Kae Inoue, Makiko Kitamura and Yuki Hagiwara of Bloomberg News today file a story on the naming of the Nissan Leaf, that company's first electric car.
The article is packed with details about the car's design, as well as deep back story on the pitfalls of trying to find a name that will work globally.
IP lawyers quoted in the story consider it a miracle that a common word like "leaf" wasn't already claimed but if that's too lawyer-geeky for you, the story of how companies trademark and recycle names, great goofs in history (naming a car after the driver of a chariot that crashed into the sun, for example), a fad in Japan for naming vehicles with English words, as well as standard business information about the design of the car and where it fits in the company's global product line.
The result is a great read full of surprising information from what would usually be a paint-by-the-numbers company product announcement.
I've often observed when planning media strategy with clients that they usually overlook what's most interesting about their own story. For example, a software developer might be enamored by a unique feature in the software but over look a great story in how he raised his seed capital, or a lawyer focused on a great derivative structure but not in the economic trends that inspired its use.
The PR team and the reporters got creative to look beyond the obvious here and as a result have a much better launch story.
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