The Worst Branding Advice Ever
We can’t tell if this article from BNET is simply misguided, or a thinly veiled pay-to-play piece.
If you’re thinking of changing your product, company or organization name, please read the story’s suggestions and quickly do the opposite. A few of the points to which we take issue:
1 Rejecting names because they ‘suck’ indicates you’re evaluating names against a subjective and personal set of criteria. What you should be doing is writing a brief laying out what the name needs to communicate, and evaluating candidates against that.
2 Bomgar is short, unique, memorable and absolutely 100% meaningless. Not exactly the holy grail of naming.
3 Interesting that the employee who suggests naming the company after its founder is ‘clever’. Clever like a fox. It never hurts to flatter the boss, does it?
4 You don’t have to come up with a horrible name to unify your brand – you just have to be deliberate about constructing a logical brand architecture.
5 “The company, which had revenues in excess of $22 million last year, has been on the Inc. 500 list for the last two years. Clearly, the name change paid off for Bomgar.” $22 MILLION!?!? Maybe we should change our name to Bomgar! Sorry Ms. Fenn, but post hoc ergo propter hoc doesn’t hold water.
If you’re starting or in the midst of a naming effort, RUN DON’T WALK FROM THIS ADVICE!
2 Comments
Great find. That is article is an embarrassment. I liked the “alliterative” key attribute. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of a single product brand I admire that consistently uses alliteration as a “key attribute” of its name. Apple aPad? Intel Intium? RIM RickBerry Rurve?
Also not sure how great a “story” it is that the company is named after the founder, when a) who cares? and b) he had to CHANGE HIS NAME to make that true. Now, that’s a story…but one that makes me think “this guy’s a jackass.”