The Economist on the state of firm naming
Do you agree with The Economist’s viewpoint?
There’s only one print publication that still makes its way to my mailbox, at that’s The Economist.
The prior week’s Schumpeter column talks regarding the state of firm naming, and paints a rather bleak picture. You ought to read the entire article, but here are a few interesting parts:
Copyright law is a pain: firms have to go to great lengths to make sure that nobody has staked a claim to their favourite names.
C’mon, Economist. I expect better of you. That is trademark law, not copyright.
The biggest culprit is the internet: firms put a premium on finding convenient “domain names” that direct you to their websites, but many of the good ones have by now been grabbed by name speculators.
Yes, there’s a premium for good names.
[The tech inudustry] is also responsible for a lot of tripe. Too many tech firms are either tediously wacky (Yahoo) or overly familiar (PayPal).
I’m not sure I agree. Yahoo is a wacky, but memorable, name. And PayPal is only overly familiar since it’s been such a dominate brand for over a decade.
Tech firms are as plagued by naming-imitation as by product-imitation: witness the fashion for incorporating “Buzz” in your name (following BuzzFeed) or the “-ify” suffix (following Spotify).
Hey Bill Doshier, do you like that?
I agree that the “me too” approach many startups take to naming is causing style fatigue. “-ly” is another suffix that is used a lot.
