Dear Uncle Matthew,
I notice you trade under Articulate Marketing – and what a great name that is, by the way – rather than Matthew Stibbe. Just wondering what you think the pros and cons are. I imagine that the Stibbe brand was well known when you left journalism, so you must have been sacrificing some profile. It may be that you needed to employ, subcontract etc, but you could have gone with Matthew Stibbe Associates, or something similar. I’m thinking of incorporating and I wonder if I should use my own name or if I should go with something more ‘corporate’. What do you think?
- Rose by any other name
Dear Rose,
You can read the story of how I came up with the name Articulate Marketing here.
But that article doesn’t cover the thinking behind using my own name or not. In fact, it was quite simple in my case. I got the advice of a marketing expert at one of my clients. She told me that all the agencies that she worked with had ‘big company’ style names and that, as a multinational, they tended not to work with individual freelancers. In other words, I needed to look enough like a big company to reassure them that I could do the business but enough like a small company to prove that I was more nimble than the other agencies who were my competition.
Also, having already started one business with a bit of a silly name and seen it grow into a 70-person leviathan which I subsequently sold, I didn’t want to limit my options by tying the company name to my own.
Lastly, I don’t think that my reputation as a freelance journalist was so great that I would have benefitted from it in the corporate world. If anything, the opposite. I really wanted people to stop seeing me as a journalist. You can imagine that a big IT firm would not be keen on revealing its secrets and plans to someone they thought would post them on The Register the next day.
So there are three reasons why I chose Articulate Marketing over, say, Stibbe Associates. Your mileage may differ and the choice depends a lot on who your clients are and how your name positions you in the market. My only solid advice is to think about it carefully (but don’t overthink it) and then make a bold decision.
Uncle Matthew
Such sage advice. I chuckled when I read this particular insight: people may have known me as a journalist, but maybe it’s better that they didn’t – or words to that affect.
On a related point, I’ve been reading a few books lately about how to build a successful writing business (been at it 20+ years myself, but always willing to learn). It interests me that most of them assume that all “copywriters” come from an agency/marketing/advertising background. I wonder how many of us there are with journalism roots, and how that adds to our offer (or detracts from it)?
Interesting discussion Uncle Matthew, as always. I started my company as http://www.richpelletier.com. Later, with the help of Nick Usborne, my company became Lucid Content. I haven’t come from the agency world, or the journalism world. I woke up one day and declared myself a copywriter and scared the beejesus out of my wife and friends (along with a friend who was a 20+ year copywriter at National Geographic. I’ll never forget the look on his face when I told him I was going to be a copywriter!)
“Copywriter” is such an weird moniker. I hear that word and I have visions of sales letters that are long enough to circle the globe with gigantic typography imploring me to buy a weigh loss supplement or an “Internet Marketing Solution.” On the other hand, there are so many copywriters out there doing great work.
Cheers Matthew hope life is great over there!
rp
It is so weird telling people ‘copywriter’. They think it’s all Mad Men! I don’t think there’s a better word in English though.
“Copywriter” always makes me think of direct mail or advertising, which doesn’t really cover what I do. One of my favourite business writing gurus, John Simmons, makes a good argument for “business writer”, which is what I use.
Yes, the Dutch say something similar and I think ‘business writer’ or ‘corporate journalist’ or something like that is better. In many cases I just say ‘writer’ although that conjures up some odd images too – people ask if they’ve read anything I’ve written!