As part of a partnership with HP, I’m writing over at their new Small Business Marketing Guide. Longtime readers know I always am transparent about these deals, as I was with my work at American Express. I love this work, because it lets me write longer form, and never tells me what to write about.
Here’s an excerpt of the piece:
We humans are all wired for a great story. We love narrative, it’s how we relate to each other and the world. Over the course of the past 20 years I’ve been involved in naming a lot of new things – from the early days at Wired (more on that in a minute) to Web 2.0, to my current work at Federated Media. And as I review all the names and brands I’ve been involved in starting or advising, one thing becomes crystal clear to me: the best names are ones that have a great story buried inside.
It’s often said that a brand is a “vessel waiting to be filled.” In other words, you can call a new product or service anything, and after a while, if your product is successful, that brand will come mean whatever experience it ends up delivering. While I generally agree with the thesis, I’ve found that having a great story is a very good way to jumpstart a new brand, and a great way to help sell it and keep defining it in the long term.
Read the entire post here.
Wow, John, I didn’t realize that the real founders of Yahoo were “Jerry Yang and David Brin”. 😉
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The storyteller is the always the best salesman.
It can take years to get the right name: even though I knew I had a great idea, because I had both David Pogue and John Dvorak on board with the concept, getting the team together didn’t take off until I came up with a tagline: “What’s Cool, What’s Hot, and What’s Not.” Even then, it took me months to realize that CoolHotNot would make a great brand. Once I snapped up the domain, everything fell into place for CoolHotNot.com and getting a great team all on board. Should be going live with the beta soon now, and with a name that’s easy to spell and easy to remember, it makes the concept that much easier to get.
Team OS/2 (see Wikipedia) was also successful (as a concept at least, if not by its ultimate failure to stop Microsoft) largely because the name was instantly appealing to its audience and told a story all by itself.