I beg to differ with my esteemed colleague’s blog post about the naming of Windows 7. In it, Burt said “if Landor can get paid to come up with “FedEx” out of Federal Express, someone certainly can get paid for “7″ as a brand for the 7th version. Funny, Catchword never seems to get tapped for those easy jobs.” Well, maybe we didn’t create with the number “2″, but we were certainly asked to provide guidance to LeapFrog on what to name the second generation of Leapster. We went through a whole series of alternative modifiers – including candidates like Live, Go, and Connected – before we all agreed that the best choice was to go with the simple number “2″. This indicated that the new version was significantly different from the original Leapster, while maintaining the brand equity in the name (and not distracting from it with a word that might become a sub-brand, in the way that “Nano” and “Shuffle” are for the Apple iPod).

Look for more Catchword-named products from LeapFrog, coming to a store near you in 2009…