Originally Posted by
bhrubin
We all can think of brand names that are meaningless nonsense words. Because tons of them were and are! We’re just used to many now because they’ve existed for enough time. Google. Yahoo. EBay. Expedia. Travelocity. Napster. Priceline. Kayak. Microsoft. Verizon. Starbucks.
Some of your examples are genuinely random and meaningless: Yahoo, Kayak, and Napster. But most have easily discernible word roots that allude to the company's core mission / values. Travelocity? They modified "travel" with a suffix that refers to speed (velocity). Verizon is a euphonious blend of words signifying truth (veritas) and vision / distance (horizon). Even if you don't make the conscious connection, your subconscious language processor does.
Google refers to a very high number. And so on. The majority of corporate coinages are not pure nonsense.
Bonvoy is not total nonsense, with a buried / corrupted allusion to
bon voyage, but it's close enough. It defies common sense because hotels are about arrivals, but you say "bon voyage" to someone departing. (It's not a greeting, or message of hospitality; it's a goodbye.) The coinage is too easily read as a corruption of "envoy," confusing the intent, and Envoy is a brand for too many other things (a GM vehicle, a home-services app, various travel agencies, the AA regional carrier). So Bonvoy sounds neither intuitive nor unique, in the way a good coinage like "Verizon" does.
Finally, in this game you have to worry about unintended / negative allusions. Bonvoy is perilously close in "mouth feel" to Bon Ami, which is a household cleanser and not a good allusion for nice hotels. Or Bonomo, or Bok Choy, or Bon Jovi, or Bono, or Bonjour (which is a brand for printer networking software, but which might actually have been better for Marriott in this case). And your quick-reading mind, if it doesn't catch the well-obscured "bon voyage" allusion, can truncate Bonvoy to "boy" or "good boy," which makes it -- and Marriott -- sound juvenile. As I said upthread, my first reaction to hearing "Bonvoy" was that it's entirely useless for signifying hotels, loyalty, travel, etc. but would be a good name for a line of designer clothes for children. It also kind of sounds like a candy bar to me, but maybe just because I grew up with Bonomo Turkish Taffy.
I have done my share of corporate nomenclature work. It is shocking how stupid and arbitrary and regrettable some big decisions are in this space.