Chapter 7 - What’s In a Name?
To read:
The race for names: As competition over names intensifies, businesses are getting creative, says Cristine Laborio-Chaffkin, a senior writer at Inc. magazine.
Markets as conversations: The first markets were filled with people, buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. Nothing has changed, argues the brilliant book, Cluetrain Manifesto.
To listen:
No New Tale to Tell: Listen to this song by Love and Rocket, and think of this chapter and the deep exercise of discovering your company’s name.
To watch:
Next act for Tim Berners-Lee: The founder of the world wide web is building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video.
Chapter 7
What’s In a Name?
“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.”
— Confucius, Chinese Philosopher
A company name can be symbolic, like Xerox. It was crafted in a 1958 corporate rebrand from the underlying technology of the firm’s product itself, invented two decades earlier. This was “xerography,” which fused the Greek words for “dry” and “writing” and the company name was spun from that. Or, it can be fun and spirited, like Steve Jobs’ Apple, which he claimed came to him when he was on an all-fruit diet. And the bite out of the logo is a nice touch — a clever nod to Eve’s bite out of the apple in the Garden of Eden. A choice of name can be inspirational and aspirational, such as Tesla, honoring the pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla who invented the technology enabling today’s remarkable cars. Or, a name can be personal and pragmatic. Think Dell, Ford, Chrysler, or McDonald’s, as just a few among the many named for their founders. A name can be serendipitous, such as what happened as Richard Branson was wondering what to call his small record shop in London and an office staffer in the room remarked, “Hey, we’re all virgins in business.”
What it should never be, however, is hastily considered and casually chosen.
A company name should have longevity and it shouldn’t be limiting. Eventually — and hopefully — you’ll grow into international markets, other industry verticals, and many product lines. Imagine if Jeff Bezos had named his company to reflect book sales, like one of his early rivals did with CDNow.com. It was pretty clear what they sold but they never expanded beyond that or stayed in business. Bezos may have started with books but they now represent less than 10 percent of Amazon’s revenue. A name should explain your mission but also be memorable, with a great story behind it. Tesla qualifies in this category. A name should have resonance. Intel’s founders conceived the name as a portmanteau of the words “integrated” and “electronics.” But it also evokes business intelligence and insight. Can you imagine how impressive a logo on your laptop would be if it said, “Microchip Inside?” Brevity is overrated as a virtue in naming, but concision is helpful. Imagine if we were still calling Yahoo! by its original name — “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
A stanza in the song, “No New Tale to Tell” by Love and the Rockets, really captures the spirit of naming:
"My world is your world
People like to hear their names
I'm no exception
Please call my name
Call my name"
For the full song, visit the Digital Companion.
I put much thought and consideration into naming a new startup. It isn’t an easy exercise when done right and it requires a lot of reflection and a healthy dose of inspiration. This was certainly the story with data.world.
As we were conceiving the radically new concept behind the startup we were planning, my co-founders and I wanted a name that would reflect the incredible ambition of our mission. This was, and remains seven years later, “to build the most meaningful, collaborative, and abundant data resource in the world.” And we have, with tools that help companies and institutions make sense of the oceans of data that are growing exponentially, comparable in a sense to what Sir Tim Berners-Lee did when we created the World Wide Web to organize the chaos that was the internet in 1990. On the Digital Companion, you can watch Berners-Lee’s TED talk on linked data (or, in our nomenclature at data.world, knowledge graphs, which make linked data possible) that helped inspire us.
The naming happened spontaneously while we were brainstorming our foundational idea, which initially was the brainchild of our brilliant Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Bryon Jacob. In the midst of the brainstorming, I blurted out, “It’s like data.world!” We quickly searched and found out that the “.world” top-level domain had come into existence a few months before. We slept on the name and it eventually stuck with us — data.world was a perfect name. We would not be limited by geography, industry verticals, or expanding into new product lines (data is a truly huge industry with unlimited total available market, or TAM). We lowercased the name because we wanted to reflect the utility nature of our platform — kind of like you “plug into” data.world, which our customers and community members can do as we back the product suite with a full set of interfaces, or APIs, in tech jargon. We also thought lowercasing data.world would “understate” the amazing power of our platform, a bit of humility to frame our boundless ambition. Plus, it is a shout-out to the original protocols of the Internet, like FTP, gopher, and telnet, that all of us as data.world used heavily “back in the day.”
The case of how I came up with the name of Bazaarvoice is a very different story and I remember the naming epiphany as if it were yesterday.
Our first-born Rachel was just six months old. We were in Cabo San Lucas in April 2005 using our last few weeks of vacation at Coremetrics before I left to take the plunge to start Bazaarvoice with my Co-founder, Brant Barton. I was reading Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto and it hit me — big time. That chapter, Markets Are Conversations, moved me more than almost anything I had ever read (it is a manifesto after all!). Its central thesis builds on the idea that the original form of marketing was the conversations taking place in the ancient bazaar.
“The first markets were filled with people, not abstractions or statistical aggregates,” the four authors who collaborated on the book wrote. “They were the places where supply met demand with a firm handshake. Buyers and sellers looked each other in the eye, met, and connected. The first markets were places for exchange, where people came to buy what others had to sell — and to talk.”
The ultimate point is that nothing has changed, it’s just that conversation — or marketing — now takes place through massive intermediation, at a planetary scale, and at the speed of light. It’s a powerful book, all online for free, and of course linked on the Digital Companion. And it was the book’s insight that hit me like a thunderbolt: The “voice of the marketplace” — it was perfect!
Bazaarvoice, of course, is an engine that powers and enables unfiltered customer reviews, engagement, and feedback for literally thousands of corporate retailers and brands around the world, in more than 40 international languages. Its user-generated content — including reviews, Q&As, and video — is literally the means for the 21st-century version of that conversation that enabled the trade of a knife or a cotton blanket in the ancient bazaar.
While the book is not specifically about naming conventions, implicitly it is so. For conversations open with introductions, and the name introduces the introduction. Think of the way the waiter begins at a nice restaurant. “Hi, my name is Chad, and I’ll be your server today. We have a few specials I’d like to recommend…” The name of your startup is the opener of every transactional “conversation” you will ever have.
So “Bazaarvoice” was it. Just as the name Coremetrics six years earlier had described exactly what the company did, providing the foundation for your most important metrics to run your online business, Bazaarvoice described exactly what we were setting out to do. It was a bit of an irreverent name intentionally, as we realized immediately that it was likely to be confused with Bizarrevoice. But that was actually a good thing in this case. There was meaning in that — the voice of customers would indeed sound “bizarre” to all of the corporate people that had been locked away in their corporate towers instead of walking their store aisles like Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, used to do to “keep it real” and then taught his children how to do that in his book , Made In America.
Hence Chapter 4 of that irreverent book, that Manifesto, gave us a great story behind the name. We were out to change the face of commerce forever, which was growing increasingly digital and mobile, and we needed a radical calling card to do so. The fear of negative reviews had held the industry back from embracing the voices of their most important stakeholders — their customers. “You mean that customers can write negative things about the products we’ve curated?!”, our earliest customers often said. Yes, just like they can talk to each other about your products over dinner. Or in the bazaar. Early on, we had some serious battles with household name companies that wanted to censor negative reviews and comments, which of course would have destroyed the credibility and trust of the product. But the name, or the story behind the name, was our primary tool to make the case for unfettered commentary, even when it was critical, or even hyper-critical (i.e., the dreaded one-star review). It seems so obvious now but back then it wasn’t — only around three retailers had customer reviews on their websites in 2005. Everything is clear in hindsight.
The name Bazaarvoice, like Coremetrics, also has a practical dimension. It is near the top of the alphabet, which matters if your primary marketing expense will be tradeshows. Why? Because everyone alphabetizes the list. Yep, just like the days with the Yellow Pages where plumbers would name themselves ABC123 Plumbing to be at the top of the Yellow Pages. I picked up this little tidbit out of Guy Kawasaki’s brilliant book, The Art of the Start.
So I phoned Brant and told him the name and the backstory. He was in. We were locked. But not without plenty of sometimes difficult deliberation ahead. We were just hiring our initial Chief Marketing Officer, Sam Decker, and we were still a few months out before our launch. He hated the name. The VC firm Austin Ventures hated the name. The famous angel investor and celebrated marketer, John Hime, who never invested in Bazaarvoice, hated the name. “Just call it Bvoice,” John said, “long names are horrible.” Sam asked Guy Kawasaki what he thought. I thought, “Wow, this is going to be good - I love Guy.” But, sadly, he hated it too. Guy suggested “Pheedbax” as his top pick. He also passed on investing even though he had invested in Coremetrics. Whatever happened to the top of the alphabet, Guy? As CEO, I stuck to my guns and, as my co-founder, Brant did too. And now I just smile when everyone says they love the name.
This is all easy to say now, after establishing a global brand name, a Wall Street Journal top-five IPO of 2012, and thousands of clients in over 40 international languages. It is much harder to say when you are two guys, a dog, and a PowerPoint. Sam and I have good laughs about this every now and then. But I’ve yet to have that laugh with John or Guy. Perhaps this chapter will stoke that fire.
There’s a caveat in all of this, of course. Which is that you shouldn’t let yourself or your team get so far caught up in the weeds of naming that it distracts you from so much else that is critical to startup success. There’s a cottage industry out there of naming consultants, online name generating tools, and endless sources of advice. All of these are fine for brainstorming, and for inspiration perhaps. But it truly comes down to your own search for a name that aligns with your vision and goals. And there are plenty of companies that have done just fine with what I think are graceless names. The Canadian courier, that country’s equivalent of UPS, is called “Purolator,” for its origins in making oil filters, a business it abandoned decades ago. Purolator had $2.2 billion in revenue in 2020. Or there’s IKEA, an acronym contrived out of the initials of the founder, Ingvar Kamprad, and the first letter in the names of the town and province where he was born in Sweden. It seems to me that IKEA might have been better used as part of a login password. But IKEA has been the world’s largest furniture retailer since 2008, operates in 30 countries, and has revenues of over $40 billion a year. And as for where you are in the alphabet, just think of YouTube.
But I still believe that these are the exceptions that prove the rule. In all seriousness, my point here is to urge you to think deeply about your company name. As with Coremetrics, it took me weeks to come up with the name Bazaarvoice. And it has served the company well. As compared to PowerReviews, which was one of our primary competitors, the name Bazaarvoice was superior for several reasons. First, it was not just limited to a reviews product. Second, it had a better story behind the name. Third, it was descriptive of what we did. Fourth, it had global appeal. Bazaar is an ancient word, traveling from Persian, through Turkish, and into Italian as “bazarra” in the 16th century. Today it’s a globally relevant term. Fifth, as mentioned, it was at the top of the alphabet (at least the English alphabet).
Later on, it led to the b: moniker in our rebranding prior to IPO, so it was also playful. b: bold. b: authentic. b: changing the world. Which is what every entrepreneurial endeavor should be about. I proudly displayed a “b: authentic” sign outside my office, and I hope that is shining through here.
“There is all the poetry in the world in a name. It is a poem which the mass of men hear and read. What is poetry in the common sense, but a hearing of such jingling names? I want nothing better than a good word. The name of a thing may easily be more than the thing itself to me.”
— Henry David Thoreau, American Naturalist