When I was trying to come up with a name for my copywriting and marketing agency (now called Articulate) I spent a lot of time perusing the internet on the subject of naming. One of the sites I came across was a hundred monkeys.
I really like their attitude. Their home page is really tidy, quick to load and well-signposted. I particularly like the headline “things to do” and the fact that they have a contact us link top and centre on the page. This is good web karma.
What is especially fabulous about them is the fact that they differentiate themselves from their competition in a really smart way. What they say is, essentially, this: you can tell who is a good naming company by the way they name themselves. They then proceed to list several dozen competitors, with links to the home pages, so that the reader can judge for themselves. I think this is a ballsy strategy that shows great confidence and for the kinds of companies that are going to be excited by the monkeys’ approach to naming it clearly differentiates them.
My only complaint was that I found it really hard to actually talk to any of them and while I had some money to spend on naming consultancy and they were really one of only two or three companies I shortlisted, I just couldn’t get any of them on the phone and the few emails I got were slightly surreal, non-specific and from different people. I suppose this ties up to the point that branding must be underpinned by service delivery to be effective.
It reminds me of an old joke that I have used on the Articulate website: “if you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write ‘hey, hey we’re the monkees.’”
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