Like most online dating relationships, Jazzed.com didn’t last as long as we had hoped. (They couldn’t match the success of Match.com and eHarmony didn’t want to cannibalize its own business.) I’m still heartbroken.
MORE EXAMPLES OF EMOTIONAL NAMES
Obsession (fragrance)
Pedigree (pet food)
Club Monaco (clothing)
Snuggle (fabric softener)
One Kings Lane (flash sale site)
Next let’s look at the flipside of SMILE: SCRATCH.
CHAPTER 2
The 7 Deadly Sins
When you’re starting out with a blank slate, don’t curse your name with any disadvantages. Every time you have to help people spell, pronounce, and understand your name, you are essentially apologizing for it, which devalues your brand.
Unique spellings, nonsensical words, and unfamiliar expressions may differentiate you, but just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s good. There’s a terribly misguided belief that unique equals creative, which equals great. Think of a time when you’ve been in an art gallery, at a garage sale, or in the home of a friend, and you eyed a strange oil painting, turned to the person next to you, and whispered, “What were they smoking?” People react the same way to strange names.
For a glimpse at the seriously strange, you need to look no further than the annual winners of TechCrunch Disrupt, a breeding ground of awesome startups with not-so-awesome names. Past winners include Atmosphir, Bojam, GazoPa, plaYce, Shwowp, Tollim, and Tweegee. Distinctive names? Yes. Good names? Hardly.
When to SCRATCH It off the list
As you know from the previous chapter, the SMILE & SCRATCH name evaluation test is based on my philosophy, “A name should make you smile instead of scratch your head.” We’ve covered SMILE, the acronym for the five qualities of a great name. SCRATCH is an acronym for the seven deal breakers. A good way to remember this: if it makes you scratch your head, scratch it off the list.
SCRATCH: The 7 Deadly Sins
Spelling challenged
Copycat
Restrictive
Annoying
Tame
Curse of Knowledge
Hard to pronounce
If you want a strong name, make sure it doesn’t suffer from any of these weaknesses.
Spelling Challenged —
Not Spelled like It Sounds
If you have to spell your name out loud for people, Siri butchers it, or it looks like a typo, it’s a mistake.
Spelling your brand name in a non-intuitive way isn’t clever—it’s lazy. Sure, it’s tempting to spell your name creatively, so you can nab an available domain name. But spelling-challenged names will forever frustrate your customers, embarrass your employees, and annoy journalists, bloggers, and proofreaders. And if you were still in elementary school, it would annoy your teacher, too. (Many dot-com names do look like second graders created them. More about those dot-com name fails in Chapter 3.)
Misspelled Hell
For many years, my firm has bestowed a “Head Scratcher of the Year” prize to companies with extremely problematic names. The 2010 winner was ridiculously silly: an organic baby clothing company named (drum roll, please) Speesees.
Obviously, whoever came up with this name was not a former spelling bee champion. I’ve been in the naming business long enough to bet money on why they spelled it that way—the domain name they wanted (Species.com) wasn’t available, so they thought they would be clever by spelling the word phonetically.
On its Facebook page, Speesees explains that it’s “spelled s-pe-e-s-e-e-s because that’s the way a baby might spell ‘species’ (if a baby could spell).” I am not making this up.
Imagine that you work in sales at Speesees.com. Making sales calls, you have to repeat your email address (e.g., staceyw@ speesees.com) over the phone. Ten times a day. This is what you would sound like: “That’s Stacey with an e—S-T-A-C-E-Y-W—at Speesees dot com. S-P-E-E-S-E-E-S. I know it’s a weird spelling, but we think that’s how babies might spell it if babies could spell.” Having to say this once would be exasperating. But how many times in the life of your business will you have to spell your email address or URL for someone? Why would you intentionally make it hard for yourself with a spelling-challenged name?
Beyond the babyish spelling, Speesees is a creepy name for anything related to human babies. Plus, Speesees broke what I thought was a self-evident, unwritten rule of naming, which I will write here, so you don’t make the same mistake—your business name should not rhyme with feces.
Speesees is now out of business. The last image on their Facebook page is for a “bye-bye sale.” Bye-bye, baby.
Don’t Get Cute with Numbers
While it may work for texting and clever license plates, embedding numbers in a brand name looks cutesy and unprofessional. When you use numbers in your name you will 4ever have 2 spell it out. For example, coast2coast spelled out loud would be coast-numeral 2-coast. Your goal is to have a name that you can say proudly: “Coast to Coast dot com—just like it sounds.” If you can’t get the domain name CoastToCoast.com, add a modifier word (as in GoCoastToCoast.com or FlyCoastToCoast.com.)
Skimming through store names at Mall of America (a hotbed of bad names), I found stores called Friends 2b Made and Engrave Ur Memory. Friends, I would like to engrave this into your memory: if it’s not spelled the way it sounds, scratch it off the list.
Test the Siri Theory
The true test to see if a name is spelling challenged is to see and hear how voice recognition software spells it. Use the microphone key on an iPhone and speak the name as a text message. See how it’s spelled. Is it incorrect? Garbled? Did autocorrect suggest an absurdly wrong word, as every spell-check program will forever do to you and your customers? Welcome to your world.
While you have an iPhone handy, use voice commands to ask Siri to do a Google search for the brand name you’re considering. Whatever results you get are what your customers will see.
MORE EXAMPLES OF SPELLING-CHALLENGED NAMES:
TCHO (fancy chocolate)
Svbtle (publishing network)
Twyxt (couples app)
Houzz (interior design)
Häagen-Dazs (ice cream)
I’d like to buy a vowel, please.
Copycat —
Similar to a Competitor
Hijacking another company’s original idea isn’t good for your business reputation or for building trust with your customers. Copycat names are lazy, lack originality, and blatantly ride on a competitor’s coattails. Plus, because they could cause customer confusion, you open yourself up to trademark infringement, which can be very costly.
Pinkberry is a successful chain of trendy frozen yogurt stores. While the name isn’t exactly a showstopper, because of the popularity of the brand, countless copycats have tried to take a free ride on the highly distinctive Pinkberry name and unique swirl identity design. Here are a handful of the dozens of knockoff names I’ve come across. A number of these have faced trademark infringement and related claims. (See the Resources section for more on trademarking your name.)
Yoberry
Lemonberry
Peachberry
Blissberry
Yogiberry
Myberry
Kiwiberry
Luvberry
Coolberry
Freshberry
Another example of a copycatted name is Twitter, a polarizing name that I love. I think we can all agree that the employee collaboration tools named Yammer, Jabber, and Chatter were inspired by the name Twitter. While those three names may not be cause for trademark infringement, they are not winning any awards for originality. I got a good laugh when we recently worked on naming a cool new corporate employee communication platform. In the creative brief under “Words to Avoid,” our client wrote, “Any sound a bird makes.” (I was thrilled that he chose the name Tribewire.)
Other Copycat Trends to avoid:
____ Monkey
____ Daddy
____ .ly (.ly domain names, especially verbs, look and sound sil.ly)
iAnything (unless you’re Apple, don’t do this—it screams copycat)
eAnything (e.g., eFax and eLove are hopelessly dated, plus they look grammatically incorrect in print as proper nouns)
uAnything (see eAnything)
The Double-O (it may have worked for Google and Yahoo, but that doesn’t guarantee the success of Doostang)
any fruit (Apple and Blackberry are so well known that if you name your company Kumquat, you will be a copycat and you’ll have a silly name)
Cloud (overused, and because most businesses now have an Internet presence in the cloud, the word cloud is superfluous)
Also avoid names that are a combination of a random color plus a noun. While it works for some companies, where the color is meaningful to their audience, such as WhiteHat Security (“white hats” are the good guys), most names with colors in them, especially those of tech companies and wine brands, sound terribly dated.
An Exception to the Copycat Rule
While it would be ideal to have a unique brand name that no one else has ever used before, with only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet, that’s nearly impossible to do. Especially if you want people to be able to spell and pronounce your name. The good news is, it’s usually not a problem for unrelated brands to have the same name when your audience is not likely to be confused about who is who. When a name appears in context on a product, people don’t associate it with the other brand. Think about it. When you’re showering with Dove soap, you don’t associate it with a chocolate-covered Dove Bar.
Here are some other examples of unrelated brands that share the same name:
Monster (job board, energy drink, cable company)
Ritz (crackers, hotel)
Explorer (car, Internet browser)
Pandora (Internet radio, jewelry)
Delta (airline, faucets)
Magnum (condoms, ice cream)
I don’t recommend using the same name as a brand that’s so recognizable it’s iconic. For instance, using either Apple or Virgin would be a liability for you and almost certainly run into issues of trademark infringement. Always check with a trademark attorney before using any name.
Restrictive —
Locks You In, Limits Growth
On average, Americans visit tire shops only a handful of times in their lives. Yet in Canada, according to Reference for Business, nine out of ten adults shop once a week at Canadian Tire. It’s not that the roads up north are so rough that people need to replace their wheels fifty-two times a year. Canadian Tire sells not only tires, but toasters, treadmills, tackle boxes, tool belts, trashcans, tents, tablecloths, toys, tropical plants, telescopes, and trampolines. And a whole lot of other totally terrific merchandise completely unrelated to tires. Like the company’s tagline said in the 80s, “There is a lot more to Canadian Tire than tires.” What a waste of words. A tagline shouldn’t have to apologize for your name.
With 437 locations in Canada, it’s safe to say that the Canucks know Canadian Tire is a mass merchandiser. But what if Canadian Tire wanted to roll into the United States with the same name? How would Americans know that they could go there to buy everything from toilet seats to tennis balls? Hello, million-dollar ad campaign.
Don’t get locked into a name that you may outgrow down the road. Plan ahead, and choose a name that will be a wide enough umbrella to cover your future product and service offerings.
Do Not Use the Same Name for Your Product and Company
It’s confusing and shortsighted to name your product and company the same thing. Although you may have only one product now, think about the future. What if Apple had named their first computer the Apple? What would they name the dozens of other products that have launched since then? Your company name should allow any product name under it.
If you’re launching a product and company simultaneously, I suggest you name your product first. You can expect consumers to remember only one name, so make it what they’re actually buying.
Don’t Paint Yourself into a Corner
Roomba, the first robotic vacuum, was the initial product from iRobot. The folks in the marketing department probably thought they were onto something clever when they named their second product, a wet vac, Scooba. Then they were stuck. They ran out of -ba names. How do their next two robots—Verro (for pools) and Looj (for gutters)—fit in? They don’t.
MORE EXAMPLES OF RESTRICTIVE NAMES:
Name
Limiting Factor
99¢ Only Stores
It outgrew the price.
Fast Signs
Its tagline is “More than fast. More than signs.”
24-Hour Fitness
Some locations are not open 24 hours.
Burlington Coat Factory
They now sell many kinds of clothing and home furnishings and have spent millions explaining their name: “We’re more than just coats. Not affiliated with Burlington Industries.”
Diapers.com
They sell all kinds of baby products, not just diapers.
1-800-FLOWERS
This has got to be the least romantic name ever for a company that now sells not only flowers but candy, fruit, gift baskets, teddy bears, and more.
Annoying —
Forced, Frustrates Customers
Annoying of course is subjective, but if you think about your name from a customer’s point of view, you can avoid causing frustration if your name does not appear forced, random, or grammatically incorrect.
Clunky Coined Names
If you invent a new word for your name, be careful that it doesn’t sound unnatural. Mashing two words together or mixing up a bunch of letters to form a new word rarely appears or sounds smooth. One of the most cringe-worthy coined names I’ve come across is a women’s networking organization named Femfessionals. Really? Would you want that on a professional résumé?
Some natural and organic brands that use this technique end up with names that sound like they are full of chemicals (e.g., Activia and Enviga). Simply adding or dropping a vowel or two at the end of a real word or word root is the laziest way to coin a name and almost always sounds forced (e.g., Innova, Natura, Portfolia, and Evolva.) Exceptions would be Nautica and Expedia. Those are pretty names, which sound like real words and are no-brainers to spell.
Another naming style that tries too hard is adding trendy suffixes to a word to make up a new word. Sprayology, Teaosophy, and Perfumania are all train wrecks. Also, please don’t dissect the word Nirvana. It’s a beautiful word on its own but rarely works when combined with another word. Homevana, Teavana, and Pervana are all uncomfortably forced.
Suffixes that need to be used with caution:
____-mania
____-ster
____-osophy
____-icious
____-ology
____-zilla
____-palooza
____-ly
____-topia
____-ella
Resist the Temptation to Be Mysterious
Another sure-fire way to annoy people is to choose a name that’s completely random and seemingly meaningless. One I wonder about a lot is Vungle. I have no idea what this company does. I don’t want to know. It sounds like an STD. Likewise, can you guess what companies Qdoba, Magoosh, Iggli, Kiip, Zippil, or Zumper do?
Don’t Get Thrown in the Grammar Slammer
A grammatically challenged name is unprofessional, a huge turnoff to customers, and sets a bad example for children. A few of these names that should receive citations from the grammar police are Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, Retail Me Not, Jennifer Convertibles, and Toys “R” Us, which in seven short letters manages to violate at least three basic rules of English.
Initials Don’t Make Good Names
Nancy Andreotta and Colleen Kachele are professional organizers who market a nifty reusable labeling system for home st
orage. The name they created for their business, NACKit!, combined their initials, NA and CK, which was meaningful to them but annoying to potential customers. NACKit! was also spelling challenged, had an unnecessary exclamation point, and an awkward combination of upper and lowercase letters.
When Nancy and Colleen received a trademark infringement letter from 3M brand (makers of Post-it Notes and Post-it Products), they had to agree to change their name to avoid litigation. We rebranded NACKit! as Stash Mob, a fun name that hints at storing your stuff, is easy for people to spell, and doesn’t slow down Siri or spell check.
Tame —
Flat, Descriptive, Uninspired
If you want your name to stand out in a sea of sameness and get noticed—without a massive advertising budget—you can’t afford to be shy. Descriptive names are boring because they require so little imagination. They don’t challenge, excite, or mentally stimulate us. And because they are so predictable, chances are that those names have already been taken, making it difficult to get them trademarked.
Hello, My Name is Awesome Page 3
