Norm Brodsky argued that business names did not matter in his Inc magazine article. Instead, he argued that the company’s customer service and the satisfaction that it delivered were far more important than the exact, perfect, ultimate catchy name for your new company.
In a counter article, Marcia Yudkin made a somewhat convincing argument that names DO matter and listed ten reasons to back up her point. I especially liked this one:
just ask the shoe company in the UK that named some new sneakers “Zyklon,” which was the name of the gas the Nazis used to kill millions during World War Two.
Could the shoe company have been any less aware? Would it have taken a lot of effort to google the proposed name of the shoe and find out what (or if) it had been used for in the past? In my personal experience, I have been involved in the naming process of a couple of companies, and numerous websites. One thing that stands out to me is the neccesity of “trying out” the name in all forms of media that you intend to use it.
For example, perhaps your latest entrepenurial venture is to make toilets for wild animals. You might think that a name like “Deer John” would be a clever and catchy name for a company like that. In print it looks quite clever, but how would it sound over the phone? “Hi, this is Bob from Deer John, and I am responding to a literature request”- What, Dear John? As you can imagine, there could be a lot of confusion surrounding your company name. What about the internet? Try doing a search for the name ‘deer john’ - I got 9,220,000 pages, many of them about a tractor company called John Deere. Or perhaps your potential clients mispell their search and went looking for ‘dear john’ instead. They would only find 32,000,000 pages.
I was part of the naming process for the company Truxxx Manufacturing, which makes truck accessories. A simple name, it passed the visual test (so we thought) and was seemingly clearly associated with trucks and truck parts, or so we thought. I came up with a cool logo, built a website and away we went. Then the fun with names began, first with delivery people always wanting to know if we were a porn studio. They always seemed to pronounce our name True-XXX. Ooops. Another issue came about with corporate firewalls blocking anything with XXX in the name, preventing one of our larger clients to be unable to use our website for selling to their customers. Another ooops. We also ran into trouble leaving phone messages, with most people mispelling the name despite the fact it only has six letters. And the final frustration is the mispronunciation that often occurs. We had intended people to pronounce it ‘trucks’, and instead it often gets said as ‘trucks-s-s’ as they try to say every x in the name.
So in summation - think of print, phone, internet, radio and tv before settling on a name for your company. You might save yourself some communication headaches later.
Another company name I have had trouble with in the past is ‘Greg Pilling Equipment’. This was from my automotive repair equipment days, and it seemed like a simple name to use at the time. It did become impossible to seperate myself from the business, however, which had problems of its own. Many times I ran into resistance because I was the sole person, and thus could not possibly be professional! Of course this is not true with many sole proprietors, but the sterotypes do exist. I often wished that I had called it ‘Triangle Equipment’ or something, but then people would want to know what sort of equipment was used for making triangles!
So my advice is to put some thought into it, do some internet searches, check for trademarks, and run it by your mother. If a complete stranger can understand your company name over the phone, you might have a winner. Once you have a company name, forget about it and focus on creating the best company you can. Norm Brodsky is right when he says that a great company name will not make a great business. But it doesnt hurt.
Or you could just hire Marcia for $997 to name your company.
