- Dos and Don’ts of choosing a winning business name [more... ]
- The stories behind 10 great names [more... ]
- The businesses that got it wrong [more... ]
Dos and Don’ts of choosing a winning business name
Do ...- keep your name short and snappy – no more than 3 or 4 syllables is best
- choose a name that tells customers what’s special about you and why they should choose you over the competition. Funky Frocks tells women what they can expect before they even set foot inside your shop
- get your name checked out by a foreign language specialist if you intend to sell abroad, or even to non-English speakers at home
- make sure all words in your name are easy to pronounce if you’re hoping for word-of-mouth recommendations. This is particularly important if you have customers whose first language isn’t English
- check how your name looks when written down, especially when all the words are run together in your web address. Experts Exchange can be read Expert Sex Change and Therapist can be read as The Rapist
- use your own name for your business. You know who you are, but do other people?
- limit your appeal by including your home town or district in your name. Tewkesbury Taxis and Havant Heating Engineers might be overlooked by people who don’t live in Tewkesbury or Havant
- choose a name consisting only of initials, unless you always accompany it in promotional material, on stationery, company vehicles etc by a byline eg HSBC – the world’s local bank. People don’t have a clue what initials stand for
- include overused words like Innovative, Premier and Quality in your name. They don’t tell potential customers anything and don’t distinguish you from thousands of other companies
- base your name on cringe-making puns. They might seem funny at first but humour palls after a while
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The stories behind 10 great names
Apple was the favourite fruit of company founder Steve Jobs. When it came to choosing a name for his computer he wanted a change from the cold, complicated names of other computer companies of the era – IBM, NEC, Cincom and Logitech. The Beatles’ choice of the name Apple for their label was a pun; Apple Corps (pronounced ‘core’) was set up to replace the company Beatles Ltd.
Audi, the German car company, is the imperative or command form of the Latin verb meaning ‘listen’. The company’s founder, August Horch, was previously boss of another car manufacturing firm called A Horch & Cie, but when, after a dispute, he left to start up another company, he was forbidden to use his own name. Horchen means ‘to listen’ in German, so the name Audi is actually a pun.
BlackBerry was a name thought up by the US naming company Lexicon Branding. The gadget was provisionally named PocketLink, then an employee noticed that the miniature buttons looked like strawberry seeds. The long ‘a’ of the word straw didn’t convey speed and niftiness, so BlackBerry with a short ‘a’ sound was chosen instead.
Coca-Cola’s name is based on two of the drink’s ingredients – extracts from coca leaves and from cola nuts. Cola nuts can also be spelt kola, but the founder of Coca-Cola preferred the look of the two Cs.
eBay was originally going to be called Echo Bay, but the URL echobay.com had already been taken.
Google was originally nicknamed BackRub by its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, because their system analysed back-links (ie links from other web pages). In 1997 the pair wanted a new name that would give a sense of the huge amount of data the search engine could process. Google is a play on the word googol, the word for the huge number that is represented by a one followed by a hundred noughts.
Hotmail is not only a snappy word linking mail with a positive adjective (hot in the sense exciting, new or topical) but it also contains the computer mark-up language initials HTML.
Kodak is a made-up word. Company founder George Eastman wanted a short name that would be easy to spell and to pronounce – and to trademark. He liked the letter K, which he described as a strong, incisive letter.
Nike began in the 1960s as Blue Ribbon Sports and officially became Nike in 1978. The company takes its name from Nike, the winged Greek goddess of victory – very apt for a company involved in the sports world. Nike’s Swoosh logo represents one of the goddess’ wings.
Starbucks is based on a character in Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. This was the favourite novel of Gordon Bowker, one of the founders of the coffee chain and he originally wanted to call the company Pequod after the whaling ship in the book. His partners weren’t so keen and suggested Starbo, the name of a local disused mining camp. Bowker saw the connection with Starbuck, the first mate on the Pequod, and so Starbucks was born.
There are more great names in the e-guide Choosing a winning name for your business.
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The businesses that got it wrong
Arch Deluxe was a very expensive flop for McDonald’s in the mid-1990s. It was a premium burger aimed at a sophisticated adult audience and the name was chosen to suggest ‘luxury’. The trouble is that no-one associates McDonald’s with luxury and sophistication; McDonald’s values are convenience and consistency. It is estimated that McDonald’s spent over $300 million dollars on the Arche Deluxe brand, but it all came to naught – the product was soon withdrawn from sale.
Consignia was the short-lived name of the British postal service, the Royal Mail, between 2001 and 2002. The name was meant to demonstrate the global nature of the business (Royal was regarded as too British) and to show that the company was involved in more activities than just sending letters. The name Consignia was designed to make you think of the word consign, whilst also evoking the regal connotations of insignia. One problem was that people weren’t sure how to pronounce it. Another was that it reminded some people of a 1980s deodorant called Insignia, whose irritating ad spoofed a Rolling Stones song. Even worse, the word consign has overwhelmingly negative connotations – it usually appears in phrases such as consign to the dustbin, consign to the scrap heap or consign to oblivion.
Emu Airways was a small Australian airline based in Adelaide. It closed down in 2005. An emu is a good Aussie emblem but could the airline’s demise have anything to do with the fact that emus can’t fly?
Froogle became plain old Google Product Search in 2007, four years after it was launched. Froogle is a snappy and witty name, and was meant to be a cross between frugal and Google. Unfortunately, most people didn’t get the joke and never clicked on the link, because they didn’t know what it was meant to be.
Monday was the short-lived name of Price Waterhouse Cooper’s consulting arm when it was spun off as an independent entity in the wake of the Enron scandal. The name was intended to denote ‘a fresh start’. Unfortunately, Monday may suggest a beginning in the West, but it’s not the beginning of the week elsewhere – in the Arab world, for instance. Monday reminded many people of Black Monday, the 1987 stock market crash, or the Monday Club, a right-wing group in the British Conservative Party. Pop fans were reminded of the hit songs I don’t like Mondays and Manic Monday, and some couldn’t help humming the Mamas and Papas song Monday, Monday that goes ‘Whenever Monday comes you can find me cryin’ all of the time’.
Osco is a chain of pharmacy stores based in the US Midwest. In the mid-1980s the parent company acquired another chain, Sav-On, based in southern California, and renamed all those stores Osco. Sales in California dropped and three years later branches in that state reverted to their original name, Sav-On. The company bosses denied that there was anything wrong with the name Osco, claiming that Sav-On was more familiar to the local population, but many commentators thought that the Spanish-speaking residents of southern California were put off by the name. Osco was too similar to the Spanish word asco, which means ‘revolting’ or ‘disgusting’.
Zyklon was the name of a running shoe launched by Umbro in 2002. Zyklon is German for cyclone, but it was too reminiscent of Zyklon B, a lethal insecticide used in Nazi concentration camps, for non-German-speaking markets. Umbro apologised for any offence caused, but this did not satisfy some Jewish groups, who accused Umbro of choosing the name deliberately to appeal to the thuggish, racist element within sports fandom.
There are more examples of businesses that got it wrong in the e-guide Choosing a winning name for your business.
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