On Naming Startups

Create new names for seven startups in three days: that was the challenge I faced last month when consulting at the Nexus Innovation Centre at the University of Limerick. I spent three intensely productive days brainstorming, creating, debating and negotiating with the startups. Here are some thoughts and observations arising from that work.

Straight Into Beta

Has the concept of “being in beta” now come to mean something else?
I have been a Blogger user for a little more than two years. As a web application it is somewhat clunky and rough around the edges, but it gets the job done. Being the type of person who enjoys playing around with the template of my blog and the structure of my posts, I am delighted that the application is now getting an upgrade. I am looking forward to migrating Thoughtport onto the new Blogger platform and using the new enhanced tool-set. However, putting my branding hat on here, I have reservations with the name chosen for this upgrade: ‘Blogger In Beta’.

Blogger was already well established as the most adopted blogging platform when I started ThoughtPort in 2004. For this next stage of its evolution to be labeled as beta seems oxymoronic. This seems to imply that we have all merely been using an alpha version up until now.

The advantage of web applications to me, the user, is that my upgrade cycle is continuous and unobtrusive. From a user perspective the ideal upgrade path should be seamless. I do not have to go out and get the latest version of Gmail and install it on my MacBook, instead I can just use the latest features as they are activated behind the scenes.

In practice, many Web 2.0 applications are using the word beta defensively. Their thinking appears to be that, by including the word somewhere on their home page, they are indemnifying themselves from any bad service experience their users may have. Big mistake. Once your service is live online and customers are using it, then you are moving out of beta. Of course, you have to refine and develop based on ongoing user-feedback internal innovation, but that is now a hygiene factor not a competitive advantage. (Technically, you could argue that all web services following this model are perpetually in beta. But that is merely the trivial definition, which also makes the prominent display of a beta tag equally redundant.)

Flickr kept a small grey beta tagline beside its brand mark for so long that it just became embarrassing. So much so that their (smart) response was to parody themselves with the new ‘Gamma’ tagline that they added with this year’s upgrade.

My intuition is that this unobtrusive, gradual, on-going accretion of features causes headaches to any traditionally-minded marketers who may be working within these organisations. They crave the large event, the splash of novelty, the hook big enough to hang a launch campaign upon. Why not wait, they may think, roll a suite of new features together and then launch them simultaneously to create some momentum and some buzz. Then name it (with a slightly tweaked or radically different name), to reinforce how different this new experience is to what has come before. This is not the approach I would take, but I suspect may be the road travelled in this case. “Well it is new and there are some aspects we cannot't truly test until we put a heavy user-load on them, so lets call it Beta: ‘Blogger in Beta’.”

I can see the dilemma they face. Discrete ongoing evolution is great for your existing user base, but not so helpful when you are trying to define your competitive advantage against your competitors.

On the basis of the business decision above, what might be the optimal naming strategy to pursue? Okay, so I would certainly not co-opt the nomenclature of the software-in-a-box model: Blogger 3.0, Blogger 4.0, which just perpetuates the older paradigm. (Although, the major July upgrade of Digg is informally referred to as Digg 3.0, but that seems to be an internal project title which has been co-opted as a conversational convention amongst Digg users, and does not appear to be a marketing construct.) A more valid approach is to completely eschew the whole concept of their being a version at all, as practised at Squidoo, Gmail, Google Calendar to name a few of the relevant sites. There surely are other variants which will need some further consideration and thought.

Addendum: I wrote this post before I migrated Thoughtport over to the new platform. On doing so, I now see that they are having to run both the original Blogger and the new ‘Blogger in Beta’ applications in parallel for a transitional period. With two different base URLs. This gives a valid technical basis for the name change. However I think the branding and naming issues addressed above are still relevant and worth discussing.

Can Do How Now?

Are the blogosphere and tagspace already fostering an evolutionary response in corporate verbal identity?Looking at the new DHL adverts in the last few week’s editions of The Economist, with their high-impact Hollywood-blockbuster aesthetic, I was intrigued by the organisation’s new corporate positioning statement: ‘The Do-How People’.

The syntax of this sentence jars with me. My first thought was that perhaps it reads better in the original German. The communicative intent is obviously an organisation that combines a ‘can-do’ spirit with some serious ‘know-how’. That the ‘Do-How’ resonates with the D and H in DHL, adds the mnemonic hook that justifies the brand consultant’s fee.

But really: ‘Do-How’? Surely there must be more elegant ways of expressing the desired concept? In these instances I always ask what underlying strategy would inform the decision to agree on that particular form of words?

In this instance, is it possible that this may soon become related to ‘tagging’ the corporate brand? One of the core ideas that I took away from Bruce Sterling’s E-Tech keynote speech was that of naming your concepts so that they are tag-able as much as Google-able. (Bear with me regarding those hyphens.) A quick check against Sterling’s ‘Spime’ meme on Technorati demonstrates how his naming strategy successfully facilitates my joining the conversations about that topic.

By implication, stewarding a brand today also means making it tag-able. Think about the Corporate Marketing function at most large multinationals, their corporate name is a given and unlikely to change soon. When their corporate name functions as a tag in the online environment today, it will be equally denoting critical conversations as well as favourable conversations. (The most clichéd example being the ‘Why X-Corp Sucks’ class of web page.) So in this environment, a novel tactical strapline can become a more useful asset than was previously the case. And, I suspect, the more novel it is then so much the better. We may begin to see a Darwinian evolution of somewhat ungainly taglines as brands compete to put up some bait for the folksonomies.

Getting back to ‘Do-How’ as a novel tag. A quick Technorati tag search for both the ‘Know-How’ and ‘Can-Do’ tags leads to a lot of varied content. Unfortunately a similar search for ‘Do-How’ tags does not yet lead to anything related to what people are saying about DHL today.

Perhaps now is the time to revive the humble word ‘Tagline’? It has fallen out of usage in favour of the more grandiose-sounding and value-added flavours such as ‘Corporate Positioning Statement’.

Delicious Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How
Technorati Tags: Branding | Corporate+Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How

To buy: Wordcraft

Wordcraft: The Art of Turning Little Words into Big Business
By Alex Frankel, ISBN: 1400051045
"Wordcraft is Frankel's in-depth look at how companies name themselves and their products and, in the process of defining their business through words and language, develop narratives that define the way they present themselves to the outside world. His lively, fly-on-the-wall narrative takes us into the conference rooms of Lexicon, the world's largest professional naming firm, where we see how the highly successful email pager known as the BlackBerry got its name. We travel to Germany to learn how Porsche approached the naming of its controversial SUV, a car that challenged the company's famously sporty image. The creative team behind Viagra explains how they took a completely fabricated word and turned it into a powerful idea. We witness how IBM assumed ownership of the word and story of "e-business" and in so doing turned around its corporate mindset and returned to a dominant industry position."