Mergers, Mergers On The Wall, Who Is The Prettiest Of Them All’

July 5, 2004

As mergers start to take off in insurance and financial sectors, the realignment of these newly-stirred corporate philosophies must be properly captured and correctly projected through their new corporate name personas. During this time, it’s essential to ensure long-term investor’s confidence and have a trustworthy corporate image in the global marketplace.

But first, we must know precisely how corporations and their big branding tackles new name germination. The following are the three main principles often applied, sometimes at great costs, which often result in more questionable looks than they originally started with. The real big question is not how, rather why?

Principle One – Naming isn’t as important as branding. Pick a name out of a hat—branding, advertising and media spending will take care of the rest. Why?

There is no longer surplus money available to buy every billboard or television spot in the country. Bottomless budgets are the utopian dreams of advertising agencies. The concept that any name will effectively win business is a recipe for bankruptcy. Naïve executives sometimes ignore naming altogether, choosing a name in a panic often hours before they announce it in a press conference.

A recent study showed that 97 percent of names are selected on the day of the announcement, frequently only hours before the press conference. For proof just open any old magazine and behold the cemetery of big-time names, now mostly dead.

Principle Two – Creative, even ridiculous names will win the customers’ hearts. Catchy, funny and silly names will attract attention and increase sales. Why?

Hit-and-run naming has left a bad taste among companies, customers and the media. With hundreds of high profile naming failures all over the world, there is an urgent need to repair the lost credibility of naming and branding agencies. Names must be more than a fad—they must have sustainable power over time. Nowhere is the issue of naming more critical than on the Web. E-commerce has opened the gates to hundreds of new ideas, markets, and competitors from all over the globe. Corporations must reinvent themselves to gain the attention of customers worldwide.

Contrary to common belief, naming is not a creative exercise, but a black and white empirical process. Naming involves the application of highly strategic and tactical skills, demanding authoritative knowledge of global marketing, languages, perceptions, connotations, trademark laws and cyber rules of domain care. Graphic design skills are also critical and must follow a name over a long period. Not in reverse.

Principle Three – When merging with another company, simply merge the two names. Capitalize on the established brands of the two companies by merging their names. Why?

It’s true that it can be difficult to find better names than those of the original and perhaps legendary companies. Is there a correct naming process in place? If you’re trying to pick from a list of 10,000 names compiled by a sub-contracted freelancer, then you’re probably going to end up sticking with the original names. The prudent and astute boards of the two merged giants have virtually no other choice but to reject such ad hoc choices.

Join the names, and as they say, end of story. However, this is frequently the wrong approach. The merged corporations suffer in their marketing efforts by trying to graft two corporate personalities together, which can result in a diluted and vague impression on the public. This is especially true when the companies are perceived to have very different identities.

Some corporations believe all the star-quality names have been taken, and therefore have no choice but to accept a silly or strange name. This impression is patently incorrect, and arose partly from the use of large agencies in the naming process. The same big agencies that delivered world-class logos and great commercials often failed in naming. A false myth was created to cover a lack of skills.

Naming is normally farmed out to freelancers for a “buck-a-name” service. ($500 for 500 names.) Predictably, quality suffers when you catch too wide a net for name possibilities. Serious naming is now getting respect as a professional discipline. There is a big difference between a massive branding exercise and a highly specialized naming expertise.

Three types of names
Today less than 5 percent of names in insurance and financial services worldwide can pass the true acid test of global suitability and registrability, while the rest have serious faults restricting them from a free flow of global usage.

Long geographic names—This can seriously hurt national and international marketing. The same long names get initialized, causing massive confusion with strange companies worldwide and become impossible to find on the Internet.

Words on a string—All kinds of names of things combined either accidentally or through M&A or for some other strange reason, make no connections to the business at all. Customers hate them, yet the institutions ignore them and keep pushing.

Initials—That comes about because the customers refuse to call out long names. Financial services have the strangest and most unusual collection of initials. Often, initials were simply collected and appended as a proof of their long history while somehow, their customers are living in the present, and never care about the role of the institution in the previous century.

So why is this so important and what is this new cyber-branding war? Here are the key issues:

Location, location, location … There are three locations on a Web search page … top, middle and down. A search engine report sometime fits a single screen and other times it’s a hundred feet long. Today, e-commerce is like a deep ocean, where if your Web site’s identity is successful, only then will it float on the surface and be visible to potential customers. Otherwise, it will stay caught in some mysterious undercurrent, submerged like a submarine. Or worse, it will rest at the bottom of the ocean, lying beside the Titanic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the next big thing. The real search engine wars are about to begin. Watch out and be prepared, as it will soon get very rough out in the ocean.

Here are a few floating tips:
First, be aware of your location on search results, develop a monitoring strategy based on how many different ways your customers are going to search for you … by a generic term, by city, or your very specific name? Test each one, plotting and counting your resulting positions and then modifying each to see the differences. Find the right formula for better visibility.

Second, if your site is not showing on page one or two, then your URL is not a right name, rather a dead weight, only sinking your e-commerce dreams. Figure out why the name is not working and how it can be fixed. If there are too many identical or look-a-likes climbing all over your name, then how come? Also, seek SEO expertise in Web design strategies with far more emphasis on URL alpha-structures than flashy graphic layouts. Award-winning Web sites don’t guarantee floating.

SEO-friendly names
Uniqueness: names that are simple, but unique, without dashes, slashes or any numbers.

Easy-to-type: easy to remember, with short and clear alpha-structure with direct relationship to what the name is selling in the first place. This feature helps the popularity among random use, taking the name to the top.

Alpha-Connect-Ability: names connecting to common language with a common sense match to the search query have a better chance. Searching is often based on phonetics therefore common word sounds can play a key role, yet this aspect is like a dangerous double-edged sword because overly simple names based on common words are sometimes completely lost. Names connecting to words only with an extremely fine balance will also connect easily to search query words. This can be very tricky to balance.

Proprietary names, which acquire a position in the general market place as one-of-a-kind, shut out all the other copycats. Protected by global trademarks and matching dot-coms, this is the best position to be in.

Only star quality names are capable of taking you to the top of the page, and it is easy to have a global name with trademark and matching URL. All you need is the right expertise. Check the Web for corporate image and naming and bring “Webinars” into your corporation so you have an internal understanding of cyber-branding issues.

Names on e-commerce are now the key. It is the only device that controls the access to the portal and the entire Web site of a corporation. Nothing else matters: no logos, no designs and no fancy colors. It is still early in the Internet age and a lot can be fixed, modified and adjusted before it is too late.

Diagnosis—The Five Star Standard of corporate image & name identities
Apply these professional procedures which measure the effectiveness of a name as being Healthy, Injured, or on Life Support. It makes no difference whether these names are for products, services, divisions or the main corporate name. To a customer, a name is a name, no matter how it is offered. Healthy names are extremely easy, absolutely unique, highly related to business and carry global trademark protection including an identical dot-com URL. This provides simplicity and easy access.

When a name passes all of the above five critical issues, then it is a Five-Star Quality Name. Anything less than Five Stars and the name will never survive while losing all branding efforts. If any of the following applies to a name, then it loses a star.

Injured names are long, confusing, diluted or initialized. Simple dictionary words also cause a lot of confusion. There are too many Firsts, Uniteds, Nationals, and too many names with compass directions in them—Eastern, Western, North, South and so on. Life-Support names are tangled in serious trademark or obvious confusion problems. Names without identical dot-coms or with no apparent connection to the product or service are constantly in need of oxygen. Spelling difficulties will also kill a name.

Here are some steps to help you identify if your name passes the Five-Star Standard:

1. Analysis. After this, organize a mandate to formally audit and professionally analyze the name in detail with a general checkup so management can take specific steps to change or modify it. Most institutions have dozens of different names and URLs, clashing with each other. It’s always better to have a few healthy, strong and protected names; so long-term brand values are established.

2. Treatment. It is very easy to re-position, and rebuild the name identity of a product or service if you do so by seeking the right expertise and the application of The Laws of Naming. Healthy names are always fit to run the race, so they cost less to promote, and promoting them builds huge brand value. Use “Webinars” on naming and research references on the Internet on corporate image. Bring Web seminars on cyber branding into your organization. It’s not only extremely cost effective but they also create an internal understanding and harmony about all these name-branding issues.

Institutions and nonprofit sectors are not the only industry facing the impact of names with e-commerce. It’s all over the globe and reaching the farthest corners controlling access to the entire corporations. There are major naming issues that association executives must tackle in order to cope with the new challenges and prepare this new name-economy.

Naseem Javed is the author of Naming for Power, and is recognized as a world authority on global name identities and domain issues. He introduced The Laws of Corporate Naming and is the founder of ABC Namebank, a consultancy based in New York & Toronto. For more information, contact Javed at: ask@njabc.com.

Topics Mergers & Acquisitions

Was this article valuable?

Here are more articles you may enjoy.

From This Issue

Insurance Journal Magazine July 5, 2004
July 5, 2004
Insurance Journal Magazine

2004 E&S Directory Vol. II