Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
We have all read that line in high school, or if we were really bright and possessed, middle school. But in today’s information overload world, names are harder and harder to come up with that mean something to the customer.
Forget the challenge with getting a URL that even smacks of English. That’s another whole topic that would end up centered on some of the inherent flaws in a free-market economy — squatters often win.
We are talking about product naming and solution naming.
There was a great piece in the NY Times a few weeks ago about naming and pitching products. It’s an important read because bad pitches or names can kill great products. (I can’t find this article. The Times’ search capabilities via Google are worthless. You can’t specify a date range or drill down in just one section. Try as I might, I end up getting all kinds of crap from other parts of the paper.)
Hollywood is often parodied for their sometimes silly pitch lines -“it’s Batman meets Live Story” or some other weird set of associations. But what is really going on is a critical concept that entrepreneurs need to understand not just when they are pitching for money but even more importantly when they are pitching their audience.
Associations enable the receiver or listener to put the words and images into their own context so they can understand it and make a decision on the idea – “do I want this now”.
Given that we have less than 20 seconds in most interactions, especially on the web, to get a point across, the pitch by association is a very powerful tool.
And it’s easily tested. Try it out on 5 of your friends if it’s a consumer product. Do they turn their head at an angle as if you were speaking a unintelligible dialect or do they start creating their own associations out loud saying something like ” you mean like x and y”
If your friends do not get what you are doing after the associative pitch, scrap it and start again. In the consumer space, if your friends don’t get it, it’s unlikely anyone will.
It’s laborious to rework your pitch, but it’s cheap compared to launching and failing because no one couk understand quickly what the product or service did.
In my last company, we coined the term Data Services. We thought we were so cool. To be the first to coin a term that would live in the IT hall of fame was very cool. Little did we know that we were in the business of selling software that simplified the integration of XML payloads and webservices, not in the IT education business.
After at least a year of pounding our heads against the wall, we retreated into a much simpler value proposition and pitch by comparing what we did to the state of the art at the time. (I won’t bore you with the details.)
Suffice it to say, the company took off and sold within 9 months of getting the pitch right.
Spend the time getting your pitch right. Its worth the investment.