Lucy

Commerce Vision has some serious smarts. The company was launching a new B2B solution that uses artificial intelligence to automate order processing like never before. Our challenge? To cut through the clutter of a crowded eCommerce marketplace, and demonstrate that the product was leaps and bounds above its peers.

Our solution was Lucy – an animated character who’s fast, efficient and reliable. Designed to give this tech solution a human face, Lucy makes AI approachable and outlines the benefits of the software simply and clearly.

Naming is one of the most important aspects of recognition. It's the device that people use to tell their friends and peers about a product. While a logo or visual brand identity may evolve over a product's lifespan, its name – more often than not – remains the same. 

In naming Commerce Vision's new product, our key considerations were spelling and pronunciation, memorability and the availability of a matching URL. The name needed to make a positive impression upfront, and resonate with different nationalities and cultures in a global marketplace.

So why Lucy? Firstly, it's familiar. As the product boasted smarts that were new to the market, we chose a name that was accessible, making it feel less technologically intimidating and easy to implement. Conversely, in the digital product space, Lucy stands out from the crowd. The majority of popular product names had a similar "tech" ring to them, so we were keen to cut through the noise with something simple, personable and easy to recall.

“For words of seven letters or fewer, there are 8.4 billion possible letter combinations – including Aaaaaaa and Zzzzzzz. The number of plausible, pronounceable names is much, much smaller.”

These are the words of David Placek from Lexicon Branding Inc –
famous for naming BlackBerry, Pentium and PowerBook. In a landscape where "everything is taken", our challenge was to come up with a unique .com URL that wasn't too long, hard to spell, hard to read, prone to mistyping, or just plain nonsensical. 

Of course, lucy.com was unavailable. However, our tagline "Let Lucy handle it" led us to think about the possibility – and benefits – of using "letlucy.com". Not only did it leverage our tagline and improve its recall, it was easily comprehensible, containing words that were short, familiar and made logical sense together.