After three months of arguing over a name for their wireless-technology concern in 1997, the founders finally agreed on BlueKite.
Within a few months, though, Bluetooth, a licensed wireless technology, burst on the scene. Then Blue Martini, a software company, moved right into BlueKite's building in San Mateo, Calif.
"That's when we started to worry," says Glen Stancil, a BlueKite co-founder. "Now it's unbelievable."
The corporate world has a bad case of the blues. Along with Blue Martini, other software firms that have sprouted in the past few years — and are still in business — include Blue Squirrel, Blue Moon, Blue Shoe and Blue Pumpkin. In the wireless world, there are Bluesocket and BlueLinx. In retail, count Blue Nile, Bluemercury and Bluefly. The newest member of the U.S. airline squadron is JetBlue Airways.
"There are a lot of us all of a sudden," concedes Marla Malcolm, chief executive of Bluemercury, a cosmetics retailer in Washington. "But I don't care — I'm a blue addict. When I grew up, my room was blue."
As companies discover that the color has deep-rooted associations and worldwide popularity, more of them are getting tangled up in blue. "For most humans, there is this eternal aspect to the color blue," says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, a not-for-profit chromatic think tank affiliated with Pantone Inc., a developer of color standards and printing technologies. "Blue is invariably connected with sky and water," she says. "The sky has never fallen, and water has never gone away. It has dependability and constancy."
Indeed, says Blue Cross & Blue Shield, the big medical-insurance provider whose logo dates back to 1934, dismissing the blue parvenus. "There are other blue companies, but none have our history or size," says spokeswoman Iris Shaffer.
The color has a rich history in many cultures. In antiquity, the gods were designated by colors and Jupiter was blue. During the Renaissance, it was de rigueur in paintings to portray the Virgin Mary's vestments in rich blues. Blue is the color of royalty but also of Levi's, proving the versatility of a color that in America has come to represent both depression and pornography.
It also suggests "stature and professionalism," says Allen Adamson, boss of the New York office of brand consultants Landor Associates. Thus, when it comes to the corporate brand, blue is "such a safe choice," says Adamson. And lately, the color has taken on attributes of being "cool, hip and relevant to technology," he says.
It has some real advantages. The color can be clearly seen by most everyone, including the 10 percent of males who suffer some form of the common color blindness that affects vision of reds and greens. And according to the "Purkinje Effect," first documented in 1825, blue appears more visible and luminous in fading light. Color theorist Christopher Willard, a professor at Hunter College, speculates that this is one reason for so much blue in churches' stained-glass windows and mosaics. "It's also the color of heaven," he points out.
About 23,000 English words are either registered as Web site names or trademarked, at least in some industry category, says John V. Allen, senior partner at brand consultants Lippincott & Margulies. IBM, or "Big Blue," was a pioneer in marrying color and a corporate brand. "They grabbed it first, and they romanced that color," he says. Today 70 percent of Fortune 1,000 corporate logos are blue, he says.
But attaching the word "blue" to something else for a corporate moniker is a conservative way to get around the name shortage. "You're not going to have a client who says, "We're not ready for blue,'" Mr. Allen says.
That seems to hold true everywhere. A Brazilian lodging chain recently renamed itself Blue Tree Hotels. A new mobile-telephone operation in Italy is called Blu, and a British Internet shopping portal is BlueCarrots.com. Virgin Blue is up and flying in Australia, and Blue Fox Airlines hopes to lift off in the U.K. next year.
What the many blue arrivistes appear to find irresistible is the attachment of "blue" to something that never would be — such as squirrels, teeth or pumpkins. And even if the color has some real association with the noun it modifies, it's impossible to tell from the name that Blue Moon makes software for apartment-building managers and Blue Nile sells jewelry on the Internet.
Blue Nile actually changed its name from the straightforward "Internet Diamonds" two years ago after engaging linguists and conducting focus groups. The former name "was good in the beginning to tell consumers what we did," says Mark Vadon, chief executive of the Seattle retailer. "But it was too brown-paper wrapper" and too narrowly focused on diamonds.
Others entered their blue periods more serendipitously. In 1998, exhausted researchers were relaxing over after-dinner drinks and mulling a code name for their project, says Skip Bryan, a manager for Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson. Talk turned to the obscure topic of Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century Danish king who united warring tribes and converted the realm to Christianity.
Somehow, implausibly, the Bluetooth name stuck. "Certainly Bluetooth doesn't suggest wireless technology to many people," Mr. Bryan says. "But blue's a hot color for technology and marketing. What can I say?"
Brazil's Blue Tree Hotels, owned by Japanese-born hotelier Chieko Aoki, gets its name from Mrs. Aoki's: "Ao" for "blue" in Japanese, and "Ki" for "tree." The chain's previous name was Caesar Tower Management Co. Blue Moon's founder, Javier Gonzalez, confesses he lifted his company's name from his favorite band, Nanci Griffith and the Blue Moon Orchestra. "It's kind of catchy," he says. "What were we going to call ourselves: Eclipse? Crescent?"
JetBlue two years ago seized on its name in utter desperation after its expensive consultants came up with duds including "egg," "it" and "Air Hop." The airline then toyed with "True Blue" but found out that name is owned by a rental-car business. With time running out, the company went with "JetBlue," an employee's suggestion.
"Blue is certainly growing," says Michael Lord-Castle, president of startup Blue Fox Airlines. "It's a pity . . . not to be able to stand out." Asked about other blue-named firms in Britain, he consults the government's online list of registered companies. "There must be about 100 or so," he reports, adding with alarm, "Here's a Blue Air. I must look into this."