Many years ago when I was an honest to goodness engineer, we called a feature for what it was. If we built a light blue box with white dials that played 500 songs that came bundled with a white a headphone, we’d call it a light blue music box that can play 500 songs that you can listen to using the included stereophonic white headphone. Thank goodness, the engineers weren’t in charge of picking out the final released names for our products. We were only allowed to choose the internal code name. You know, code names like “Cracker Jack” or “Project Carmel” or some other obscure project name so that our competitors couldn’t figure out what we were actually building.

The group that was officially in charge of picking the actual product name was marketing. This was by design — and for good reason. Leave it to the engineers to pick names, and all you would get are feature sets. It was the marketing department’s job to figure out how to match up features with how they would benefit the customers.

It may seem obvious, but if a Japanese chef were to call his product cold, dead fish, not many people would flock to buy it. In fact, most people would steer clear of his product. Rather, cold dead fish is called Sushi. It is marketed as a high-end product that you can only get from select Japanese restaurants. Strategically locate the restaurant in swank places like West Hollywood, pay a few American Idol contestants to frequent the joint, and voila, you have a cool place to hang out. Never mind that you are still serving cold, dead fish. The benefit of visiting the restaurant is because it is the place to be seen with potential stars. Cold, dead fish is now Sushi, is now hip, is now a must have.