When Dot-com Becomes Dot-yawn
By Marie Eve Demers -- EDN, January 29, 2001
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If your company's name ends with a dot and a com, you might find yourself in trouble a few years from now. The problem isn't market consolidation, bankruptcy or cheesecloth business plans-not in this case, anyway. Simply put, your company's once-hip name might become an outmoded liability. What was fresh in the 1990s could well become as dated as an avocado-colored kitchen appliance this decade.
Anthony Shore is executive director of verbal branding and naming at Landor Associates, a San Francisco firm that has worked with companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Alcatel, Philips Electronics and Sun Microsystems. He believes that the new trend for Internet-related companies is to move away from the dot-com approach.
Since last April, when many Internet companies started to face financial trouble, having an obviously Internet-related name became tarnishing to a company's image. "Companies realized that putting all their eggs in the dot-com basket was putting them at risk," Shore explained.
Technology evolves at such a quick pace that it might not be a stretch to say that, next year, a company name ending with the dot-com suffix will sound passé. Just think about some midcentury companies that chose a then-popular technical expression, o-matic, as an ending to their name. What would you think about a company today named Chip-o-Matic?
Executives may be tempted to heave a sigh of relief if their company name doesn't have those three letters glued to its extremity. However, other fading naming trends include the preface i (Internet), e (electronic) and the emerging m for mobile. Many iCompanies believe that their eBranding strategy is clever, but Shore begs to differ.
"Names that include Internet-related letters, numbers and terms-such as i, e, 2, or net-will prove to be of a short-term vision," Shore said. "The Internet merely is a medium of communication; it shouldn't be a foundation for a name." Just as Interscope and Lookout no longer advertise that a CD has stereo sound, companies will eventually cease to advertise the fact that they are online.
The same could be said for numbers. There has been a proliferation on the Internet of company names with the number 2 or 4, that, Shore predicts, will eventually seem cliché.
Companies will not be the only ones to adapt to the Internet evolution. Terms such as B2B, I2I, P2P, e-commerce and m-commerce are also expected to slowly fade from the media's list of trendy words as e-commerce becomes an integral part of regular business.
Granted, it is very difficult to find a good name that is also an available URL; consequently, companies must think of creative ways to tweak a name in order to find a memorable Web address.
When the domain-name craze first started, people rushed to grab single-word URLs before somebody else did. Words like insurance or computer were worth gold, some believed. However, naming a company according to what it does is not a sure bet, Shore said. First, a descriptive name is not a guarantee of success. In order for a name to sink into people's minds, it has to stand apart from the horde. Sites like Pets.com, Garden.com or Furniture.com-all bankrupt in recent months-lack interest or personality.
However, the biggest problem with these types of names is that they are descriptive, and therefore limiting. "A company needs to keep its options open, in case it wants to reposition itself," Shore cautioned.
Company names unrelated to the company's business worked well for Amazon.com and Yahoo!, which allowed both companies to evolve and add services in new spaces and markets. Jeffrey Bezos, founder, president, and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, a company that recently added electronics, toys and DVDs to its list of product offerings, is probably glad he didn't name his business Books.com.
