UKNM: What's in a name

[Ray Taylor]

> Agreed - seems to work fine for Amazon & Jungle etc.


I have heard a lot of people argue that, because Amazon is a great name and

has nothing to do with books, then it follows that you can come up with

anything meaningless and make it work - like "bigbluebog" for instance.

People who argue along these lines are missing the point.



Amazon has created a very strong brand in a short space of time for the

following reasons.


1. It's a well-chosen name

2. It has been marketed very well - initially all online

3. Excellent customer service has led to a trusted, reliable brand


Why is it a well-chosen name? Well, I am no expert in these things, but I

would say that Amazon is a very strong word. It conjures up images of one or

more of the following:


1. A big, strong, wise, old river

2. A massive area of mostly uninhabited and largely unexplored rain forest

3. A mythical female warrior


..all of which suggest something big, solid, strong and reliable.


It is a single word, with three syllables, that reads easily and is easy to

remember.


There is also the connection between trees and books. And maybe it sounds a

bit like "amazing", and possibly for all sorts of other subliminal reasons I

can't think of right now.


Amazon has from the beginning conducted an intensive online marketing

programme and, more recently, have moved on to offline to extend knowledge

of the brand further.


To my mind they went about it the right way round, unlike so many

dotcomwannabeemillionaires these days who are happy to simply chuck their

shareholders' money into the soho ad-spend incinerator, lacking the patience

to do the job properly from the ground up.


And of course the most important part of the Amazon brand is the customer

service. I have still yet to find any online retailer that comes anywhere

near to Amazon. Most still do not understand what "customer service" means.


Jungle is a clever choice because of the association with Amazon

(trees/forests/jungle, etc). And they have done some good brand advertising.


Had Amazon chosen something like booksonline then it would have been much

more difficult to differentiate their offering from that of any other online

bookstore. But that does not mean that their choice of name was purely

random.


I would like to think that there are branding agencies and consultants that

could help you come up with the right name and brand identity. But when I

tried to find one last year, none inspired any confidence. So we ended up

doing the job (of rebranding as eyeconomy) ourselves, with help from our

design partners Antics Marketing.


We ditched a purely descriptive name - New Media Communications - for one

which was (a) not an English word, (b) still had some points of reference to

the business we are in, and of course (c) had available domain names. It

took a lot of brainstorming and elimination to get there,


The logo came about as a result of a lot of work briefing and rebriefing our

design partners, and then selecting and developing the strongest graphic

executions.


But when it came to testing the new brand, very few people had any strong

views either way. And I must admit, it took a while for the thing to grow on

me.


I think the reason for this is that brands are not supposed to work on the

intellect, but on the emotions. Whatever anyone says, they _feel_ something

about Coke and it is this feeling that will influence your buying decisions,

not giving the product a mark out of ten - sweetish, sticky, quite acidic,

fizzy drink of indeterminate flavour. Disgusting warm, but ice-cold it's at

least as good as any other ice-cold fizzy drink. I'll give it 4/10. But I

can't remember ever asking for "a cola."


So it doesn't really matter if consumers "think" Amazon is a good name. It's

how they react to the name that counts.


Ray Taylor



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