04.21.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 9:13 pm by Athol
Yahoo recently announced they are offering voice search capabilities so that users of Blackberry devices (and similar) can speak their requests and get an email reply via Yahoo’s mobile oneSearch engine. Unlike the competing ChaCha where humans answer the requests, do the search and send the results, everything for Yahoo is handled automatically via technology from a company called vlingo. That is right.. another bunch of techies trying to be clever and spelling their name without a capital letter. Good luck.. it will drive editors nuts.. and so they will be in foul mood when writing about you. And what are they to do if a sentence starts with the name?
Did your mother give you a name with a lower case? Of course not. Names are proper nouns. They should always start with a capital letter. Make the logo lowercase - if you must - or if you are paying Landor a lot to design your new look. But keep your name in lower case at your own risk. Cisco tried it years ago.. and they perhaps had more justification than others since this name was the back end slice of San Francisco. But then they grew up.
Imagine trying to read an analyst’s report on companies to watch, even later a Wall Street analyst’s, and your name doesn’t get flagged or indexed since it was passed over by man and machine all for the want of an uppercase letter.
Vlingo probably has great technology or Yahoo would not have hooked up with them. Their name potentially is very powerful and appropriate, but only when people know it is a name and not some common word.
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04.18.08
Posted in Language Fun, Name Origins at 7:26 am by Athol
One of the fun parts of naming is discovering new roots and meanings every day. I must have been asleep at the wheel to not know that Nevada is from the Spanish word “snowfall”.
There is snow in the mountains and the north, but enough to name the state after it? Wow. Imagine we name some winter ski parkas (that are good in snowy weather) Nevada. People will surely not get it and assume we lost all our naming marbles in the casino.
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03.31.08
Posted in Branding, Great Names at 9:02 pm by Athol
A few years back, we all had to endure an ad agency showing off around the country about how they branded milk with their famous Got Milk ads. I still have a problem with their claims. They may have created a little more awareness about milk, and had some interesting campaigns that became PR items in and of themselves, but I defy you to name 2 brands of milk. Most of us barely know what brand we usually buy ourselves. All I know is my milk of choice comes in a blue carton. And while this campaign was running, they were mostly missing the youth audience that 7Up was happily scooping up at all the X-Games.
On the other hand, what a spectacular job the water industry has done of coming up with different and strong brands, even though all the water scientists tell us we are better off drinking tap water. No, we’d rather pollute the landfills of the world with all those expensive plastic water bottles - even those of us who are thinking green!
Perrier is one of the original and on-going classics in this field. They had us believing in the classiness of French water long ago, so much so it is acceptable to drink in fine bars and restaurants. They were closely followed by Evian as well. Probably because of the weight (and stupidity) of shipping water all around the country there are only a few national brands like Aquafina, DeSani (terrible name!) and Crystal Geyser. If you travel a lot, you can almost remember what airport you are in by what bottled water brand they are selling. Talking Rain tastes funny to me since I don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, but I do love the name.
BottledWaterWeb.com lists 80 bottlers of water now in the USA, yet we all have our favorites and swear we can tell the difference. There are probably a lot more milk bottlers (old theme by now.. I know)! But despite being a namer by profession, I am very visual and of course I am a regular consumer too. Nothing ever jumped into my shopping cart as quickly as Fiji water did the first time I saw their display. The square bottle with the see through label is a magic story in consumer packaging and deserves more attention. Shipping water all the way from Fiji must be expensive, and so they have to compete on something other than price. I still love the fact that they are the first product I have ever seen where the inside of the label shows you a lovely water scene through the water in the bottle itself. I don’t care what it costs. I sometimes “need” this water to decorate my desk. As a result, I believe it tastes good too and I buy their story about how it is natural and untouched by man.
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03.25.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 9:27 am by Athol
The stupidest question I get asked, usually by bright, naive would-be company founders, is should they consider the search engine rankings of a name or words first, then find the company name, or find the name first. And last week it came up a number of times, so I fear this silly virus is spreading.
So let me put it to rest here and now, and as politely as possible say: If you consider search engines first, you are flat out stupid. Consider the facts:
- Whatever clever, catchy web name you come up with for your product line, it is still only one of many web search terms.
- Whatever name you come up with, I can put it in the title or keywords of my web pages and score as high as you (or better).
- Whatever name yo come up with, I can make a webpage with that same key phrase and score as hight as you (or better).
- Whatever name you come up with, if it is a popular search term, it is probably generic so you cannot trademark it.
- Whatever name you come up with, it is almost impossible to get consumer or business brand awareness, since humans are so brand-centric.
- Whatever name you come up with that is popular with search engines, will also be popular as a general search term and you will be home alone, lost on the internet.
- Consider where you would go to buy a CD, a computer, a pair of shoes online. Really..you wouldn’t go to cd.com, computer.com or shoes.com (respectively) so why would your clients go to the generic for your industry.
If you want to sell scientific text books online, you could own the domain scientifictextboooks.com (it is for sale, and they are only asking $1,400). But how could you make this a brand? And how would you compete against the big brands? So please, first type this term in a search engine and see who else comes up. Even Target stores comes up early in this search, and that is far from their core business. Plus what happens if you really find your audience are searching for technical books instead?
Enough said. Go get a great unique short brand name that you can own and protect. Then do your search engine marketing properly.
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03.15.08
Posted in Domain Names at 8:06 pm by Athol
It amused me to read the recent Business Week article about YouTorrent, the new index site to give the video and music companies heartache. Can you imagine someone who is running such a popular site, as he hides from the law, actually ponied up $20,000 to buy the domain YouTorrent.com? When you are providing a free path to contraband, and not charging for it, wouldn’t any old name have worked? Why did he have to do guerilla marketing off YouTube and BitTorrent? With millions of hits a month, that he is self-funding with no revenue model in site, this especially doesn’t make sense.
But then again, neither does it make sense to me when every few months someone tries to buy the domain Roseann.com off me for under $500. My sister, Roseann, and I, once ran a business with this name. Plus there are a number of congresswoman with this name, and it is of course close to the name of comedienne Roseanne (Barr) who is always on some rerun TV channel somewhere. To make sure I wasn’t too biased, I had GoDaddy appraise the domain and they came back with a range of $6,822 to $17,000! Me, I’d be happy to get half the lower end of that range… but in the meantime it is worth more to our family.
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03.10.08
Posted in Name Origins, Great Names at 7:44 pm by Athol
Sweeping across the nation is a new chain of high class Chinese restaurants called P.F. Chang’s. Imagine if they had just been called Chang’s. Wouldn’t they have sounded very common? Wouldn’t it have been very difficult to own, trademark and protect that name?
On the other hand, what a difference a few initials make! Suddenly a touch of class is added.. even if you haven’t tried one of their restaurants so far. Pure initials are a disaster from a marketing point of view for most new entities unless they are backed up with megabucks marketing, but initials plus a common word really help free up some unique name space and customer mind share.
So how do you pick which initials to use? Peter Fleming (of the famous Fleming Steakhouses), simply used his own. And so there really is no Mr. P.F. Chang to greet you ever… but don’t tell everyone. Simply take them out for a new class of Chinese American food.
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03.03.08
Posted in Language Fun, Great Names at 3:31 pm by Athol
Some names are just plain fun. No one knows what they mean or where they came from, but they bring a sense of warmth to our hearts and a smile to our faces when we hear them. And every year about now in the middle of ice hockey season, I want to run out and hug a Zamboni!
Sure I can get all analytical and research it and find that these crazy lovable machines are simply named after their founder, but why spoil the simple things in life. A Zamboni is a Zamboni and that is that. After all, not a lot of industrial equipment has inspired its own fan sites (e.g. www.dochertyfamily.com/zamboni.htm for one) or allowed its owners to make it part of their marketing and brand experience for the fans.
Our local San Jose Sharks do it as well as anybody, as you can in this picture of one of their Zamboni’s soaking up some rays for a change. Both Zamboni and the San Jose Sharks deserve some sort of marketing awards for this!
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02.24.08
Posted in Future Names, Language Fun at 9:39 am by Athol
I suppose it has become more than just a trend.. maybe even a wave .. all these new, very short, strangely spelled Web 2.0 names. On one hand we had the very common name backlash after the .com bust, resulting in names like FaceBook, YouTube and MySpace (which I categorize as Web 1.5 names). But now people are pushing the envelope again though they seem too scared to pick a word with proper English constructs.
Of course, this trend is also driven by the SMS generation, so spelling is not of paramount concern to them, as long as it is short and decipherable and cool to their peers.
Here are some examples from the recent Silicon Valley latest quarter venture funding report: Vuze, SezWho, Tumri, YuMe, SoonR, Taoit, Zoove, Qwaq, Jangl, Fliqz and Ribbit.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, your professional venture capitalists invested over a million dollars on average in each of these strange characters from cartoon land!
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02.21.08
Posted in Rotten Names at 11:14 am by Athol
For my regular readers, you may recall that back in June last year I forecast Blu-Ray would win the DVD wars. After all, a real brand name usually beats out initials.. especially if it is lots of initials without a megadollars branding campaign behind it.
As often happens, the only 3 worthy initials to use with initial names are R.I.P.
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02.05.08
Posted in Name Origins at 11:36 am by Athol
Now that Yahoo has become a $44 billion soccer ball in takeover battles, it is interesting to look back on the origin of this name. Only 14 years old - an eternity in internet time - this is one of the last names that came straight out of the dictionary and the domain was free!
Jerry Yang and his partners were looking through a dictionary for any words similar to Yacc (Yet Another C Compiler for those of you who are not Unix propeller heads) when they came across the word Yahoo. I am sure they must have looked at the meaning too - and promptly ignored it - because definitions vary from “A slightly crazy cowboy” to “a brutish, vicious person”. Today this is almost a conservative name. Amazing how things change with time and usage. But I bet they never would have picked such a radical name (at the time) if they had not been a bunch of youngsters fresh off campus. Can you imagine an older management team telling their board of directors about the meaning of such a name? Not many places it would have flown, other than at what today is Yum! brands.
Of course, despite what the dictionaries say, Yahoo had become the sound of an expressive yell as well… and why the company name is properly tagged with an exclamation mark!
P.S. My big old Webster’s points out that the first meaning of the word came from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels: a race of brutes having the form and all the degrading passions of man. If the takeover fight gets dirty, this might become too true!
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