What’s in a name?
A rose called any other name would smell just as sweet, wouldn’t it? So why then do we dwell on names? Why does our business development team put their valuable brainpower and creativity into naming our projects instead of just visiting the internet for a random word generator? Why do we, Invest Buffalo Niagara, have a database full of projects named things like Project Prom?
The answer to that last question is easy. One of our business development manager’s senior prom date had the same last name as the company behind Project Prom.
The answer to the overall question is both utilitarian and fun. Naming things is an amusing and creative exercise. Confidentiality of the companies behind our economic development projects is also massively important, so while we must give out code names, we might as well make them fun.
Today, we show you how the sausage is made.
Project Message- Created by Carolyn Powell for a company that manufactures bottles. In her mind, partially for fun and partially so that she could have a linguistic connection between the company and project name, she thought of a message in a bottle.
Project Zinc- The last name of the president of the company, Power Drives, is Panzica. Lorrie Abounader hand-picked a few letters out of there and came up with zinc.
Project Bodleian- The company’s technology came from Oxford, and Bodleian is the library for that University.
Project Corey- Three different individuals in the process either had the first or last name of Corey. It was too good not to be the code name!
Project Pilgrim- An example of a project coming to us with a self-selected code name. The Yahoo! Data Center project team was under the impression that the pilgrims settled throughout the entire northeast, including Buffalo. They considered themselves the new-age pilgrims of our great region.
Project Marble- A large majority of our code names can be traced back to Seinfeld. This project had a connection with the word rye, spurring the connection to marble rye. In "The Rye", a Seinfeld episode, the Costanza's bring a loaf of marbled rye bread for a dinner party, but steal it back when the hosts forget to put it out with dinner.
Project Shave- In one Seinfeld episode, Kramer shaves with butter and eventually falls asleep with it all over his skin, beginning to cook in the sun. It’s famously referred to as the “butter shave” and this project deals with a butter manufacturer.
