaged in a fire but sure to be rebuilt) or friends with unexpectedly catchy surnames like Heikkinen and Virtanen.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:01 PM on April 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

My cat is called Eero, but he comes by it semi-honestly since his cat-mom is of Estonian heritage. He of course destroys furniture, rather than creates it. It was a bit odd to see the name pop up a few years ago as a router brand...

Well that all tracks because those routers are about as pleasant to configure as it is to trim a cat's claws while it's in the middle of a catnip fugue state.
posted by loquacious at 6:07 PM on April 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am from the US, and I liked these brand names because they sound familiar and cozy....oops.

Guess it's time to shout out home: Suomi Kutsuu/Finland Calling.
posted by Laetiporus at 6:24 PM on April 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

ah, for the days when häagen dazs sued frusen glädjé for using a scandinavian marketing theme
posted by Clowder of bats at 6:57 PM on April 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

"Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council." - Matthew 5:22
posted by straight at 8:19 PM on April 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Norwegian not Finnish I suppose?, but one of my favorite 'revealing the categories on Jeopardy!' memories was it coming up as
Science
Literature
Word Origins
Kings Named Haakon
Sports
posted by bartleby at 8:49 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh, and there once was a time when I thought it was the name for a distinctive pattern/style variant of knife, like Bowie; or perhaps a brand, like Laguiole.
But it turns out that 'puukko' just means 'knife' in Finnish? If so, excellent default setting (I dunno, we don't have a special word for that kind? it's just a knife, dude).
posted by bartleby at 9:02 PM on April 18, 2022

Kiitos, thanks!
posted by rh at 9:03 PM on April 18, 2022

I want to get two black cats and name them Piru and Perkele, which in Finnish means the Devil, and the Devil.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 9:36 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

'puukko' just means 'knife' in Finnish

But puukko is a style of knife. It happens to be the Finnish name for a general purpose knife, and puukko is that style of general purpose knife. As a general purpose-r, it's excellent.

I think that karambit is a very similar situation.

Something like a Bowie vs an Arkansas toothpick happen to be regional names given to regional takes on different base style of blade where a Bowie is a cut-down slashing shortsword/ broken-off wide-bladed backsword (like a tanto ~ katana) where the toothpick is an oversized dagger.
posted by porpoise at 10:40 PM on April 18, 2022

The Finnish word for 'hangover' is pretty great: 'krapula'.
posted by Crane Shot at 11:08 PM on April 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

Crane Shot, that must come from the Latin word crapula, which gives us the delightful English word crapulous (which is definitely how I feel after a few too many).
posted by vanitas at 11:30 PM on April 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

Eh. I'm always skeptical when companies choose a language they don't speak or have any connection to. It's only a matter of time before someone calls themselves "pubic hair" in Finnish. Wasn't there a post of the blue about some brewery taking a Maori name that turned out unsavory? It's worse when there's an overlay of colonialism, of course. (Finland was a dominion of Sweden and then Russia for like 300 years.)

History aside, Raaka sounds kind of unpleasant, all those hard consonants clanging up against each other. It's not a neutral word to this English speaker, just one where the signifier is more strongly divorced from the signified. And it must be truly bizarre for a Finn to come across a cooked/processed food labeled "raw."
posted by basalganglia at 12:47 AM on April 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I think that two somewhat different phenomena are being joined in the article. On the one hand there are cases of Finnish immigrants using common words in their native tongue, and on the other businesses with no Finnish connection at all looking at a Finnish dictionary for brand names.

The former is what immigrants have been doing for centuries, linking themselves consciously or unconsciously to their society of origin. The latter is more interesting, and I think that the reason for it isn’t teased out by the article, which I think has more to do with English than Finnish.

English has a really strange orthography that has few comparisons to any other language. Where most other languages use various diacritic marks to differentiate between different sounds, English says to hell with that, and uses only the basic letters of the Latin alphabet.

Finnish uses only one diacritic mark, the umlaut, but there are plenty of words that don’t use it at all (if you want to get technical, the Finnish language has a feature called vowel harmony, which means that the vowels “a, o, u” generally can’t be used in uncompounded words with the vowels “ä, ö, y”, which means that there are limits to how many words will have umlauts). Furthermore, the umlaut is probably the least threatening of the diacritic marks, because English speakers are used to it as essentially meaningless decoration (i.e. the metal umlaut).

So, unlike the Slavic languages, with their Š and Í and what-have-you, or Turkic languages with their Ş and dotless I and so on, Finnish is easily typed on a regular keyboard layout, and given that most English speakers are used to the umlaut as decorative, they don’t really worry about it.

Where Finnish is important, however, comes into play here. Because Finnish isn’t related to many other languages with a heavy internet presence, Finnish-based brand names are easy to Google. English-speaking consumers can see the name, know how to type it, and Google for more information, allowing the company to target them with ads, building brand awareness.

To sum up, Finnish-languages brandnames work because they’re easy to type, easy to Google, and the internet won’t be inundated with other instances of the word. The culture and reputation of Finland as a country is, I think, largely secondary. That isn’t the case with Finnish-language brandnames chosen by Finnish immigrants, where Finnishness is part of the reason behind the name.
posted by Kattullus at 12:51 AM on April 19, 2022 [23 favorites]

may be worth mentioning that 'raaka' also translates roughly to 'cruel' or 'brutal', so outstanding work on the branding there chaps. lovely to hear how it "capture(s) the essence of our chocolate and our process."
posted by keltanen at 1:42 AM on April 19, 2022 [5 favorites]

The language, spoken by about 5 million people, is a treasure trove for unique words.

I'ma gonna go out on a limb and say every language is a "treasure trove for unique words."

Also, I think the logos could be bigger.
posted by chavenet at 1:52 AM on April 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wonder if this relates to how some Japanese products use English words for branding.
posted by They sucked his brains out!

Really, it's more like how English speakers would use Japanese names/words for branding, I think. The social dynamics of non-English-speaking languages using English names are complicated, but there's a sense of aspirational metropolitan appeal involved, given English's status as a lingua franca in so much of modern worldwide society.

On the other hand, native English speakers don't really have that same aspect of feeling like their own native language is a sort of "second-tier" thing, so the use of other languages is more about exoticization and decoration. Like, yes, it's objectively funny that Sharp sold a fax machine on the Japanese market named the Fappy, but also, well, the entire tabletop game industry is collectively losing the Don't Just Use A Generic Japanese Word As a Title Challenge (looking at you, Takenoko, a game named for the Japanese word for "bamboo shoot(s)," about a Chinese animal that eats bamboo grass, which would be "sasa" in Japanese anyway).

So, hey, at least they're drawing from a different language-they-don't-speak well now.

(Side note: just shared this with a Finnish-speaking acquaintance, whose response was "Raaka is just the worst word you could use for chocolate." Apparently it just means, like, "cruelty")
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:21 AM on April 19, 2022 [7 favorites]

Crossword setters will rejoice at more short vowel-laden words joining EERO in the lexicon
posted by rollick at 2:25 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

or Häagen-Dazs, a nod to Danish

What? No. We do not do the double-vowels thing much in Danish (and where we do each vowel is its own syllable), we don't have ä, we basically don't use z (certainly not next to s), and Häagen Dazs is clearly incompetent mock German or Dutch, not Danish.

I cannot trust anything in this article now. It's like claiming Au Bon Pain is a nod to Italy. Or England.
posted by Dysk at 2:34 AM on April 19, 2022 [9 favorites]

(In fact, it's worse than that since both English and Italian contain all the letters that are in Au Bon Pain.)
posted by Dysk at 2:43 AM on April 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

The supposed Danishness of the name Häagen-Dazs inspired one of my all-time favorite pedantic footnotes on Wikipedia:

The term does not exist in the Danish or any other known language; and Danish has neither an umlaut ä (the ligature æ is the corresponding counterpart) nor the zs digraph ("s" or "ss" would normally be used in Scandinavian languages to represent its equivalent sound s); the umlaut is typical of German while the digraph is typical of Hungarian. Applying the rules of German and Hungarian orthography would result in the pronunciations [ˈhɛːaɡn̩] and [ˈdɒʒ]. In Norwegian "hagen" (cognate with Danish "haven") means "the garden" while "das" or "dass" (zs would be pronounced identically to s in Nordic languages) is a coarse slang term for an outhouse or in modern usage sometimes also a modern toilet in all the Scandinavian languages, a loan word derived from the German definite article das, originally from the German expression das Häuschen (the small house, i.e. the outhouse), by euphemistic omission of the main word; thus, in the Scandinavian languages Häagen-Dazs would be most reminiscent of a grammatically incorrect way of saying "the garden outhouse" with Hungarian- and German-looking extra letters and diagraphs.

posted by Kattullus at 2:58 AM on April 19, 2022 [22 favorites]

I think that two somewhat different phenomena are being joined in the article.

Thank you for the fantastic analysis, Kattullus. While I wouldn't have expected them to bring the same knowledge of comparative linguistics to the article, I'm pretty confused that neither the author (a professional marketeer) nor the professor of marketing he interviewed noted the SEO aspect of this, particularly given the prevalence of lazy googling (e.g. "raka chclates hiping cost GA" or whatever). Is the article inviting insiders to read between the lines (surely they have to think about SEO all the time?) while avoiding the distasteful subject of how our choices are being manipulated by search algorithms and their exploitation? That sounds a bit paranoid when I write it down. It's certainly the sort of thing that would only be plausible if one lived in a world where marketing and advertising were a mendacious canker eating out the very heart of human flourishing. So.

On a less suspicious but equally speculative note, I wonder whether some of the English-speaker's fondness for Finnish words is due to a sense of magic derived from an unnoticed association with Tolkien's Quenya, which took Finnish as its initial model, and retained certain Finnish phonological characteristics throughout its development. If there's one language that sounds like the Anglosphere's idea of "beautiful fantasy language", I think it has to be Finnish.
posted by howfar at 3:08 AM on April 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

If there's one language that sounds like the Anglosphere's idea of "beautiful fantasy language", I think it has to be Finnish.

Are we talking about the same language here? That's a description of the sound of Finnish that certainly new to me.

(Signed, a native speaker of a language that is typically described as a nicer-sounding language with a potato or rock in your mouth, boiling porridge, or mud. I thought you were one of us, Finnish!)
posted by Dysk at 4:15 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the link. I've been meaning to catch up on which companies are still buying Mordorian oil.
posted by howfar at 5:45 AM on April 19, 2022

I wanted specifically to find a source that has as pleasant sounding (to my ears) Fininish as possible. It's too easy to find someone playing up the dull monotone thing for laughs and that wouldn't be fair. The content is incidental.
posted by Dysk at 5:53 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah if you slow her down, give her more lilt and a cool magic sword or something she'd sound like a sorceress to me. Maybe a very sensible, no-nonsense sorceress, but still.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:11 AM on April 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm looking one step ahead and domain squatting on Sámi words for my future US hipster bar enterprise. Dego sávzačora ("people get dumber in crowds," according to at least one website) has a nice ring to it.
posted by eotvos at 7:15 AM on April 19, 2022

Finnish was the model for Tolkien's elvish language, which probably goes a long way to explaining why it sounds like a fantasy language to is English speakers.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:20 AM on April 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

It sometimes sounds like it's echoing too. ;p
posted by howfar at 7:24 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

> “We claim no Finnish heritage, but the cadence of the word and its meaning capture the essence of our chocolate and our process. When we make chocolate we’re after something that feels the way Raaka sounds: strong, wild, playful, and most of all, different.”

This is the branding strategy of bad tattoos.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:51 AM on April 19, 2022 [8 favorites]

The supposed Danishness of the name Häagen-Dazs inspired one of my all-time favorite pedantic footnotes on Wikipedia:

It also supplied one of my favorite The Simpsons lines, spoken by Ranier Wolfcastle: "Here's the scoop: Your Haagen days are over! (throws scoop into trash) I'm Baskin' in your pain as I'm Robbin' you of life!"
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:35 AM on April 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

I wanted specifically to find a source that has as pleasant sounding (to my ears) Fininish as possible.

Ever heard Kardemimmit?

Myötätuuli (Tailwind)
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:09 AM on April 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Raaka is just the worst word you could use for chocolate." Apparently it just means, like, "cruelty"

Yeah, and if it wasn't clear from my Bible quote, "Raca" means "fool" to lots of English-speakers who grew up with the King James Version of the Bible.
posted by straight at 2:06 PM on April 19, 2022

I've lived with Finnish people and picked up a bunch of words and if I ever start a company I'll call it Kikkeli, for the same reason that my go-to first word in Wordle is PENIS.
posted by kersplunk at 5:12 AM on April 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

We claim no Finnish heritage, but the cadence of the word and its meaning capture the essence of our chocolate and our process. When we make chocolate we’re after something that feels the way Raaka sounds: strong, wild, playful, and most of all, different.

This is the branding strategy of bad tattoos.

I came in here to say this. These guys are the corporate version of the 19-year-old who doesn't speak a word of Chinese getting glyphs tattooed on their forearm because they look cool. At parties they insist it's idiomatic for "beautiful dreamer" but the literal translation is actually "dumbass tourist."
posted by Mayor West at 7:15 AM on April 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

> Eh. I'm always skeptical when companies choose a language they don't speak or have any connection to. It's only a matter of time before someone calls themselves "pubic hair" in Finnish.

The literal word for that would be häpykarvoitus, which doesn't really roll off the tongue well in any language, including Finnish. It's more likely that this will end up using something like pallikarva. Note that as a compound word, the stress there goes PAL-li-KAR-va. The Finnish "r" is rolled.

> Finnish uses only one diacritic mark, the umlaut, but there are plenty of words that don’t use it at all

To be pedantic, the Finnish letters ä, ö , and å (this last only used for Swedish words) are not in fact considered to have diacritics, but are their own separate letters. The same Unicode code points are used to represent them as in languages that do consider those dots as diacritics. In Finnish, they're properly alphabetised as a, b, c, ..., x, y, z, å, ä, ö.

> I'm looking one step ahead and domain squatting on Sámi words for my future US hipster bar enterprise.

As far as I can tell, the only Saamic word that's reached global adoption so far is "tundra", which got there via Russian.
posted by eemeli at 12:13 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

I don't want to out-pedant, but share because I find this interesting, that some words in Finnish can be spelled with a Š, such as "šakki" (chess), or a Ž, such as "Fidži" (Fiji). These words can also be spelled with a "sh", like "shakki", or a "z" (Fidzi), so the háček is entirely optional in Finnish orthography, but people can have it as a treat.
posted by Kattullus at 2:21 PM on April 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Can I recommend the excellent Finnish word "kalsarikännit" for anyone starting a company. It's a word that is very representative of the Finnish spirit, much like the famous "sisu" is.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:43 AM on April 21, 2022 [3 favorites]

the háček is entirely optional in Finnish orthography, but people can have it as a treat.

Finns, háček: your privilege
posted by howfar at 8:13 AM on April 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

can I sit at home in my underwear with my háček?
posted by chavenet at 3:39 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Nah, you've gotta get up and join the circle of dudes on the quad playing háček-sack.
posted by bartleby at 3:38 PM on April 24, 2022 [1 favorite]