A Rose by any other name

 

Was Shakespeare right about names, or does the market tell us another story.

Two months ago we started a journey with a number of companies into a business acceleration program, using influence as the key driver. What has come to the fore this month, has been the limitation of names on business opportunities. I felt this whole area worthy of an Evers Report, as naming is one of the nine Influence Factors in any business, but rarely discussed in any kind of depth.

Three of the businesses participating in the program chose to review this aspect of their Intellectual Property and as a result have now expanded both development options and exit strategies.

A context for naming
Names have a bit of the chicken and the egg syndrome around them.  If you take the Shakespearian perspective “a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet” actually only applies if you have had the experience of the “rose” first. In business this relates to meeting a person, liking them, and then asking about their business. This is how we often experience people and their businesses through networking events, referrals or introductions.

Just like Romeo smitten with love for Juliet, does he really care what she is called when those hormones kick in? Alternatively, do people in business care what the company is called when they are at the other end of an good deal...of course not. Still, I can't help but wonder if even Romeo would be so brave, as to pursue a girl whose name was “John” or “Gertrude”?

An interesting study was conducted a few years ago, on the emotional impact of names. Particularly, it sought to understand the influence a name could have on attractiveness.

The first part of this study concerned itself with finding two women that were rated by some 100 people as equal in attractiveness. The second part of the study was to take these two identically rated women, simply apply the names of “Jennifer” to one and “Gertrude” to the other, and send their photos out again to another 100 people in order to rate their attractiveness.

If the Shakespearian perspective was true, you would expect the addition of a name, to have little bearing on the attractiveness of either woman. However, the two names, did change people’s perceptions of attractiveness of the two individuals. The study revealed a whopping 400 percent difference towards the person “Jennifer” and away from the person named “Gertrude”. (Remember, these women were rated the same in appeal before those names were applied.)

For any business who wants to use non-personal means of introduction, whether through advertising, billboards, signage, marketing campaigns and/or the internet, then your name must be considered as a factor of influence to your business success.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) experts have long known the difference a change in domain name can have, along with ad copy, to increase the click through rate for advertisers on Google adwords. (They are the advertisers you find mostly down the right hand side of a search page on Google.).

How we take on information
My second guiding principle relates to the way we as humans take in information. Recently, I was sitting down to coffee, when a truck went past with the name “Lyre Company” and the tag line “we put your interests first”.  

We take in information visually through what we see, how it makes us feel and by hearing. When coining a name, make sure that its meaning doesn’t alter visually, over the phone (orally) or when experienced as a word. Now, back to our “Lyre” example, there is no difference between the sound of “Lyre” and “liar” over the telephone. 

“Lyre” would definitely not be my choice of a name for a security transport business because it sounds like “liar”. Even apart from this, is the marketplace really going to believe a tag line like “we put your interests first” from any company that calls itself “liar”, of course not and the company loses its potential for influence as a result.

I wrote about a similar situation, last Evers Report, concerning the National Australia Bank changing its name to “nab”. We all know what “nab” means in slang. However, here is a quirky fact. If they would have kept their new name in caps, as in NAB,  that would have changed our perception in a different way. Another study reported in New Scientist on names showed that names in caps have higher credibility and influence than names in lower case. Unfortunately, not only did “nab”  lose in the oral name stakes, they lost in the credibility stakes by going lower case as well.

Naming for Business Continuity
The third principle for any business though when naming is around succession planning, diversification and the overall exit strategy for the business.

As part of your business naming process, you need to decide whether your exit strategy is to sell or pass on the business, diversify your business interests or franchise it in some form. Every one of these has an impact on your choice of name and has intellectual property ramifications as well.

Your name captures, along with the brand, the goodwill of the company. Nothing is more disheartening than to see years of goodwill unable to be fully realised in the sale of a business or leveraged into new products or business opportunities because of a poor naming strategy.

Take Rentokil as an example. Rentokil is a great name for pest control business, but Rentokil Plant Hire, doesn't quite cut it for a business that hires out healthy plants. Something about kill and plants doesn't quite go together. I keep thinking that it was the "rento" part that should have been transported to the plant hire business. They could have called it Rentoplant or Rento Tropical Plant hire, still can and would change the take-up of this franchise business overnight.

You can uncover even more examples of this, with businesses that use a form of technology or service in their name that are now becoming extinct such as typewriters or analog now in telecommunications. Names that leverage off current technology can often end up with a limited life span.

Own your own name
Finally, your name has be able to be owned by you. That means you need to be able to trademark it as well has having the logical .com or the extension for your country as your domain.

Domain names are in themselves becoming big business. I noticed while I was doing the research for this report that www.planting.com has the hefty price tag of $58,000 on it. Not a bad return for an initial $10.00 investment in an internet domain name.

These four guiding principals do set the stage for right thinking around names.

In creating a name of influence there are at least nine approaches you can use to come up with the right name. As well as a nine point checklist that has taken us years to compile, to make sure it will be effective.

The good news is, that we will be covering both of these aspects, in detail, in an Accelerated Influence course we plan to release later this year, online. We realise that there are challenging times ahead and business people will need these kinds of resources to empower their business within reach.

So, until our next report, I wish you well on your journey to greatness.

Regards,
Monika Evers

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