To do really well, a business needs lots of things. A smart owner, a good market, a great product…But one thing it really needs is a great name. Name your enterprise badly and you’ll be running up hill for the rest of its existence.
Hard to believe that a company name matters, isn’t it? Especially when some big ones have some really lame names. What’s an Exxon? Why is O2 called that? What on earth does Lady Godiva have to do with chocolate?
If you have a very, very large quantity of money you can take any set of characters and sounds and teach people to associate it with your product. If you have millions to invest in brand building, marketing, PR and press releases, that training process may even make sense. Because trademark law says that if you have a word no one else uses, and you brand it and trademark it so people associate it with your products and services, you can successfully sue anyone who uses anything like it. For example, Exxon the oil company could go after anyone calling themselves Exxon Oil Services.
But if you don’t have enough money to do that kind of branding, you need to name yourself something that people will understand at first glance. For example, if your shop for decorators is called “I-Spy” and your neighbors is called “Battersea Decorators Emporium” they are getting more business. Because their name, in effect, is an advertisement.
Many businesses, like YouTube, Facebook and Pottery Barn are examples of startups that found it easier to grow because they had names people intuitively understood.
Optimally, a company called Battersea Decorators Emporium should have the domain name BatterseaDecoratorsEmporium.com and at least its first branch should be in Battersea even if its going to expand its operations online. You should pick a name that isn’t already taken on Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook and after registering your domain name you should get groups, fan pages and business accounts on those sites set up. Make sure they all point to you.
If you have an online business, insure your company name incorporates what you do for a living. Car Parts For Cheap Online is a better name than iParts. Since your business is online, you don’t need to incorporate a location.
The key thing is not to hamper your business with a bad name in an effort to be creative and unique. Because you’ll spend more time explaining it than you will selling what you do for a living.
Dan 'goAugmented' Sodergren
24 August 2011
11:33 am
Amen to all of this – this is basic #greatmarketing – it costs (legend has it) 5 times more to establish a brand people don’t understand…. so keep it simple.
Have been trying to persuade a client and a whole industry about a name change at present – augmented reality (in which the start up works) is such a geeky term.
The company we work with were called Nabreem ( a silly name) now we are called goAugmented (a better name)
But I still think we can get more descriptive and sexier but we are held back by an industry which refuses to change it’s standardisation.
Would the world wide web have taken off if the founders had stuck to calling it “The Information Mine” which abbreviates to TIM (Berners-Lee’s first name), or the “Mine of Information” was turned down because it abbreviates to MOI which is “Me” in French. Both were presumably far too possessive. The Information Mesh was rejected because, in Tim’s own words, ” it sounded too much like “Mess.”
Thank goodness they saw sense – we can only hope that the AR industry does as well
Kieran Thomas
25 August 2011
12:46 pm
Nice article. I was wondering – Do you have any advice on how to tackle the following scenario?
You have a great name for your product. It’s catchy, it’s descriptive, it’s short, and it’s hard to mistype/spell incorrectly… there’s only 1 catch…. It’s just been grabbed right out from under you.
(OK, so we know that whenever possible, grab the name as quickly as you can but in this instance, that wasn’t initially possible)
So, the question is….
Would you bite the bullet, and try to come up with something else, or, is it worth the expense of trying to acquire back the name?
How do you calculate the worth of a name if the product isn’t already established? (i.e. how do you calculate if it’s better to spend £x on aquiring a name back, or spending £x on marketing a different name)
How much more expensive & challanging is it to take a “non descriptive” name (such as Amazon, Orange, or o2), and to at least start it off onto a path for being a brand which becomes natually associated with a product?
I would be very interested to hear your thoughts and I hope other new startups might also find it helpful.
Many thanks
Nancy Fulton Mazur
23 September 2011
6:46 pm
If you’re just starting your business, and the name is expensive, I’d recommend you’d find another name. If its the name of your real world business, and you have been trading for a while, . . . it might make sense to buy the domain. Rebranding a whole business is hard.