Kaṭukassaratā

Well I created a twellow for Arc Therapeutic Massage and that means, of course, that we had to create a twitter account

Seth Godin posted the other day about A dumb branding strategy.

He goes on to discuss how things like Computer World, World Market, and other similarly named stores are useless because it doesn't tell you anything about them and the names are interchangeable. I could just as easily be visiting Computer Market as I could Computer World. But the real truth of it is, how do you protect a name like that? You really can't. He sums it all up in this paragraph:

The second reason this is an exceedingly dangerous strategy is that if you start to succeed a little bit, you suddenly want to protect your lame name. So you hire a lawyer and start to harass people for using the English language. So Computer Land sued Business Land (or maybe it was the other way around) and lost. Or consider the angry lawyer at Jewelry Village (or was it Central, I can't remember) who sent a letter to Squidoo complaining about an editorial (not a retail) page that used the phrase. There are more than 15,000 matches for this phrase in Google, which means he's got a lot of letters to send, and a lot of people to annoy. For what? Even if he manages to make a lot of noise, he's just reminding the world how generic the phrase is in the first place.

Of course the lawsuits are, imo, just part of our sue crazy country. I see it as almost a return to the 80's when lawsuits were at their peak.

But this article is a good reminder that "it's all in the name" our business name is one of the first impressions we give to our clients and it needs to be as strong an impression as we can make it. This is the same case with web sites, our descriptions that we give in the html code is a strong impression we are giving to search engines and it needs to be accurate as possible. The first impression we are giving our clients is, of course, the url. What is it saying to them? Is it easy to remember, does it mean anything? Then our banners and site headers. The first real visual impact our visitors receive.

So many sites also fall under the 'dumb branding strategy' Seth discusses in his blog. I don't think it is limited to business names.