Brand new day
As electronic media and communication continue to evolve, positioning your company and products online as well as for mobile platforms are the keys to success almost regardless which industry you are in.
Building a brand today is increasingly difficult particularly as the online presence is becoming more important to businesses and the internet is becoming a very crowded place.
Can you think of a large successful consumer brand without a web presence? if you can, please post it in the comments.
Finding a relatively short and memorable company or brand name for which you are able to secure a domain name (ideally .com), Twitter handle, Facebook and LinkedIn usernames etc is not an easy task as the most obvious names and abbreviations are already reserved. I will be writing a separate post about using brand names on social networks in case you wonder why these things are important – it obviously ties in closely with reputation and having your brand show up in search engines.
Some companies are resorting to spelling a word wrong like Flickr.com, others like 4shared.com are using a number in their brand name, when they can’t get the exact names they want. When Flickr was first launched and I was telling friends about the service I always had to spell it out to them which is not ideal – but such brand names can of course be successful too provided they have the right team, product and resources to consistently build the brand – sometimes it can even be an advantage with a typotypographical error.
To me the most important in a brand is that it is memorable and that anyone can easily spell it without special instructions – in other words not having to explain for example news4u.com is with the number 4 and the letter u and not the obvious newsforyou.com it sounded like.
If you have a brand name which can easily be spelled/typed in different ways or just hard to tell how it is spelled when pronounced I suggest you try to reserve obvious domain name variations and redirect them to your preferred version – examples includes gogle.com which redirects to google.com and also the other way around where flicker.com redirects to flickr.com
A brand name does not have to give away the business activity to be successful, as an example search.com logically should have been the winner in the online search industry but instead we have names like Google and Bing dominating – it is all about what you do with your brand or company once you have secured the right name.
If you are interested in branding in general and what it means to your business I recommend you head over to the brand futurist, Martin Lindstrom‘s website and watch some of his videos or read his books.
The amazing photo used in this post is provided by Rainer Brunotte