Name Awards

Don’t judge a book by its cover.. only its title

When I was a young sales and marketing fellow, one of my favorite books was Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive. Since then, Harvey Mackay has gone on to fame and fortune, while I am still soldiering on. More interestingly, his publisher thought this title was nonsense, but he ran some quick market research and it was the clear leader in the public’s mind. So the publisher capitulated. However, let us quickly add, that in most cases a title this long is a failure. This is simply the exception that proves the rule titles should be short and dynamic – like War and Peace for example.

Now most bigger publishers have many wordsmiths on staff – writers, editors and marketers – so coming up with unique titles that will sell is simply a brainstorming exercise for them. However, after addressing the San Diego Writers and Publishers Group recently, I realized my namers had been correct in pushing me recently to add naming of books to our agency’s offerings.

We love books ourselves, so we are making this a very low cost service aimed at the independent author or self publisher. You can’t trademark your book name, but we can help you develop and select an effective marketing name – even if it is a boring business statistics book.

To stand out on the shelf you may need a colorful cover, but to stand out online, in indexes, in articles and in the rest of the blogosphere you need a strong, appropriate title. I called my own branding book Brighter Branding. Perhaps we can do even better for you. Please see our Book Title Naming Service on the Brighter Naming website.

Acquisio makes my head a spinio

These guys might make great PPC software for SEO agencies, for those of you who know what these abbreviations mean, but doesn’t the name feel like they were trying a little too hard?

Even the logo confuses me a bit. A shy lower case to start a pronoun! OK, I know some designers like this style…but please not when other letters in the name are uppercase. And those sergeant stripes at the end! They make it look like it is a patch is for a navy uniform or something..  or at best makes it busy and difficult to read.

Of course,  it is probably pronounced Acquizio… so they should have claimed that domain too.

Gatorade aids the alligators if taken literally

Yesterday a sports colleague told me how Gatorade almost did him in when he was using it to quench a big thirst while on a fishing trip, not knowing at the time that he was diabetic! Yes, Gatorade has a lot of sugar… though not as much as a can of coke or some of those cups of flavored yogurt.

More interestingly, from a naming point of view, is how strong this name is even for people who still think they want a name at the beginning of the alphabet. Yes, G is a great consonant to use for good names, as everyone will attest to with Google. It is not only hard, it is heavy without being stodgy. And for all the analytical types out there, would you have ever selected a name Gatorade after carefully checking the spelling and implied meaning?

Is Fidel Castro fiddling in Silicon Valley?

I have a number of interesting names to blog about this week, but Fididel really stands out from the crowd. Do they really expect anyone to trust them with money transactions when their name sounds like they are fiddling the books?

And on top of that, their logo font is junior’s favorite straight off the boxes at Toys-R-Us. Is this for real or a kid’s game? They even have the registered trademark on the name, but no one has told their logo designer yet.

PS I am sure this is some clever abbreviation of what they do (at least V1.0 of the business plan). But so what! Imagine being a salesman for them and having to call up and offer to Fididel your negotiations. Sounds like you are stuttering because you are embarassed to admit you are fiddling things. For that we already have cousin Vinny or Luigi.

How can I trust McAfee? I already gave up on Norton!

Like many others, I couldn’t wait for my free trial period on the new computer being protected by Norton Utilities from Symantec to end. What a rude and insulting company to do business with…. not least of which is they remind you ever day for the last 30 days and beyond.. and there is no way to cancel or suppress or change the message. I even checked with tech support.. who took more than 15 minutes to confirm they close button never works.

A brand is a promise of an experience. And the most important item in building that experience is trust. If they don’t trust us, how do they expect us to trust them? Especially when it comes to protecting our PC’s – and livelihood!

So I thought I would give McAfee a try. Heard great things about them. Knew they were one of the big boys. Hadn’t used them in years because they were lost under the dirty cloud of the shannigans at Network Solutions. Imagine my surprise when I selected Paypal from the payment menu, and it flips me into a screen asking for my credit card? Did I press the wrong button? Try it again. Same results. Double check payment screen. Yes, it has Paypal as an icon and a drop down menu item. Sure don’t want to give out a credit card number on an unprotected PC.  So I call tech support. Who casually tells me they don’t take Paypal..despite what it says on their payment screen!

Paypal are you listening?  McAfee is abusing your service. It isn’t rocket science to delete a payment scheme from a checkout program. If I can’t trust them with my payment information, how can I trust them with my data… and livelihood.   Another brand promise that is seriously compromised….. which means the name is tarnished. I should have used someone else.