Re: Business Cards and domain names

From: Cliff Kurtzman <moderator_at_o-a.com>
Date: Tue 01 Apr 2003 10:32:51 -0600

"Marisa D'Vari" <mdvari_at_deg.com> wrote:

>My company is Deg.Com Communications and I have been
>diligently marketing the "brand" in virtually every sentence ...
>
>... but as great as it is to have a 3 letter domain, Deg (initials
>for D'Vari Entertainment Group)
>means nothing in itself and can be easily forgotten.
>
>I also own "EffectiveCommunicationSkills.Com" which is more
>memorable, though longer ... and people might "remember" it as
>"PresentationSkills.Com" which is not my domain.
>
>Thoughts on:
>
>1. Which domain to use when I introduce myself to groups?
>2. To put on new business cards?


Perhaps you should bite the bullet and come up with a name
for your company that you can build a strong brand around. Some
thoughts to guide your development of a name:

1. Avoid naming a company after yourself. Unless you are
a law firm, it makes you look small, and, even more
importantly, it has a variety of operational drawbacks. If
your personal name is in the company name, most people who want
to deal with the company will want to deal with you personally
even if you want to delegate the interaction. And if you
decide to sell the company someday, then having your name
in the company name will reduce its potential sale value.
Finally, even if someone does agree to buy a company with
your name on it, you will have to consider whether you will
be comfortable with the repercussions of having a third
party operate a company that is so explicitly attached to
your reputation.

2. Avoid entirely descriptive names at all costs.
Businesses change over time, and descriptive names are
inherently limiting. International Business Machines
(now IBM), Electronic Data Systems (now EDS), and Minnesota
Mining & Manufacturing (now 3M) learned this lesson the
hard way. Even more importantly, as you noted,
similar sounding unmemorable names are eternally
confusing.

3. The best and most easily protected names to brand with
tend to be unique creations, single word, 3 syllables or
less. Examples include Exxon, Lucent, Cingular, Verizon,
etc. These are all strong and memorable names that "mean
nothing in themselves." This is in fact a strength, rather
than a weakness... it allows these names to take on a
meaning that is entirely aligned with the brand.

4. Another strategy is to name a company using an ordinary
word that is not normally associated with the product or service.
Examples include Amazon, Yahoo!, Saturn, Google, and United.
Often a characteristic associated with the word is used to
develop associations used in the branding effort... the name
Amazon is used to imply large size... Yahoo! implies an
irreverent attitude, Google implies a huge amount of
information, etc. In my opinion, these names tend
to be less robust and less easily protected.
If you type Amazon into a search engine, you will come up
with a lot of stuff unrelated to Amazon, the company, but if
you type Exxon into Google, then most everything you get back
will relate to Exxon, the company.

4. There are quite a number of tests that we would run in
developing an identity for a client... a few of them are
to enter the name into search engines and assess uniqueness;
to run a trademark search on the name; and to go to a site like
speednames.com and enter the company name... at a minimum,
you should be able to confirm uniqueness by making certain
that the .com, .net., .org, .biz, .us, .info as well as
major foreign versions are available.

5. Business card layout and design itself has a wide
variety of subtleties, as does the design/selection of
logos, word marks, fonts, mottos, and color schemes. Each
choice you make sends messages to the people with which
you do business. Be sure you understand the messages that
you are conveying with each choice that you make in
developing these items, in order to assure that those
messages are aligned with the brand you are developing.


Best,

--Cliff


Clifford R. Kurtzman, Ph.D.
Moderator
Online Advertising Discussion List
http://www.o-a.com/




Received on Tue Apr 01 2003 - 10:32:51 CST