We are celebrating our 3rd anniversary with a new friend! Meet Hopsy – our new company character. Hopsy is frisky rabbit who comes from a place called Dreamstime and he is here to bring us a lot of luck and success.
You can always find him on our home page but you have to be quick as he could jump away from you. If you catch Hopsy and click on him you will learn more about our philosophy and why rabbits are part of our brand identity. Welcome home, Hopsy!
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You need a name and you have hired a professional to help you with the task. The latter offers you a certain amount of options and now you have to pick one. How do you choose a name? There are different criteria to evaluate if a name is suitable for your business or not. We have chosen the 5 most important ones. Readability If 10 people read your brand name they should read it in the same way. This is an easy yet very important test to make. Associations Ask people from your target group to tell you what the name makes them think of. You would be surprised what associations a name could evoke. These associations should be positive and relevant. Availability Of course, it is great to have a name with a matching .com domain. But in some cases this is not enough. Write your name in Google and see what jumps out. If Google suggests a similar name via the “did you mean” feature, make sure the suggested word is not a trademark in your category. The name in a sentence The name should sound good in a sentence. Imagine you are a secretary and the phone is ringing. You pick it up and you say “Good morning, you are calling (the company name), how can I help you?” If it is about a product name, imagine you are at a store and say out loud “Can I have two (product name) please?” A name that jumps Your name should jump above the others in your category. Look at your competitors’ names once again and imagine your name in that list. Do you have a presentiment that your name will overleap them all? By definition, the brand name exists to identify your business. By definition, the slogan suggests your product’s appeal and advantages, or your company’s mission and purpose.
Now, what happens when owners name their company or product? Usually they look for something too descriptive – a 2 or 3 word name composed of real words. The result is companies like The Health Care Group, Personal Care, Business Support Solutions, Real Estate and Lifestyle Technologies. Why do they do this? We can think of the following reasons: 1. They believe that descriptive names are easier to memorize. 2. They believe that only real word names are easy to spell. 3. They believe that descriptive names are SEO-friendly. The truth is that these reasons are myths in brand naming: 1. Descriptive names are very hard to memorize. Do you remember any brand names that are that descriptive? On the contrary, the first brands that usually pop up to mind are Coca-Cola, Google, Skype and Starbucks. 2. Real word names might be easy to spell but these are usually longer to spell. Repeat after me: Personal Care. Now, say Avon. Which one is better? 3. SEO-friendly? Your name must be customer friendly. Only a good name can attract customers and make them want to come back. Focus on your clients, not on engines. Back to the brand name's definition, you have to remember that the name must identify your very product, company or service, not the market you are in. Otherwise, your slogan name will lack uniqueness in times when being unique is becoming more and more crucial in marketing. At the end of the day, we have a question: does your name sound like a slogan? Usually naming companies write about unsuccessful brand names, like the launch of Mitsubishi's Pagero in Spain ("pajero" being a slang term for "wanker" in Spanish), before being rebranded as Montero, or Coca-Cola which sounded like "female horse fastened with wax" in Chinese, before being rebranded as Coke. Now we would like to do the exact opposite: write about the successful brands. We will reveal how they were created and why they inspire us with their origin. Etymology: Chain of supermarkets and hypermarkets which started with a store near a crossroad ("carrefour" in French) in Annecy. Why we like it: Because there is a great story behind the name. Plus, we like the logo with its hidden C letter. Etymology: Named after the founder Louis-Ulysse Chopard. Why we like it: Because it sounds luxurious and expensive. Etymology: Named after the company founder, Walter P. Chrysler. Why we like it: See Chopard. Etymology: Compound name between "group" and "coupon". Why we like it: Because it is so obvious, all the more it is a brand new category. Etymology: Combination of the Danish "leg godt", which means to "play well". Why we like it: Because every kid does, remember? Who knew Lego accually had a meaning. Now we love the name even more. Etymology: Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA. The code name for the project was Oracle. Why we like it: Because it sounds like a leading company. No surprise it is. Etymology: Alternate spelling of rhebok (Pelea capreolus), an African antelope. Why we like it: Because it is enigmatic and very unique - we like such names. Etymology: The original concept for the name was Sky-Peer-to-Peer, which morphed into Skyper, then Skype. Why we like it: It is short and easy to memorize. Etymology: A carbonated apple juice that has a "snappy apple taste." Why we like it: Because it is catchy and suggestive. Etymology: A contraction of "Second Watch" because the new watch was introduced with a new concept of watches as casual, fun, and relatively disposable accessories. Why we like it: Because it is in line with their revolutionary idea. Moreover it sounds like "Swiss watch". Conclusion: If you have a surname that sounds like Chrysler, you do not need a naming company like the Rabbiter.
Discover more stories behind famous brands here. March 29, 2009 – the day the Rabbiter was founded. For the short period of 2 years, we are proud to have accomplished a lot. This is our time to brag, so we would like to share the key moments in our history with you: - We worked with clients from every populated continent on the planet: this international experience and our high client repeat ratio gave us the confidence every start-up company needs. - We created a lot of names: that actually inspired us to introduce the Name of the Month competition. - We had our first major media coverage: Financial Times Deutschland wrote an article about us, titled “The namer”. - We became a factor in the naming business: the leaders in this business, A Hundred Monkeys, included The Rabbiter in their list of competitors. - We started our first advertising campaign last week: the communication plan includes internet banner advertising and a viral campaign through social media (see the ad above). Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of the ones that had trust in our work. Thank you all. We jumped for joy when we saw that one of the best and most expensive naming companies in the world, A Hundred Monkeys, included us in their page of competitors! They have a special section dedicated to the best naming companies. The idea is to show that A Hundred Monkeys are not afraid to reveal the alternatives in this business and to show their potential clients how important the name is, especially when it comes to the name of a naming company. The launch of the Rabbiter Actually A Hundred Monkeys inspired us to start our company in the first place. In the end of 2008, we learnt that there is a naming company that charges $75,000 per name and that was intriguing, to say the least. Back then, we already had a good portfolio of names that we were really proud of. We thought “We can start doing this for start-up companies for as much as $500!” In March, 2009, the Rabbiter started catching brand names that jump and now, just 2 years later, we are in the list of the best naming companies, ranked by the very company that ignited our passion. Naming a naming company We have read on the website of A Hundred Monkeys that the idea behind their name is that if you put 100 monkeys on typewriters, at least one monkey will come up with a good name. That was a very brave name and a very brave explanation. Well, they gave up on the explanation and we understand why. When we were creating our name, we wanted to emphasize on the idea that we will create brand names that make businesses jump. So these businesses need names that can jump and we are the ones to provide them with such. We called ourselves the Rabbiter – an enigmatic name, easy to remember… and a hundred times shorter than many others… Inspired by the requirements of our clients, by the rules of our competitors and by what we do for a living, we present our version of the 5 most common myths about brand naming: 1. Names should start with letters early in the alphabet. Well, this is probably a very relevant rule… for the age when computers and respectively search engines were not yet invented. When was the last time you looked for a company or product in an alphabetized show guide? In today’s digital era brands can be found easily through computers, phone, tablets, etc. Now let’s take a look at the top 100 global brands for 2010 - some names that start with the last 3 letters in the alphabet are Xerox, Yahoo, Yves Saint Laurent, Zara and Zurich. These names sound more than right to us… 2. Names should not sound offensive in any language. The truth is that there are too many languages in the world. For example “sure” sounds like “death” in Estonian, but that does not mean that you should not use that word in your name. Today people have a global thinking – it will be harder and harder to scare someone to death with an English word like “sure”. When creating the name, you should just avoid negative connotations in the most common languages, like English, Spanish, French, German and also in the local languages of the markets where you plan to operate. If necessary you can also rebrand your product for some new market. Focus groups could be helpful in this situation. 3. Suggestive names are easier to remember than coined names. As professionals who create and study brand names every day, we prefer a name that is not obvious and that makes you think for a second, thanks to its metaphor, its structure or thanks to some hidden idea. As strange as it might sound, names that are too obvious are actually easy to forget. This is probably because people do not try remembering the name as they are sure that they have already memorized it. For instance Starbucks is harder to read at first, but once memorized, it is hard to forget. While a name like Elite Coffee (a real brand by the way) is very easy to read and understand, but hard to remember. This is because one will say in a few days "Oh I remember that name, it was something like Top Coffee or Premium Coffee... something like that". 4. Names should be SEO-friendly. No, your website should be SEO-friendly, not your domain name. Consumers will keep coming to your website if they remember your brand name. In order to increase the traffic to your web page, your brand name needs to be catchy, unique and different. Do not turn your brand name into a 3 word description of your product or service. Remember, you can always put that description in the Meta Keywords of your website and your advertising materials. 5. Outsourcing the name development to a naming company costs more. When speaking of costs of the naming process, all the resources should be taken into consideration – time, efforts and salaries. Imagine this: the CEO and 3 Brand Managers brainstorm for a week and they come up with names that can not be registered as a trademark, or their domain names are already secured, or nobody can spell them as they should. Does this sound familiar to you? So how much time, efforts and salaries that costs? This is why there is room for naming companies on the market. And some “hunt” better than others. Now you know what we think you should not do. Learn what we think you should with our 7 golden rules. Major design change of the Rabbiter's website now provides new benefits to clients: a more user-friendly navigation, a mobile-optimized version and a blog. We've spent some time updating and upgrading our web page and we hope that the new look will bring even more clients to our internet home. Visitors can now navigate easily through the main pages and find what they are looking for with a few clicks. The boom of smart phones made us introduce a mobile-optimized version of the website. We also have plans to publish some interesting articles on brand naming in our new blog section. An article for the Rabbiter (13.07.2010: Der Namensgeber) was published in Financial Times Deutschland! The company is very proud with its first significant media coverage: The namer (by Claus Hornung) 13 July 2010 - Silbertool: Any good business needs a good slogan. What is good nowadays is that one can engage experts - the founders Christian Korth and Philipp Silberkuhl think. Adverse change in the staff for the founders of Silbertool. The trainee in the field of sales and purchases, Matthias Liu-Nuiyen wanted to stay in the trainee program for four weeks. But now, just two weeks later, he leaves. However, there is a good reason for that. Liu Nuiyen completed his practice as part of additional training at the employment office and now it could provide him a permanent job. “Of course, I am glad about him”, the founder says, “but it is unfortunate for us – the work with him went very well.” In return for it, success in another field is observed. In order to make Silbertool stand more professionally, Korth and his co-founder Philipp Silberkuhl want to develop a corporate identity. Besides of unified fonts and colors, this also includes a meaningful slogan. For that purpose, the site freelancer.com advertised an order. They received a proposal from an expert called The Rabbiter. “He develops only company names and slogans,” Korth says, “I did not know that there is such a thing at all.” The naming specialist offers two models of payment. The customer either pays a fixed price and receives ten proposals or receives ten proposals and pays upon approval paying a higher price than the fixed option. If he does not like none of them, he does not pay anything. Korth and Silberkuhl chose the second option, received ten proposals and found their definite favorite: “The thread rolling solution in your pocket”. Financial Times Deutschland The Rabbiter introduces a new section on its official webpage – Domains For Sale. There are currently 8 domain names on sale: molzi.com, deenk.com, urgers.com, zagzi.com, scuar.com, oazon.com, pyxic.com, melyor.com “Starting from $999, the new domain names are a new option for our clients. This is a natural extension of what we do – domain names and brand names are today two sides of one and the same coin”, the headquarters stated. |
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