[Cache – #65]
Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* (*It’s what people think of you™) is the book I was honoured to co-author with Ted Matthews five years ago. Since that time, it has frequently appeared on the Globe and Mail’s list of bestselling business books, including at #2 in March.
This Spring, a fully-updated and revised edition of the book will be published – crammed with actionable branding frameworks and including a new chapter on naming.
The naming chapter, entitled Great Names Mean Business, covers the 10 jobs that names must do to be effective. Here is an excerpt. I hope you enjoy!
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“Given several hundred million dollars and the ability to sustain heavy levels of spending behind a brand, you can make a generic, descriptive, uninteresting name stand for something and sell at the shelf – sometimes.”
Carol L. Bernick
Chairman
Alberto-Culver
Job 8: Be Workable into a Suitable Domain Name
As of 2012, more than 350 million URLs, or domain names, were registered, and the World Wide Web was growing by 150,000 domains every day. A considerable portion of these domains are owned by resellers whose reason for living is to extract big bucks from you. For these reasons, it is extremely difficult to develop a Brand name that: 1. Is available for sale; 2. Is available for sale at a price you can afford.
But don’t get too stressed about it. It is not the job of the name to be available as an URL. Instead, it is the name’s job to be at least workable into a suitable URL.
Even that challenge can be difficult. But a creative workaround can almost always be found. Porter Airlines, for example, decided to use flyporter.com when porter.com was unavailable. High-tech firm ReVera owns revera.com, so for Revera, we bought reveraliving.com – which, because it says something meaningful about the Revera Brand, might even be considered an improvement over revera.com. In similar fashion, Square, a payment system that allows anyone to accept credit card payments with their smartphone, uses squareup.com – a very clever call to action.
This may seem counterintuitive, but web addresses are becoming less important by the day. Most people will find you through Google (which processes 1 billion searches every day), not by typing domain names into their browser’s address bar. If your website has a reasonably effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategy, you should be easily found.
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COMING SOON: A fully updated and revised edition of the Globe and Mail-bestselling Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* (*It’s what people think of you) – with a new chapter on naming
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THIS JUST IN: Brand: It Ain’t the Logo* ranks #2 on the Globe and Mail’s list of bestselling business books for March.