Name Stuff Ups Can be Good For Business
January 28th, 2010 by Ingrid Cliff
With all the furor over iSnack 2.0 and iPad (proof we need more women in IT), it helps to go back into history to soothe frazzled business execs nerves that not all naming stuff ups are bad for business.
Think of the ubiquitous Pizza Hut. This business was started by two humble uni students in 1958 who saw how popular pizzas were at toga parties, so conned their mum into funding a pizza shop. They rented a property on a busy street corner, bought second hand equipment and hired the cheapest signwriter they could find to put the word Pizza in big letters on a sign. The signwriter must have been having one too many that day, because they painted the word “Pizza” on an angle and lopsided. The guys couldn’t afford to get a new sign done, so they worked out they could put three letters under the word Pizza. After much searching through the dictionary, they found the word “Hut” and the distinctive Pizza Hut company came into being. (We gratefully acknowledge R Brasch in his book “A bee in your bonnet?” for this story).
The Pizza Hut guys didn’t have expensive competitions, or run massive focus groups to come up with their name. They just had a problem and had to solve it, and you could argue they did it more effectively than a mountain of marketing people at Kraft and Apple.
The two boys also had a lot of the right ideas in terms of naming their business for a web 2.0 world. You see it pays to name your company with words that include the term that most people are looking for on the net (and buy the .com to match). This means your keywords naturally appear in searches sort of like instant SEO without too much hassle, and your business is easy to find. You could get all creative with a unique name, but where there is a simple solution that gives you brilliant SEO benefits, you may want to try that first.
So, if you get stuck for a business name, certainly get some data on what people are looking for on the net, and then bung on a simple word ala Pizza Hut. You could be on a real winner!
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 2:48 pm and is filed under small business tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 29th, 2010 at 10:15 am
The benefit of describing what you do within a business name not only helps with SEO, it actually helps people know exactly what you do! If you don’t have a descriptive word in your buisness name, I don’t think it is all bad though including it in your tag line is always a good idea.
Descriptive Example.
Company Name: Cochlear
Tag Line: Hear now and always.
Non-descriptive example.
Company: Gillette
Tag Line: The best a man can get