With 800,000 auto names already trademarked, it's tougher than ever to find a moniker that works worldwide

If automakers thought it was hard to come up with a catchy new car name a generation ago, their outlook now is hopeless to impossible.

The sticky truth? As auto marketing becomes increasingly global, there are simply fewer words to call a car that are legally available around the world and work in multiple cultures.

That is why the industry is trending toward a new vehicle-naming strategy: Keep the old names as long as possible. Use common names around the world instead of looking for multiple names. Use numbers instead of words. And if necessary, bring a golden oldie out of the company vault.

"It's tough," concedes Russ Clark, director of marketing for General Motors' Chevrolet brand. "In 1985 there were about 75,000 names trademarked in the automotive space. Today there are 800,000."

This year Chevrolet has been spending millions to market a portfolio of newly named products -- the Sonic, Spark and Cruze -- conveying GM's message that the storied brand is refreshed and renewed after a decade of market-share doldrums.

And it appears to be working. Sales of Chevrolet small cars and compacts are up 26 percent from last year and 44 percent higher than five years ago.

But sometimes there is simply nothing like an old name.

Last year Chrysler Group introduced a mid-sized sedan called the Dodge Dart, a name Chrysler used in the happy-go-lucky days of the 1960s, before the Japanese imports dominated the family sedan business.

Nissan Motor Co. has just begun reintroducing its long-shelved brand name "Datsun" in some emerging markets, including Indonesia and India. Nissan spent untold millions getting rid of the Datsun name in the United States in the 1980s in an effort to commonize its operations under a single corporate identity.

And then there's the case of the Chevrolet Impala.

Despite wooing U.S. consumers with its refreshed portfolio of new names, Chevrolet introduced its new-generation 2014 full-sized sedan as the Impala -- the same name it has marketed without interruption since 1957.

"We surveyed buyers and intenders about their awareness and opinion of the Impala name prior to naming the new one," Clark says. "And the consumer impressions of the name were the best in the segment."

"It's getting harder to find names that mean anything. You know what an Impala is. It's an animal. It's fast and graceful. It's a good name."

But by embracing the heritage of the old name, Chevrolet is basically successfully pursuing two opposing naming strategies simultaneously, observes Jeff Schuster, senior vice president at the industry forecasting firm LMC Automotive.

"The new names of the small cars communicate a break with the past, where Chevrolet wasn't so good at small cars," Schuster says. "They could have easily also changed the Impala name for the same reason, since not all of the past generations of that nameplate have been particularly good. ... But what Chevy is communicating this time is that this is the car's true heritage. They're saying, 'This is the real Impala that you know and expect from Chevrolet.'"

Name changes are nothing to undertake lightly, says Larry Dominique, president of the industry valuation company ALG Inc. and former product planning head for Nissan Americas.

"The rule of thumb is that introducing a new car costs you $100 million in advertising," Dominique says. "But if you have to introduce it under a new name, it will cost you $200 million."

Some part of every ad dollar must be diverted into making sure the consumer knows what this newly named thing is, where it belongs in the portfolio and what it does, he says.

"The key question is awareness," he says. "How much is it going to cost you to make people aware of your name? Not just to have a positive association with it but to simply recognize what it is as a product in the marketplace."

Increasingly, the task is how to do that globally. Overseas sales potential was a major consideration when Chevrolet changed the name of its compact model from Cobalt to Cruze. (The Cobalt name replaced Cavalier.) But the new name -- with its clearly non-American spelling -- is helping Chevrolet globalize the product in non-English-speaking markets.

The Internet is a big factor. Customers all over the world are simultaneously looking for product information online these days. A customer in China or Poland who types their particular equivalent of "affordable Chevrolet car" into a search engine doesn't need to be confused by online product discussions that refer to a car called one thing in the United States and something else in Europe.

That's precisely why Nissan rolled out the Versa hatchback in the United States this summer as the Versa Note, says Roel de Vries, Nissan corporate vice president for global marketing and media strategy. In other markets, the sedan is called the Versa and the hatchback is called, simply, the Note. So blending those two names as the Versa Note in the United States, Nissan's largest market, isn't really giving the car a new name but rather adopting an existing name that's known around the world.

Yet some names must change.

Across the corporate aisle from Nissan, the luxury Infiniti brand this summer changed the names of its entire line. For the past 25 years, Infiniti relied on a roster of individually picked letters, followed by the engine sizes contained under each hood. As a result, Infiniti showrooms sold the G35, with its 3.5-liter V-6, and then the G37 with a 3.7-liter engine, next to the EX35 and FX56 crossovers and the M56 sedan.

But as of this fall, under the direction of Johan de Nysschen as worldwide president, Infiniti's line of cars all begin with a "Q," followed by a number simply indicating their place in the portfolio -- the Q50 and Q70. And all crossovers and SUVs are now a "QX" followed by similar numbers.

De Nysschen said the renaming was needed because global luxury customers were not clear on what the Infiniti letter "G" represented, or how it differed in size or price from an "M" or an "EX."

"The truth of the matter is," de Nysschen says, "across the world, there is hardly a name or a letter that hasn't already been claimed by one car manufacturer or another. You can go through the alphabet -- A, B, C, and so forth -- and you will quickly see that almost all available letters are taken."

Even Infiniti's new "Q" declaration is not entirely free and clear of existing associations. Audi of America -- of which de Nysschen was president until last year -- uses the same letter for its crossovers, the Q5 and Q7.

Sybille Kircher, director of Nomen Deutschland, a branding consultancy based in Dusseldorf, Germany, that guides automakers to new product names, corroborates de Nysschen's assertion that the industry is running out of names. Kircher says it is worse even than Chevrolet's Clark tabulates. He was estimating only the number of auto-related trademarks, she points out. The larger galaxy of business trademarks dwarfs that number -- and a trademark in one product line can inhibit its use as a car.

"There are 564 new trademarks taken out every day in Germany alone," she points out. Around the world, there are 11,500 new trademarks every day. There are now 23 million that have been registered.

"This obviously complicates any mission to come up with a new product name."

In the past, she says, an automaker might only worry about whether a car's name is safe to use in its domestic market. Now the company must also make sure it is free to use in export markets as diverse as Africa and Russia.

Nomen is the company that named the Toyota Yaris, Volkswagen Touran and Lotus Evora, among many others. Most recently, her office named a new compact delivery van for Mercedes-Benz, calling it the Citan (SEE'-tan).

She explains the name in a way that might not resonate immediately with American consumers: "Its target customers are people who work in the city. The name implies something heroic about their work delivering goods to people who are waiting -- it suggests 'hero in the city.'"

Part of the new naming equation requires automakers to stay on top of an ever-changing public mood. For European markets lately, she reports, that has meant steering away from words that sound East European or Russian, even though auto companies are targeting Russia and East Europe as potential growth markets.

"We're finding that people don't have a good response to names that sound East European," she says.

ALG's Dominique bemoans that the shrinking pool of available words will cause the industry to end up with "names that sound like pharmaceuticals" around the world.

"My feeling is always that, unless you're trying to get away from a bad association, just keep the name you have," he says. "Even if a car didn't sell particularly well in the past, if consumers don't have a bad impression associated with the name, why change it?"