We take a lot of interest in naming our children – we buy all sorts of books, browse baby name sites, ask a zillion people for suggestions and last but not the least numerologists are taking over the baby naming job.
But when it comes to naming companies or products, is the Indian corporate world taking enough interest? FMCG products usually add the word “New” to their product every few months/years. E.g. “Now buy the NEW Vim bar soap” “Ultra New toothpaste” 😉
India has naming companies but far less when compared to the ones in US. I did approach a couple of them in India for naming our company (Greynium) but they were unaffordable. I mean it, very expensive but those companies had done some excellent work.
Anyway, why am I rambling about naming companies? Mint had carried two articles,
- Reliance Big Bazar clothes, anybody?
To be sure, the trademark granted to R-Adag is different: it spells Bazar with a single “a” while Pantaloon uses two “a”s in spelling Bazaar, defined as a market in the Oxford English Dictionary.
- Apple challenges RCom’s iPhone-like trademark
Apple spells its brand ‘iPhone’ while RCom proposes to use a capital ‘I’ and has a character-wide gap between ‘I’ and ‘Phone’and similarly small ‘i’ and a gap between ‘phone.’
ADAG‘s brand name is ‘Big’ (BigTV, BigFlicks, BigAdda). May be this was the reason for coining “Reliance Big Bazar” but yet it is very boring. But why did they go for “I phone”? Why not “Big Phone” (even though phones are getting smaller in size by the day)? Both these names from Reliance will only cause confusion amongst consumers.
Can one of the ‘richest’ corporates in the world (even during recession times!) afford to be so un-creative? Very unimpressive. It would cost them a mere $10k or $100k or let us say even a ‘mere $1m’ to get a great product name.
I believe they still have time to fix the product names and come out with something cool.
Also see “The Best Company Names of All Times” – Inc.com
BG – I couldn’t agree more. For some reason, companies will spend millions on product development and then have a handful of people in the marketing department take a stab at naming it. The added layer of finding a matching .com domain name makes it even more difficult, especially when naming a company. And of course, there’s always the trademark issues. Branding is really a combination of art and science and common sense. Your points are well noted.
Exactly the reasons why we started a website exclusively to promote our Naming services. I believe awareness among customers in having a unique and creative name is very low in India.