|
For many companies, the process of naming and branding is almost an afterthought: the founder names the company, the first products are descriptively named, and branding means marketing, which means, for the most part, advertising. The assumption is that the names aren't that important, that the number of dollars you put into advertising is what will get you noticed. This approach may have worked fine in decades past, but it is increasingly anemic in today's saturated marketplace. There are simply too many companies and products out there for anyone to remember, so only the ones with the most memorable names stand a chance. And that's true whether you invest millions into advertising or nothing at all. Advertising can get you seen; it cannot, however, guarantee that you will be remembered. So, if naming has become that important to modern business, how do you go about approaching the process in the right way, and why have so many companies dropped the ball when it comes to naming? Let's take a deeper look. Descriptive Names An important first step when naming a business, product or service is to figure out just what it is that your new name should be doing for you. The most common decision is that a name should explain to the world what business you are in or what your product does. Intuition dictates that this will save you the time and money of explanation, which actually turns out not to be true. Why not? Let's consider the arena of online bookstores. Here are a few of their names:
1bookstreet | Classbook |
A1Books | CoolBooks |
allbooks4less | Ebooks |
AllBookstores | eCampus |
alotofbooks | eSuccessBooks |
BookCloseOuts | gobookshopping |
Bookland | Gobookshopping |
BookNetUSA | HalfPriceBooks |
BookPool | nwbooks |
BooksAMillion | Textbooks |
BookSense | Textbooksatcost |
books-forsale | Textbooksource |
BooksNow | Textbookx |
Bookspot | TheBookPeople |
Bookwire | TrueBooks |
CheapyBook | VarsityBooks | When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, it was billed as an "online bookstore" just like all of the above, and since it was one of the first such companies, there was even more reason to go with a descriptive name, right? Otherwise, how would anybody know what the business was about? Jeff Bezos knew that someday his company might want to sell more than just books, and that someday it might even have an offline, not just online, presence. In short, he understood that the name should be bigger than just "books" or "online," and further it needed to distance itself from all the competitors who would surely follow. He needed a name that could become a powerful brand. In "Amazon," he found just such a name, and the list above confirms that the competition came in droves, though a key difference is that they are forever relegated by their names to selling only books. The notion of describing your business in the name assumes that the name will exist at some point without contextual support, which, when you think about it, is impossible. The name will appear on a website, a storefront, in a news article or press release, on a business card, on the product itself, in advertisements, or, at its most naked, in a conversation. There is simply no imaginable circumstance in which a name will have to explain itself. This is fortunate, because having a descriptive name is actually a counterproductive marketing move which requires an enormous amount of effort to overcome. A descriptive naming strategy overlooks the fact that the whole point of marketing is to separate yourself from the pack. It actually works against you, causing you to fade into the background, indistinguishable from the bulk of your competitors. Which brand are you more likely to remember, Amazon or one from the list above? Where are you more likely to go online to buy a book? A naming project can quickly run aground if the names being considered are judged without the context of a clear positioning platform, a thorough competitive analysis, and an intimate understanding of how names work and what they can do.
Any one of the intuitive concerns below could have been enough to keep these powerful names from ever seeing the light of day, if those making the decisions had forgotten that names don't exist in a vacuum: Virgin Airlines - Says "we're new at this"
- Public wants airlines to be experienced, safe and professional
- Investors won't take us seriously
- Religious people will be offended
Caterpillar - Tiny, creepy-crawly bug
- Not macho enough - easy to squash
- Why not "bull" or "workhorse"?
- Destroys trees, crops, responsible for famine
Banana Republic - Derogatory cultural slur
- You'll be picketed by people from small, hot countries
Yahoo! - Yahoo!! It's Mountain Dew!
- Yoohoo! It's a chocolate drink in a can!
- Nobody will take stock quotes and world news seriously from a bunch of "Yahoos"
Oracle - Unscientific
- Unreliable
- Only foretold death and destruction
- Only fools put their faith in an Oracle
- Sounds like "orifice" - people will make fun of us
The Gap - Means something is missing
- The Generation Gap is a bad thing - we want to sell clothes to all generations
- In need of repair
- Incomplete
- Negative
Stingray - A slow, ugly, and dangerous fish - slow, ugly and dangerous are the last qualities we want to associate with our fast, powerful, sexy sports car
- The "bottom feeding fish" part isn't helping either
Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac - I don't want hillbilly residents of Dogpatch handling my finances.
- They don't sound serious, and this is about a very serious matter.
|
