HATTIE: OK. What's in a name? Stop on that a minute.

JOHN: Nothing's in a name. Band-Aid, Kleenex, Charmin. But if you go back to the great companies in America--Ford, Disney, Nordstroms, DuPont--those are people's names. They just named the company after themselves because they didn't know any better. What did those names come to mean was something radically different than old man Ford or old man Disney or Nordstroms or DuPont. Those people built in a real brand identity with their name.

So our name is cute, it's fun, it's unique, it's different. It's largely differentiated from what other people do in airport transportation, taking people to and from the airport, but for us, what we wanted to do is brand ourselves like those people that had done such a marvelous job in branding.

Cloud 9 came about because in 1991, when we started this thing, we wanted to go get a vanity phone number, and we wanted to get 1-800-4-SHUTTLE because we knew that'd be easy to remember and people would dial 1-800-4-SHUTTLE and they'd get us and we'd take them to the airport. 1-800-4-SHUTTLE belonged to the US Virgin Islands. We went back to White Plains, New York, tried to get AT&T to break the rules and to give it to us and we were going to spend money, which we had none of, to get this number because it was so important, but we couldn't get it. Pac Bell had 1-800-9-SHUTTLE. We said, `Well, a little bit is better than nada. Take 1-800-9-SHUTTLE.'

MIKE DIEHL (Cloud 9 Shuttle): It's about the marketplace. Why not...

HATTIE: (Voiceover) The former Director of Marketing, Mike Diehl, recalls the renaming exercise.

MIKE DIEHL: You know, we sat in a room and sat down and we made the decision at that time that 'if we weren't gonna be Super-Shuttle and we weren't gonna be Sure-Ride, who were we gonna be?' When we took a picture of all the competitors in the marketplace, we had to ask ourselves what they were selling, and it really just showed that they were hauling things. And we wanted to capture an opportunity of a personality, put a name that's sellable.

HATTIE: Pain Reliever...

MIKE DIEHL: Oh, we had it all. We had from Golden Retriever, On Spot on Time, Peppered Express, Sun Diego Shuttle, Paradise Shuttle, Super Ride, which was common. But it wasn't until one of the gentlemen in this group here, Jeff Nauser, he says, `You guys got the name sitting in front of you. You're just not leveraging it.'

We had this 1-800-9-SHUTTLE for a long time as Super Shuttle. He says, `You're talking about comfort. You're talking about reliability and safety.' He says, `You live in paradise,' unlike today; it's a little gray, but it's winter. He says, `You're on cloud nine.'

JOHN: And we all said, `You are on Mars. You are crazy. You're the weirdest guy in the world,' which he still is. And he's terrific. But he said, `The best that I think it's got longevity. It's graphically extendable. It's legally protectable.' And we had all those things written on the wall. You know, it has to be a good name, it has to be these 36 characteristics. If it passes that screen, it's a good name. He said, `This one passes that. It's unique. It's different. It's sellable. It's cute. It's appealing to young and old, male and female, visitor or residents. It's got long legs in the San Diego community. You guys can make this happen.' And we thought he was crazy, but then we put it back through this very academic list of things one had to do to be able to name a product successfully, whether it was Coca-Cola or Kleenex.

It passed all those screens; so we said, `OK, 1-800-9-SHUTTLE is Cloud 9 Shuttle.'