IBM. GM. AT&T. GE. Sound familiar? They are. These are all companies that qualify as “Captains of Industry.” And with good reason. They’re huge, they’re successful, and they have vast amounts of “mindshare.” But when you are naming your company – or your product – do you want to try acronyms or meaningless bunches of letters?
Here’s the deal. All the companies listed above were once companies known by real names. International Business Machines. General Motors. American Telephone & Telegraph. General Electric. They were able to move to letter designations because the public began referring to these companies with that form of shorthand, and it stuck. (FedEx was “Federal Express” long before it was “FedEx”.) If you expect to get the same milage out of two or three letters, you’d best build up some brand equity and mindshare with a name that means something, before you attempt to get a few letters to be instantly and irrevocably associated with your name.
While we’re on the subject, I can let you in on a little secret I know…the secret to coming up with a great name.
A great name is one that is memorable. The company names above are memorable only because they’ve been around for a long time, and their companies have poured vast sums of money into marketing and advertising so that you’ll think of them as memorable. A nice idea, but far too expensive for most people.
A great name is evocative. One of the smartest marketing guys I’ve ever known was not a marketing guy. Paul Grayson was a computer guy – he’d worked for Price Waterhouse in their computer department, and started a little company called Micrografx, then sold out and started another. He’s got better marketing instincts than most MBAs I know. Intuitively, he knew a great name when he heard it. He had a product – then called Graph Plus – that (desperately) needed a new name. The product was a competitor to both Powerpoint and Harvard Graphics (remember that one?). It was designed for people needing to give presentations. We tried a lot of names. Nothing clicked. We held a contest. Paul was CEO and judged the entries. He won. Not because he was CEO, but because he had the best name for the product. The name? Charisma. I’ve always marveled at that name. In just one word, he was able to communicate not what the product did, but what it would do for you.
A great name must be easy to spell and easy to pronounce. Seems simple, but if you’re trying to say the name of your product or company over the phone, you don’t want to have to spell it every time. And don’t even get me started about what a cute spelling does on the Internet.
A great name must be available. Don’t be too quick to fall in love with a great name, until you know that it’s actually available, and not too similar to a competitor. Everybody’s global in the Internet Age. We had to pass on a dozen “great names” before we found “Novel Idea,” because we couldn’t get the URL – or the one we could get was too close to a competitor’s name.
A great name must be unique. “General Motors” has got to be the worst name for a company since…since “General Electric.” Don’t name your company by using a literal word for what you do married to a word like “general,” “amalgamated,” or the name of your hometown. Come up with something different. The word “Blockbuster” at one time was used only to describe a movie that had a huge opening weekend. Today, the word has “mindshare” for a movie rental company, even more so than any one movie. Brilliant.
Finally, a great name must have resonance. If you come up with a great name and it doesn’t fit your company’s image (internal AND external) it’s not a great name – just a cool one. Move on.
So the next time you’re shopping for a great name, put some thought into it. After all, if names weren’t important, we’d all be known as “protein unit #46398072” or something equally as memorable.
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