On Dog Names: Alcone Marketing Blog

Speaking of dogs... I found a local blog that is a lot cooler than you'd expect. Alcone, a marketing company based in Darien, has a blog called Consumer Lab. They post the latest surveys and studies on a huge variety of topics. A post about trends in dog names caught my attention today. Evidently dog-like names (Spot) are out and human names (Sasha, Murray) are in.

I'm totally OK with that. Lars would be a great name for a German Shepherd. My friend has a mini-dachshund named Ellie, pictured above. I have a dog named Ruby, which makes sense because she's from West Virginia and acts like an old woman. In a previous post I mentioned Laverne and her brother Gilly, short for Gilmore. Those names are perfect for eccentric, lovable French bulldogs.

What I can't tolerate are human names that obviously aren't made to do double-duty. For example, Justin. I knew a dysfunctional, aggressive shepherd mix named Justin; so wrong. The name Michelle would be another name that's not OK in my book. Gretchen would be OK, because that's an unusual name. Harry for a dog would be OK, but Bob is stretching it. Jennifer, no; Jenny, yes. I think I can generalize and say that if you're going to give a dog a human name, it needs to be a little quirky. Or, as this list of popular names shows, it should be a cute name that ends in -ie or -y: Molly, Buddy, Annie, Cody.

The Alcone site is a great resource for conversation topics. Several articles are posted a day, so it's worth putting on your RSS feed. Getting your blogs and news by RSS feed is a must-do for information hounds. I'm too lazy to explain it, so have someone at work show you how to do it.

My friend Misty, a photographer, took the picture of her dog Ellie, above.