The torrent of generic brand names on the Internet provides hope for the late starters. If you can launch a Website with a good idea and a good brand name, you are in a good long-term position. You can wait until the generic site names drop out of sight and then jump in and win big.
Make no mistake about it. Your name stands alone on the Internet and is by far your most valuable asset. This is one of the major differences between the Internet and the physical world.
In the physical world, there are many clues to a company’s purpose. Location, window displays, even the size and architecture of the building. A hotel looks like a hotel, a bank looks like a bank, and a restaurant looks like a restaurant.
Even in the industrial field, you seldom are exposed to just the company’s name. A brochure or direct-mail piece will usually have pictures that establish the company’s product line or service.
On the Internet, however, the name stands alone. Until you get to the site, you won’t find any clues to what the site actually does.
In the physical world, a mediocre name can sometimes work because the physical clues combine to establish the company’s identity. A watch store looks like a watch store.
The location and visual look of a retail store, for example, can be so unique that customers often forget the store’s name. “It’s the repair shop at the corner of Eighty-seventh Street and York Avenue.”
Even a droll name can work in a retail environment. “The Mattress Firm” for a bedding shop, for example. “The Money Store” for a home-loan company. “General Nutrition Centers” for a health-supplement store. Names like these never stand alone. They always carry a wealth of clues that communicate their real purpose.
In the electronic world, there are no clues. There are no books in the window that tell you that Amazon.com is a bookstore. No travel posters that tell you that Priceline.com sells airline tickets. No greeting cards that tell you what Bluemountain.com does.
This is what leads Internet companies astray. Straight into the generic trap.
The lure of the generic is so powerful that some companies have paid enormous sums for names that in the long run will turn out to be useless. A Los Angeles company bought Business.com for $7.5 million. (To whom it may concern: If you had bought this book for $18.95, you would have saved yourself $7,499,981.05). Some other recent purchases:
It’s worse than tulip mania in Holland or truffle madness in France. The latest bid on the Loans.com name was $3 million. (If you own a common Internet name, our advice is to sell it before the mania melts away.)
Even at this early stage, the power of a proper name as opposed to a common name for an Internet brand has been clearly demonstrated. The big early winners (AOL, Amazon.com, eBay, Priceline.com, Yahoo!) have all been proper names rather than common names.
There’s a lot of confusion on this issue. People see a name like Priceline and assume it’s a common or generic name, but it’s not. The generic name for the category is “tickets” or really “name-your-own-price airline tickets.” Tickets.com is a common name used for a Website that, in our opinion, is not going to take off.
(“Price” and “line” are common words, of course, but they are used out of context and in combination to create the proper name “Priceline,” which becomes an effective Internet brand name.)
Every common name can also be a proper name if used to identify a single person, place, or thing. Bird is a common name, but it’s also a proper name, as in Larry Bird or Tweety Bird.
When you are choosing a brand name for your Website, the first thing to ask yourself is, what’s the generic name for the category? Then that’s the one name you don’t want to use for your site.
Invariably a singular proper name will turn out to be a better name for your site than a generic.
iVillage.com, for example, is a better name for a Website devoted to women than Women.com. (Yes, there is a Website called Women.com, and it spent millions to promote its name before selling out to a rival.
Ashton.com is a better name for a Website that sells luxury goods than Cyberluxury.com, eLuxury.com, or Firstjewelry.com.
In the physical world, the same branding principles apply. The proper name is superior to the common or generic name.
There are degrees of commonness, of course. “Burger King” is not a totally common name. The Hamburger Place would be a totally common name for a fast-food establishment that features burgers.
There are degrees of properness, too. McDonald’s and Hertz are more “proper” than Time magazine. Time is a common name used out of context to create a proper name.
In the same way, Amazon and Yahoo! are more “proper” than Priceline and eBay, which are common words used out of context. (All distinctions are relative, of course. Even Amazon and Yahoo! can be common words. A yahoo is a brutish creature and an amazon is a tall, vigorous, strong-willed woman.)
So how “proper” should your Website name be?
It all depends. First, and most important of all, you want your Website name to be perceived as a proper name. Then hopefully you want your name to be more “proper” than your competitors’. But you also want to consider other factors.
In general, the shorter the better. Shortness is an attribute even more important for an Internet brand than an outernet brand.
You have to keyboard the Website name into your computer. That’s why the site name should be both short and easy to spell.
Many Internet brands have two strikes against them. They are both too generic and too long. As a result, they are hard to remember and hard to spell. Some examples:
Starting with the generic name for the category and condensing it is a good way to kill two birds with one stone. You create a proper name that’s also short and easy to spell. CNET.com, for example, took the generic term “computer network” and shortened it to CNET, creating a short, proper name that’s also easy to spell.
Sandoz needed a brand name for its over-the-counter flu therapy product. So the company reversed the word order and condensed the name to TheraFlu. The product went on to become the leading brand in its category.
Nabisco needed a brand name for its vanilla wafers, so it called them Nilla. And the powerful brand name Jell-O is just a shortened version of gelatin dessert.
Nabisco itself is a brand name constructed by condensing its former generic name, National Biscuit Company. (There are many national biscuit companies, but only one Nabisco.)
Barnesandnoble.com finally threw in the towel on their long, difficult-to-spell name and shortened it to bn.com.
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is an enormously successful financial company, but Morganstanleydeanwitter.com is not going to make it on the Internet. The company shortened the name to msdw.com.
(The names bn.com and msdw.com are not good either, because they are hard to remember.)
The well-known consulting firm Booz Allen & Hamilton obviously couldn’t use its long, complicated name on the Internet, so the firm launched Bah.com. (Not a particularly euphonious choice.) And what about names like Deloitte & Touche? Or PricewaterhouseCoopers?
The Internet will force many companies to take another look at their names. This is true even for companies for which the Internet is a medium and not a business. Instead of launching Bah.com, perhaps Booz Allen & Hamilton should have changed the consulting firm’s name to Booz Allen and launched a site called BoozAllen.com.
And what about names like: Allegheny, Allegheny Teledyne, Allegiance, Anheuser-Busch, Bausch & Lomb, Canandaigua Brands, Di Giorgio, Harnischfeger, Hayes Lemmerz, Heilig-Meyers, Leucadia National, Marsh & McClennan, Phillips-Van Heusen, Rohm & Haas, Schering-Plough, Smurfit-Stone, Sodexho Marriott Services, Synovus Financial, Tecumseh Products, TIAA-CREF, Transmontaigne, Wachovia, Wackenhut, Weyerhauser.
All of these companies will have difficulty transferring their names to the Internet. And these are not small companies either. They are all ranked in Fortune magazine’s list of the one thousand largest American companies.
Because of the Internet, many companies will have to simplify their names. You have to misspell a name and address pretty badly before the Postal Service will refuse to deliver your letter. To reach a Website, however, you have to be perfect. You can’t drop one of the periods or leave out a hyphen.
One way to have your cake and eat it too is by using both a name and a nickname on the Web. Charles Schwab is the leading discount brokerage firm, but on the Web the company uses both CharlesSchwab.com and Schwab.com, although it promotes only Schwab.com.
Ask Jeeves is one of the leading search-engine sites on the Internet, but it wisely operates with two site names: AskJeeves.com and Ask.com.
When you have to choose between several brand names that seem equally good, the smartest name to pick is usually the one that also has a good nickname.
People feel closer to a brand when they are able to use the brand’s nickname instead of its full name.
Simple is not the same as short. Simplicity has to do with the alphabetical construction of the brand name. A simple word uses only a few letters of the alphabet and arranges them in combinations that repeat themselves.
Schwab is a short name (six letters), but it is not a simple name because it uses six letters of the alphabet. This is one reason that Schwab is not a particularly easy name to spell.
Mississippi is a long name (eleven letters), but it is also a simple name because it uses only four letters of the alphabet. Which is why most people can spell Mississippi.
Coca-Cola is both a short name and simple name. Although the name has eight letters, it is formed by using only four letters of the alphabet. Furthermore, the name repeats the “co” syllable.
Pepsi-Cola, on the other hand, is a much more complicated name than Coca-Cola. Pepsi-Cola uses eight letters of the alphabet to form a nine-letter word.
Autobytel.com, for example, suffers from the same problem. Like the Pepsi-Cola name, it takes eight letters of the alphabet to form the name. Furthermore, how do you “parse” the name? Is it Auto by Tel or Auto Bytel? And what is a Bytel anyway?
Even though the Autobytel Website has a proper name, along with an early lead in the car category, we don’t believe it will become the premier site in its category.
Some people have criticized Nissan’s decision to change its U.S. brand from Datsun to Nissan. But from a brand-name point of view, Nissan is the superior name. Although both brand names use six letters, the Datsun name requires six letters of the alphabet and the Nissan name only four. (You hardly hear anyone use the Datsun name anymore.)
Here’s the paradox. To become a big brand on the Web, you need a proper name. On the other hand, the name should suggest the category without falling into the generic name trap.
This is not an easy line to walk. Shortening the generic name is one way to achieve both objectives (CNET, Nilla, and Jell-O, for example).
Another approach is to add an “off-the-wall” word to the name of the category. PlanetRx, for example. (We would have preferred a different word than planet, which has been overused. In addition to the ailing Planet Hollywood chain, there are two other would-be planet brands on the Internet: Pet Planet and Planet Outdoors.)
DrugDepot.com might also have been a better name for an Internet drugstore than either Drugs.com or Drugstore.com. It’s alliterative and mimics both the Home Depot and the Office Depot brands in the physical world.
We helped a company that was planning to sell advertising specialties on the Web come up with the name BrandBuilders.com. (The company sells hats, T-shirts, pens, binders, and other material used in corporate brand-building projects.) Then we agreed with the client to make the name more finger friendly by shortening it to Branders.com.
Unique is the key characteristic that makes a name memorable. This is true for all brand names, especially those used on the Web. AskJeeves.com and DrKoop.com are two Internet brand names that are both unique and memorable.
No name, of course, is totally unique unless you create it from scratch, like Acura, Lexus, Kodak, or Xerox.
AskJeeves.com is associated with the butler and DrKoop.com with the former surgeon general of the United States. But these are singular individuals who are not going to be confused with the Websites that carry their names.
As a matter of fact, both individuals suggest the functions of their sites—Ask Jeeves for finding information and Dr. Koop for medical information.
But how unique is More.com, a site that spent $20 million to tell you they sell health, beauty, and wellness products? Or MyWay.com or CheckOut.com or Individual.com or Owners.com or YouDecide.com or Indulge.com or This.com or Respond.com? Or any of a hundred different sites being backed by millions of dollars’ worth of venture capital and promoted with millions of dollars’ worth of advertising?
A Waltham, Massachusetts, company spent $20 million in television and radio advertisements to launch a gift-buying service called Send.com. How is anyone going to remember the name?
Let’s say you wanted to buy a present for your friend Charlie for Christmas. Do you go to Buy.com, Present.com, Gift.com, or what?
By definition a common or generic name is not unique. It does not refer to a specific person, place, or thing like a proper name does. Therefore, a common name used as a Website name for the generic category is not memorable.
Why do you think children move their lips when they read? They are converting the visual symbols represented by the letters and words into sounds that can be processed by their brains. The mind works with the sounds of words, not with the visuals and their shapes.
When you grow up, you learn not to move your lips when you’re reading. But this doesn’t change the way your mind works. It still works with the sounds of words.
If you want people to remember something, rhyme it for them. “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit.”
Fogdog.com is an improvement over the brand’s original name, which was Sportsite.com.
Alliteration is another sure-fire way to improve your brand’s memorability. Many real-world brand names are alliterative. Some examples:
In our search of active, well-promoted Internet brands, we could find very few that used alliteration. (One of the reasons we liked BrandBuilders as a name was its alliteration.)
The same principle applies with babies. Give your newborn kid a head start. Pick a first name that’s alliterative with your last name. It’s a fact that many famous celebrities have alliterative names: Alan Alda, Ronald Reagan, Robert Redford, Tina Turner, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Sharon Stone, Greta Garbo, Doris Day, Sylvester Stallone, Susan Sarandon, Ted Turner, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck.
When was the last time you bought something because you read an advertisement or a news item about it? Many people are hard put to remember a single item they bought because of an ad.
Does this mean that advertising is ineffective? Not necessarily. Most people buy products or services because they hear about these things from friends, neighbors, or relatives.
Word of mouth is the most effective medium in your entire communications arsenal. But how does the first mouth get the word to pass along? From publicity or advertising, of course.
As a rule of thumb, there are ten word-of-mouth recommendations for every publicity or advertising “hit.” This ten-to-one ratio holds for many different products and services.
As effective as word of mouth is, you can’t build a brand by mouth alone. You have got to give that first mouth something to work with. Unfortunately, too many companies use Internet brand names that are unspeakable. And many others are common names that discourage word-of-mouth usage.
“Where did you buy your new computer?”
“It was Onsale.”
“I know you got a good deal, but where?”
“Onsale.”
Onsale.com might be a difficult name to use in ordinary conversation, but many other Websites are even worse. They’re also hard to pronounce and spell. Some examples: Entrepreneur.com, Concierge.com, Cyberluxury.com, Onvia.com, imandi.com, Brodia.com, iWon.com, iOwn.com, Richoshet.com, zUniversity.com, Shabang.com, uBid.com, Cozone.com, GiftEmporia.com, iParty.com, eHow.com, Travelocity.com, Adornis.com, 2Key.com.
When someone recommends a physical brand or a real-world retail store, you don’t have to remember exactly how to spell the name in order to find the store. Is it Abercrombie & Fitch or Abacromby & Finch? It doesn’t matter in the mall; it does matter on the Web.
That’s why an Internet brand should always try to line up all possible spelling variations of its name. 2Key and TwoKey, for example.
(Roughly 10 percent of the buying public suffers from some form of dyslexia. Why write off—or rather, spell off—the dyslexia market?)
Another problem is the mixing of letters and numbers. Very few outernet brands use both. (We could think of only 3M, 3Com, and 1-800-FLOWERS.)
Quite a few Internet brands, on the other hand, make this mistake: 1stBuy.com, 123greetings.com, 123tel.com, How2.com, Net2phonedirect.com, Pop2it.com, Click2Asia.com, Shop2give.com, MP3.com, 4anything.com, 4charity.com, Fax4Free.com, Opus360.com, 800.com, 911gifts.com.
Why do most people find it easier to remember their phone number than their license plate number, even though they are both about the same length? Because license plates usually use both numbers and letters, which makes them much more difficult to recall. While the combination can sometimes make cute vanity plates (321GO), they make poor brand names.
And did you ever try to remember a Canadian postal code like H3B 2Y7? A mixture of letters and numbers is usually much harder to recall than either letters or numbers alone.
One of the reasons that companies select unspeakable brand names has to do with the selection process.
Most brand names are selected visually, usually from a list of names printed on oversized sheets of white paper pasted on cardboard.
That’s not the way prospects deal with brand names. They usually hear them verbally from friends, neighbors, relatives, and coworkers. Even the media exposure of brand names is heavily weighted to verbal rather than visual media. Nearly 90 percent of the average person’s media time is spent listening to radio or television versus less than 10 percent reading newspapers or magazines.
In case you’re wondering, the words you hear in a television commercial are far more likely to make an impression in your mind than the words you read on the screen. (The spoken word conveys emotion and secondary meanings, while the printed word just sits emotionless on the page or on the TV screen.)
When you select a brand name, you should listen to the proposed name being spoken, and not just stare at the word on a board. You can’t hear capital letters or the sound of a circle ®. To be effective, a brand name needs to sound like a proper name or a word that conjures up a particular Website, not just a generic category.
If you want prospects to remember your Internet brand, you need to make the name itself “shocking.”
The best brand names have always had an element of shock or surprise. DieHard, the largest selling automobile battery, for example. Häagen-Dazs, the leading premium ice cream. Diesel, the fashionable brand of jeans.
It’s easy to go overboard and make the name so shocking that it offends people. FUBU is a brand name that comes close to the edge, although younger people are usually more tolerant of truly shocking names.
People sometimes ask us why we call our laws “immutable.” Aren’t some of your laws mutable? Maybe so, we reply, but to make it in the book business you need a shocking title. The 22 Generally Accepted Laws of Branding is just not going to go anywhere at Barnes & Noble, Borders, or Amazon.com.
One of the most difficult tasks in public relations is getting a business book reviewed in the media. We’re going to try as hard as possible, but the odds are that this book will probably be the eighth book we have written that will not be reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.
But the Journal did review a book entitled Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. Four hundred years from now, will the 25th-century Wall Street Journal review a digital book entitled Leadership Secrets of Adolf Hitler? Could be.
An element of “shock” makes a name more memorable because it puts the power of emotion to work. To a certain extent, you remember events in your own life based on the degree of emotional involvement. Your graduation day, your wedding day, the day John F. Kennedy was shot, the day the Twin Towers were destroyed.
You may have taken dozens of vacations in your lifetime, most of which remain in your mind as fuzzy memories. The vacations you will never forget, however, are the ones that contain strong emotional elements. An automobile accident, an overturned sailboat, the day you stepped on a sea urchin.
You see the same pattern on the Internet. Common names like Cooking.com and Furniture.com are bland and carry no shock or emotional involvement. They’re hard to remember.
It’s names that have a bit of bite to them that will turn out to be the better brand names on the Internet. Names like Yahoo! and Amazon.com. These are names that stir up some emotional response.
One good branding strategy for any Internet company is to immediately lock the “shocking” name into both the category and the benefit. Amazon.com has promoted itself as “Earth’s biggest bookstore.” This strategy works on several levels. The Amazon is the Earth’s “biggest” river, and the alliteration of “biggest bookstore” makes the phrase more memorable.
If you don’t lock your shocking name into either a category or a benefit, you waste the power of the name. We always thought that Prodigy was a good name for an Internet service provider, but not for a general site. Prodigy, in our opinion, should have been directed at children.
Other memorable names are MotleyFool and EarthLink. (Although when Earthlink acquired MindSpring, it should have used the MindSpring name, which is more shocking.) Also memorable because they are shocking are Hotmail, the most popular free e-mail service, and Monster.com, the leading Website for job listings.
Obviously, every Internet brand cannot accommodate all of these eight naming strategies, including personalization. But when the situation allows it, you should consider naming your site after an individual.
This strategy has a number of advantages. First of all, it assures you a Website with a proper name rather than a common name. Second, it enhances the publicity potential of your site.
Many real-world brands have evolved from individuals. Ford, Chrysler, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Olds(mobile), Buick, Cadillac, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Donna Karan, Liz Claiborne, L.L. Bean, Boeing, Forbes, Goodyear, Gillette, Heinz, Hertz, and Orville Redenbacher, to name a few.
Initially Dell Computer sold its products under the PC Limited brand name. But ultimately the company realized that the proper name (Dell) was much stronger than the generic name (PC Limited), so it switched.
You enhance the publicity potential of a brand when you use the founder’s name as the brand name. Look at all the publicity Michael Dell has received, publicity that directly benefits the brand. His competitor Mr. Compaq seldom gets mentioned.
And where would the Trump brands be without The Donald? Nowhere, because Donald doesn’t like to spend money when he can get something for free. Don’t knock PR. Donald Trump’s whirlwind activities on behalf of his brands are what has made them successful.
Brands are cold, silent, and lifeless. Only a person can articulate the brand’s strategy, position, and objectives. The media want to interview people, not brands. And whenever possible, the media want to interview the CEO, not the brand manager.
Relax and enjoy it. If you are the CEO and you want your brand to become famous, you have to become famous, too. The most famous brands usually also have celebrity CEOs. Microsoft and Bill Gates. Sun Microsystems and Scott McNealey. Oracle and Larry Ellison. Apple and Steve Jobs.
Same on the Internet. AOL and Steve Case. Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos. Yahoo! and Jerry Yang and David Filo.
Simplify things. Make it easy for both your prospects and the media to associate the chief executive with the Website. Give them both the same name.
All branding work starts with the name. If you pick a name that matches most of these eight naming strategies, then you will be well on your way to building a successful Internet brand.