If you are old enough to remember rock music from the 1980’s, you can probably remember band names that seemed created just to be memorable. While having an unforgettable name is a good thing, shouldn’t your name say something about what you do and who you are?
Think about bands like R.E.M., The B-52s, and Kajagoogoo. Each of these bands were highly successful in different ways, but how much did their names have to do with it? Can their naming conventions be extrapolated to teach businesses something about naming conventions and how to succeed at business naming? In some cases, absolutely.
The Value Of Straying
One advantage of giving a band a creative name is that music has a subjective, expansive quality that is hard to pin down. Instead of the name of a unique band defining its music, the band’s music ends up defining its name. In music it’s impossible to have the knee jerk corporate reaction to want to describe your product with your name.
As you are probably reading this blog on a computer screen, consider the names Apple and Microsoft. Either of the hardware giants could have played it safe and adopted a generic name such as “American Computers,” but they didn’t.
Instead, they threw naming conventions to the wind and picked names that their companies could come to define, not names that dryly implied what went on in their design labs. As deeply as they now permeate the public consciousness, this wasn’t known when they were deciding on a name.
According to company history, the name Microsoft was born by combining (micro)processor and (soft)ware. The birth of Apple’s name was a bit less tied to naming conventions. Steve Jobs allegedly thought of it after a trip to an Apple Orchard and was concerned that it didn’t sound quite technical enough for a computer manufacturer. Hindsight is a funny thing.
Can Following Make Sense?
Creative names, like Apple, work great for many companies, but they can pose a problem for companies in industries where naming conventions are perpetuated like family traditions, such as the legal industry and medical industry. Law firms and doctor offices often have dry, descriptive names instead of names that connote a unique outlook or value that the businesses possess.
In such cases, sticking with naming traditions can serve as a way to communicate that you’re part of the pack, but you have to weigh your desire for inclusion against your desire to set yourself apart from the competition. At A Hundred Monkeys we believe your name should set you apart. It should be the opening line to a conversation that grabs your audience’s attention.
If you’re lucky, we even help you create a great name for your 80s cover band. To learn more about what we do, browse through our website or shoot us an email.