Startup marketing starts with the name game: So what should you call your new business? Take two (a ghostwrite)
Our keywords and our business names no longer have much in common. Have you noticed?
A quick glance at the Fortune 500’s today suggests that past naming practices demanded of us the communication of our industries via title: American Telephone and Telegraph, General Motors, General Electric, Ford Motors… So how did we get from the naming practices that produced these now historic firms to those practices which produced Google, Yahoo, Uber, and Yoast?
The youngest guys I know in start-up right now just named their company Queblo (they’re on Medium here). I asked them what it meant, and they said, without flinching, “Nothing.”
Meanwhile the oldest guy I know in start-up right now is meeting me for lunch in an hour to ask if I think NAFTA Consulting is appropriate. He wants something catchy and searchable. And I’m going to tell him, “No.”
Can I use yet another lived example to explain what is going on?
Yesterday I was looking at a Trivago advertisement on Mexican television and trying to figure out who their target market is. I couldn’t decide if Spanish speakers would see in the name “va” (he/she goes) + “go” (english for va) or, instead of these, “vago” — Spanish slang for vagabond. My Argentinian roommate told me it was the latter. Which made me think Trivago wants backpackers and surfers as clients rather than elite class business owners. (I do not yet know.)
My point via this anecdote is that Trivago, the polysemy of the name in particular just like the polysemy in Queblo and other names that mean “nothing,” frees company heads to evolve in ways that they cannot foresee. Perhaps Trivago means vago to an Argentinian in Mexico today. Tomorrow, it is as likely to mean “go,” multilinguistically, to bilingual businessmen and women moving between Europe and Latin America.
The advantage to creating a name that indexes (points to) you as you evolve rather than to something that precedes you (think of the word “telegraph” in AT&T for example) is two part:
1. Your name will evolve with you as well as with the times. (Again, think “telegraph”; this is a negative example, a word that is monosemous, rather than polysemous―ie the meaning of the word telegraph is unlikely to shift, even if today’s twenty year olds barely understand. When did you last hear AT&T referred to as American Telephone and Telegraph? Side note: Acronyms can be polysemous)
2. Equally important: you won’t get lost by the search engines. The Queblo guys got this. In contrast: people typing NAFTA Consulting into google aren’t going to find you simply because your name is NAFTA (or Start-Up or Mexico-US), no? This is what I am about to tell Luis, I mean:
A key problem with using language as indexical when naming in the present is that the majority of people searching for you by name online won’t get to you. Further, those who might get to you are unlikely to be the ones who are looking for and/or positioned to use you.
Are the words you are considering in your naming practice heavily used keywords with long histories of circulating online? If you choose, in contrast, a name such as BulProVest (I just smashed Bulletproof Vest together in my head because it’s the first thing that occurred to me), people who seek you will find you quickly and easily.
Such naming shifts your visibility strategy to depend upon intentional marketing rather than accidental search engine hits, this is true. But intentional marketing, especially via LinkedIn, is the only thing that works at present; more on this later…
Naming is about branding. Always has been. But branding is no longer about including keywords, or even earlier, indexing what you do. Instead, branding is about finding a language that is dynamic and able to evolve with you, a language through which you can communicate who you are today and who you will be tomorrow. Branding is about that and searchability, I mean. Because ours is the age of search engines.
