*SUPER* Mario Bros.

How to Get Your New Business Name Right

Part 1: The Six Essential Elements of a Business Name

From Susan A. Friedmann

Selecting a name for your new business is not easy. A business name does more than identify your company. It tells customers who you are, what you do, and more than a little about how you do it. Your business name differentiates you from your peers, peaks customer interest, and invites further investigation - if you do it right.

An Effective Business Name:

1. Tells who you are.

Your business name should reflect your identity. This is an essential aspect of branding. You’ll be promoting your new business name, getting it in front of as many eyes as possible as often as possible. How do you want the public to think of you?  For some, that means integrating your personal name into the name of your business. This is very common in some professions: legal, medical, and accounting leap to mind.  Others prefer a more descriptive business name. One successful small baker runs her business under the name “The Cookie Lady” because that’s how her first customers identified her. It’s doubtful that most of the customers even know her first name (Pat) but everybody in her market knows “The Cookie Lady”.

2. Tells what you do.

It’s incredible how many business names give little, if any indication of what type of work the organization actually does. Take the following examples:

·         Smith and Sons

·         Hulbert Brothers

·         Only One

Can you tell me what any of these companies does? Of course you can’t. They’re relying on customers already knowing who they are (a tricky proposition for new businesses!) or by having their business name found in ‘context’, such as a yellow pages or on-line business directory.

3. Tells how you do it.

Words are powerful. By carefully selecting what words you use in your business name, you can convey a great deal about your company’s image. Consider the names of three different massage and bodywork centers:

·         Champlain Valley Therapeutic Massage

·         Clouds Above Massage

·         Speedy Spa

All three companies are providing the same service: massage therapy. Yet the first appears to favor a more medical approach, the second, a dreamy, luxury approach, and the third focuses on fast service

What are the other things an effective business name has to do?

4. Differentiates you from your peers.

Your business name is the first opportunity to tell customers how you differ from the competition. This can be done by emphasizing what makes you unique, pinpointing what aspect of your products and services can’t be found anywhere else - or that you do better than anyone else.  Consider the massage therapy example we looked at in business name essential number three. Each organization clearly has a different focus and approach to its customer base. They’re attracting different types of clients, who are seeking fundamentally different approaches. All of which is conveyed in less than five words.

5. Peaks customer interest.

Creating customer interest is an art and a science. Think carefully about your target audience. What qualities of your services are of the greatest import to your customers? What kind of words are likely to appeal to them?  Emphasize the important qualities in your new business name. For example, busy homeowners are drawn to the inherent promise of speed offered by “Bob’s Instant Plumbing” while a reader in search of a good mystery will gravitate toward “Crime Pays Books”.  Word choice is also important. Two yarn shops can both specialize in specialty fibers, but the one that labels itself “All Hemp All the Time” will draw in a decidedly different crowd than the one named “Natural Beauty: Organic Yarns”.

6. Invites further investigation.

Customers are funny creatures. What one group finds to be funny and engaging turns another group off. You want your business name to be inviting and approachable - as those qualities are perceived by your target audience.  The best example of this may be seen in the individual investor segment of the financial services industry. Charles Schwab has spent years cultivating a classic, formal image - but now that the consumer base is changing from ‘old people with money’ to ‘everyone with a 401K’, Charles Schwab has launched the “Talk to Chuck” campaign in an effort to be more approachable.

Make sure your new business name doesn’t intimidate customers away! Some industries are more formal than others, but adopt pretension at your peril.  After following a series of simple step-by-step instructions to match my corporate identity with my service offering, I came up with the quintessential business name: The Trade Show Coach. This name instantly tells customers what I do – assist companies with trade shows – and a little of the manner in which I do it – coach, rather than dictate, direct, guide, or organize.  See the difference? So did the buying public, some of who quickly became my best customers. The same thing can happen for you -if you pick the right business name.

--------------------------------- MBA Picnic ---------------------------------

The Annual MBA Picnic lived up to the hype.  It was a great opportunity to mix and mingle with fellow students, alumni, professors, and faculty.   Chaney's Dairy Barn was the perfect location.  There were huge slides for kids and even those a bit older.  I know I enjoyed sliding.  The Moo Wagon was ready for hay rides, and they even had a corn maze.  There was also a dinner provided that included potato soup, chilly, sandwiches, chips, pasta salad, and more.  Then for desert we all had ice cream. 

I tried the Big Red Rumble Ice cream which had white chocolate chunks, red velvet cake and chocolate flakes.  Big Red even came to join the fun…     

New Book Release

Books of The Times

No. 1 Planet for Alien Tourists

Published: September 15, 2010

By JANET MASLIN

 “Earth (The Book)” is a mock textbook by writers for “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” — or “the authors of the popular television program ‘The John Daly Show’ ,” as they put it in a fake Wikipedia blurb on the book’s back cover. It is conceived as a handy guide for extraterrestrials who arrive on this planet after humanity has become extinct, in case those extraterrestrials want to know what they’re missing. It explains everyday details about how we live(d), from our use of the fork (“a way to hurt food one last time before eating it”) to our wearing of pants. “We put these on one leg at a time,” it says. “You may require a different approach.”

Jon Stewart

EARTH (THE BOOK)

A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race

Written and edited by Jon Stewart, David Javerbaum, Rory Albanese, Steve Bodow and Josh Lieb

Illustrated. 244 pages. Grand Central Publishing $27.99.

Charles Seife

PROOFINESS

The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Related: Excerpt ‘Proofiness’ (September 16, 2010)

Times Topic: Jon Stewart

 Illustrated. 295 pages. Viking. $25.95.

“Earth” adopts a faux-scientific tone to explain the planet, its life forms and their quantifiable characteristics. Like the “Daily Show” this parody delivers wittily framed absurdities in a sweetly deadpan way. So there are statistics. (“Length of day (in days) ...... 1.”) There are charts. (Time We Were Willing to Wait for a Baked Potato: from 8 hours in 1900 to 1 second in 2010. Lifetime Food Consumption of First Slices of Wedding Cake: 2.1.)

There is a handsomely illustrated Periodic Table of the Synthetic that includes such elements as Wo (Wite-out), G (Gummi), Jq (Je ne sais quoi), DD (Silicone) and Li (Listerine). And there is a set of F.A.Q.’s (“Future Alien Questions”) for each topic covered here. For instance:

Q. “How many different living beings existed on Earth when you were there?”

A. “3,000 quintillion.”

Q. “How rough an estimate is that?”

A. “It is the exact number.”

That happens to be a perfect example of what Charles Seife’s new book calls “proofiness”: an exact-sounding number that represents the antithesis of knowledge. And although such numbers can be as funny as “Earth” makes them, they are dangerous too. Mr. Seife identifies a phenomenon that we see all around us, whether in advertising claims, crowd estimates, voter polls, economic analyses and warnings about the extent of global warming. “If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it,” Mr. Seife succinctly claims.

We all know what he means. So in some ways “Proofiness” is just stating the obvious. But it’s one of those books that validates pre-existing perceptions, making them more egregious and much easier to see. After all, Mr. Seife has dug up a pair of articles from The Associated Press, one with the headline “AP Poll: Americans Optimistic for 2007” and the other with “Poll: Americans See Doom, Gloom for 2007.” Since these reports ran on Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, 2006, and were based on the same survey, a closer look at manipulative number crunching is surely in order.

“Proofiness,” subtitled “The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception,” can be seen as part of the life cycle of “The Daily Show.” It owes its title to the “truthiness” of Stephen Colbert, who was once a twinkle in the eye of “The Daily Show,” though he might not put it that way. And the same kind of sneaky logic that is nailed by “Proofiness” is regularly spotted by the eagle-eyed staff of “The Daily Show.” Incidentally, Mr. Seife takes care to make his politics sound neutral, or rather, to make himself appear equally enraged at number fakers whatever their political leanings may be. Inflating the size of a crowd to one million is the same offense, whether perpetrated about Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally (Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota) or a Million Man March (Louis Farrakhan).

Beware an exact-sounding number, even if it’s more credible than 3,000 quintillion. According to Mr. Seife, nice round numbers convey an automatic message of exaggeration. So do precise-sounding measurements of concepts that are ill-defined, and so do voter polls, thanks to systematic and statistical errors. Those are different kinds of mistakes, and this indignant, excitable book is eager to explore them. It also pays particular attention to the 2008 Senate race in Minnesota, with its heated legal argument over one ballot full of write-in votes for “Lizard People.” Really.

The “Daily Show” writers deal with political craziness like the “Lizard People” fight nightly. And the previous “Daily Show” book, “America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction,” more than covered politics and government. So “Earth” doesn’t go there, concentrating instead on civilizations, structures, artifacts and physiology. A photo that purports to show half of a naked Larry King wearing only one red suspender is used as a gruesome anatomy lesson, à la the naked United States Supreme Court in “America.” The rest of this book’s illustrations are a whole lot better than that.

The early sections are dependably great looking and sporadically funny. (Planet Earth, the aging hottie: “Despite a pronounced equatorial bulge and receding polar iceline, she still stubbornly maintains a jaunty 23.4-degree axial tilt that belies her 4.5 billion years.”) The mock-textbook style gives the writers an easy template, even if they seem to be supplying filler from time to time.

But this book, like the show, is best when it takes on subjects of real substance. (Masturbation jokes don’t count.) That’s why the funniest material is about religion and science. Take special note of the tippy-toeing around Islam (“a beautiful harmless happy daffodil”), the calendar of December religious holidays for all persuasions (“Mission Impossible IV” premiere for Scientologists, “Charmonukkah” for “Blues Judaism”), the claim that the word Torah is “German for ‘kindling,’ ” and the map of Jerusalem. That map includes “Holy Missile Attack Rubble” that “burned for eight nights, despite only one night’s worth of explosives.”

A version of this review appeared in print on September 16, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

My Very First Post!

I am a brand new blogger.  I look forward to sharring my thoughts, as well as, getting a sneak peak at everyone elses.