Earlier this week retail giant Walmart launched a “social gift finder” called Shopycat. The service, developed by @WalmartLabs and available as a Facebook app, suggests gifts based on friends’ Facebook use.
My two cents: Shopycat is a bad name. I’ll explain why in a minute. First, though, a bit of background.
Off topic: When did “in-store” lose its hyphen?
The system is smart enough to understand the sentiment behind a Facebook status update, too, not just the keywords involved. So, for example, if you posted “I hate Twilight!” as a Facebook status update, Shopycat won’t recommend that your friends buy you the “Breaking Dawn” Blu-Ray. It also knows what items are more “giftable” than others, using algorithms that examine a number of signals, including recency, uniqueness (e.g., a collector’s edition over a standard edition) and the aggregate buying behavior of shoppers on Walmart.com.
Depending on your perspective, the Shopycat service is either ingeniously useful or disturbingly creepy in that special they-know-what-you’ve-been-thinking Facebook way. But no matter. We’re talking about the name today. And the name is a dud.
The Shopycat name has two strikes against it: pronunciation and semantics. The pronunciation has a built-in stumble—is the O in the first syllable long or short? For the name to be associated with “shop,” it needs to be spelled Shoppycat: the doubled consonant signals a short-vowel sound. In English, every familiar word that rhymes with “shoppy,” save one, is spelled with double P: choppy, hoppy, sloppy, stroppy, floppy, and so on.
The single exception is, of course, “copy.” Most of us learn the irregular spelling of “copy” when we’re fairly young, but it’s still counterintuitive, as the many Google hits for “coppycat” indicate. If its pronunciation followed the general rule, “copy” would have a long O and rhyme with “ropy” and “mopy.”
But “copy” is what Walmart wants us to think about, because Shopycat, with its staring-kitty mascot, is obviously meant to mirror “copycat.” Which brings me to the second strike: Why? If the point of the service is personalization, “copycat” is exactly the wrong concept to evoke. (And if we’re meant to think “shopcat”—cuter, easier to spell and say—well, too bad: Shopcat.com is “the first site dedicated to working cats everywhere.”)
In case you’d forgotten, Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, with 8,500 or so stores in 15 countries. Its 2011 revenue will be more than $421 billion. Surely it could have afforded a more effective, appropriate, and easier-to-pronounce (and easier-to-type!) name than Shopycat.