What’s in a name?

What’s in a name?

People are meaning-making-machines.  We need meaning, we need to find reasons and relationships.  Try and get away in a world that is empty and meaningless and you will fall in between the cracks filled with those who provide people with meaning.  So if you choose a company name that has no meaning, internal or external, people will have a hard time making yous stick in their heads.

When I started my Storage business, I spent about 8 months finding the name that would work.  I founded Casa Grande self storage.  Why?  Because, we went through a hundred names before settling on that one!

  • SecureZone
  • Alcatraz
  • Home-storage
  • True North
  • etc etc.

A name has power and we can’t forget that.  It is what people told fairy tales about and so many stories.  When you know the name of something you have power over that thing.  You also have the ability to call upon it and to use it.  In the best known fairy tale, the hard working girl has to guess the name of the tricky gnome (Rumplestiltskin) to get out of the horrible deal that has been cut.

Even when my children came about, we spent a great deal of time hammering out which names to give them…And other great successes today have done the same.  Look at:

  • Drop Box
  • Evernote
  • LinkedIn
  • Soundcloud
  • Youtube

All names that are huge in their own right and all of them tell you exactly what they do!  There is no working hard to figure out what these companies do and how they can help you!  Please help your clients because they have better things to do than figure you out.  People work hard to assimilate all the diverse and complicated information that is out there.  People are here because they want to live their lives…Not because they want to make you rich.  It is not your client’s job to understand you and to figure out why you’re the right business to do business with.  It is your job to understand what job your clients have to do and let them know that you can do it for them!

If you decide to come up with the name that makes you happy but no one understands, go ahead but don’t sit around waiting for people to break down your door because they know exactly what you do and how you do it!

1 Comment

  1. Antoine Petrecca

    Here is a great name….BlueCloud…for Storage

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.