Knowknot Consultancy

Brand names are important, whether it’s a company name or related to your products or services. With the growth of online you need to be even more careful when choosing your brand name.

A couple of brands come to mind to show when things go wrong:

1. 3 - This mobile phone company has a cool name & great logo but it’s such a general term for SEO. 3 or three is too vague. Compare that to Vodafone or Verizon which are unique and unambiguous.
2. F2 – Was what Fairfax Digital used to be called. When you searched for F2 you used to get Formula 2 cars. F2 is such a well used model and brand name and it often returns lots of camera lens references. I guess it helped the rebrand to Fairfax Digital which is less ambiguous & leverages the Fairfax brand.
3. äht( – There a production company called äht( which is a very arty name that I can never spell and my keyboard doesn’t help me do umlaut (those weird dots above letters) & Google’s ‘did you mean’ function never seemed to help me find them. And it looks like they have recently closed up shop :(
4. I was trying to think of a cool brand name & I love the way that ‘bumf’ looks and rolls off the tongue. I thought it just meant advertising material or ‘stuff’. Luckily I did a bit of research and found out it was an abbreviation of bum fodder…basically toilet paper. Mmmm… maybe not.
5. I see a lot of very generic brands that are ultimately forgettable. When someone mentions a new local search engine I think “what’s this one called? True Local, My Local, Local r us, Local Local, Aussie Local…?”. So many are so unmemorable. Maybe I can come up with a local search brand creator widget that randomises word with the word ‘local’ to come up with new brands…I’m sure I can get a bit of money selling it as an iPhone app ;)
6. Brands that are made up of a region & a product type will help your competition be found, but not necessarily help you be found. An example may be ‘Palm Beach B&B’. OK, you can register the trade mark but people searching for that term will also find other B&Bs in Palm Beach even if they are trading as ‘Mary’s B&B in Palm Beach’. Mary is a bit smarter as adding Mary turns the search into a unique term. Mary gets the generic searches for B&B in Palm Beach but also people looking explicitly for her place.

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