Required reading from Seth Godin:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/a-dumb-branding.html
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rules_o.html (longer)
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rules_o.html
Highlights:
"Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town. It's a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable."
"If you want Jet Blue or ikea or some other brand, you're just as likely to type the brand into google as you are to guess the domain name. In essence, we've actually added a step in the process of finding someone online. (How else would anyone find Del.ico.us?) This means that having the perfect domain name is nice, but it's WAY more important to have a name that works in technorati and yahoo and google when someone is seeking you out."
"First, the main point: a brand name is a peg that people use to hang all the attributes of your business. The LESS it has to do with your category, the better. If you call yourself International Postal Consultants, there's a lot less room to hang other attributes. Some names I like? Starbucks. Nike. Apple. "
1 comment:
Very good stuff. If I'm reading the (longer) post correctly, Group One 2 is a pretty good name. It's unique, but not outlandish and doesn't pigeonhole us into a specific market. One thing Seth Godin mentions that we talked about 12.29.08 was not stressing "go2" as a placeholder name. We have to stick with "Group One 2" internally, and if people want to shorten or alter that name on their own, so be it. To bring this home, we call "Harris Teeter" a lot of things like "HT", "The Teet", etc. but they only express themselves as their formal name publicly.
Bash
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