What to Name the Baby?
By DANIEL TYNAN
The Industry Standard

Kirsten Alexander thought she had it nailed. As director of marketing for a new dot-com in Cambridge, Mass., she was working with a talented team - including members of MIT's Media Lab. They had a great idea for a site: Provide customer ratings of online transactions. All they needed was the right name, something that would communicate what their site promises to be: fair, trustworthy and consumer-driven.

So Alexander and her colleagues generated a list of 184 names and tried them out on friends, family and focus groups.

The site's first working title, Fairnetworks, reminded people of carnival clowns and computer geeks. Not their target markets. They tried variations on the word "trust" but people thought they were a bank. How about Evalurate? Too hard to spell. iRate? Too angry. They flirted briefly with MyReputation. People were offended - they thought it was a site that rated sexual reputations.

Alexander liked Pono, a Hawaiian word that translates roughly as "trustworthy." But it had already been nabbed by an adult site, apparently to capture those people who can't spell "porno."

Then, finally, they found it. The perfect name. It was short, easy to spell and conveyed the right qualities. They registered every variation of it with InterNIC, the national registry of Internet domain names. But just to be sure, they wanted to test it one last time. So they put together a focus group and tacked the new name to the wall: Unirate.

Within three seconds everyone in the room was laughing hysterically.

"Of course, they read it as 'urinate,'" sighs Alexander. "It was one of those things that shows you that you really don't know everything."

Finally, they'd had enough. When Alexander and three colleagues climbed into the CEO's Jeep to visit a client in New York, they vowed not to leave the car until they'd made a decision. Four hours later, their dot-com had a name. The OpenRatings.com site launched in March.

No Names in Site
Pity the poor souls charged with naming a dot-com. There was a time you could dream up any old moniker, register it, then wait for the VC money to roll in. Nowadays the job is infinitely more difficult.

People who have done it say it's like naming a child. Only it isn't - it's far more difficult because every company name has to be unique. Imagine a world in which there could be only one Brittany, one Tawny, one Tyler. What sort of names would we end up with? eBenjamin? iClaudia? Mysonthedoctor?

And uniqueness is only the beginning. The name should be memorable and easy to type. It must convey your company's values (invariably, these are quality, integrity, competency and trust). It ought to capitalize on existing brands, if you've got them, but also proclaim to the world, "I am a real dot-com, my market cap is enormous." Because the Web knows no borders, it cannot mean something nasty in another language. It would be nice if the name were something you could trademark. And, of course, the URL must be available.

Good luck.

"There are 8 million URLs, and about 200,000 words in your average dictionary," says Anthony Shore, senior associate for naming at the San Francisco office of Landor Associates, an identity-consulting firm. "You do the math."

Shore has a point. An April 1999 survey of 25,500 standard English-language dictionary words found that 93 percent of them had been registered as .coms. And new domain names are disappearing faster than McCain for President buttons - approximately 25,000 are registered each day, according to Network Solutions (NSOL) . While 80 percent of these are .coms, there's "a big uptake in .net registrations," says Doug Wolford, Network Solutions' general manager.

Domain names weren't always this hard to come by.

Domain Poisoning
In 1984 early Netizens realized they had a problem. There were nearly 1,000 computers hooked to the Arpanet, the granddaddy of today's Internet, and nobody could remember every machine's 12-digit IP address. So Paul Mockapetris of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute suggested a solution: Use names instead of numbers to identify each machine, and classify them by the type of organization that owned them - .com for commercial enterprises, .org for nonprofits and so on. Thus was born the system of domain names we use today.

Back then, the .com suffix was the runt of the litter. Most Net addresses ended in .edu, .mil or .gov - for the educational, military and government institutions that dominated network traffic at that time.

The first commercial domain, Symbolics.com, was registered in March 1985. Six years later, Tim Berners-Lee dreamed up the Web, and domain names began to take on new importance.

By the end of 1992, only 7,000 names had been registered in the .com, .net and .edu domains. In those days, St. Louis travel agent Rik Brown could have had virtually any domain he desired. But he wanted to keep it simple. "I thought of many different possibilities," Brown says. "But I always came back to Travel.com." So he registered it - one of the first generic domains. Since then, Brown says, he's entertained offers "in excess of $100 million for the domain, the content and the company."

The golden age of dot-coms spans from mid-1994 through the end of 1995, when many of the Net's household names - among them, Amazon.com (AMZN) , Yahoo (YHOO) , eBay (EBAY) , E-Trade, Excite (ATHM) , Netscape and Pets.com - were created.

Even then, there were a few near misses and might-have-beens. In October 1994, Jeff Bezos wanted to name his new Web venture "Cadabra" - as in "abracadabra." But his attorney convinced him that this magical moniker sounded a bit too much like "cadaver." Reluctantly, Bezos went with his second choice: Amazon.com.

In August 1995, Joe Kraus and his five cohorts had a great name for their Web search engine: Bullseye.com. So they hired a team of artists - including graphics god Roger Black - to create designs based on the name.

There was just one problem: Bullseye Testing Technology, a maker of C++ code analyzers in Redmond, Wash., had registered the domain a year earlier. In fact, Bullseye's Steve Cornett still owns it.

"Being the eternal optimist, I was convinced we could buy Bullseye.com from this guy," says Kraus, cofounder and senior VP of Redwood City, Calif.-based Excite. "We negotiated, and the guy said he wouldn't do it. We raised the price, he said no. We negotiated and negotiated, until we finally realized the guy would never give up the URL, no matter how much we paid him."

It was three weeks before the site's launch and the company was in a panic. "So we put together a huge brainstorming session with an unbelievable number of whiteboards," Kraus says. They whittled the massive list to a handful of finalists, including Swoop, Ferret and one of Kraus' personal favorites, InfoSherpa. "But Excite had the most energy - seemed to have the most potential to do other stuff besides searching. It just felt right."

By the end of 1995, more than 170,000 domain names had been registered. Two years later, there were nearly 10 times that many. Newbies were pouring onto the Net, and Web companies wanted simpler names that people would remember and know how to spell. At the same time, savvy speculators began snapping up every generic name they could think of, in hopes of selling them to cash-rich dot-coms. If a startup wanted to be the great big portal in the plain blue wrapper, it would have to pay.

In late 1996, Houston-based entrepreneur Marc Ostrofsky saw a golden business opportunity. He purchased www.business.com from a British firm, Business Solutions International, for a then-record $150,000. Three years later he sold the domain for a new record: $7.5 million. Daniel Goodman, who registered the business.com domain in 1992, says he's delighted by the sale, because it increases the chance of selling BSI's current domain name, E-business.com. Goodman's asking price? $15 million.

Vowel Obstruction Other startups that couldn't afford the price of generic names - or who simply wanted to display their Net street cred - headed straight for a diminutive prefix: the inescapable "i" or the ubiquitous "e." But as domain registrations mushroomed from 1.5 million in 1997 to more than 8 million at the end of 1999, some surfers had had enough.

"It's getting ridiculous," says Kraus. "I saw 'e-lightbulb' the other day. That's a sure sign the apocalypse is coming."

"E-, i-, my-, net-… People will look back at these names and say, 'That's so 1999,'" remarks Liz Goodgold, CEO of the Nuancing Group, an identity-consulting firm in San Diego. The letter du jour, says Goodgold, is z: Zoomerang and zShops, Beenz and Abuzz. Business.com? Boring. Biz.com - now that's hip.


Another trend these days is to glue two or three words together to create a domain that's not exactly generic but still proclaims what your business is about. Unlike generic terms such as "pets" or "toys," multiword URLs can be trademarked. You're also more likely to find one that nobody owns.

Whether these names will be effective remains to be seen. It works for Priceline.com, where you bid for cheap plane tickets, hotel rooms and the like. But will it work for LiquidPrice, where electronics dealers bid for your business? Or FoodLine, a restaurant guide? It's an easy leap from Wrenchead and Beautyjungle to mufflers and mascara, respectively. But what, exactly, is a Honkworm? A Boldfish? Is it a Web site or a nature program?

A spate of new dot-coms have resorted to the Yahoo model, seeking distinctive names without any obvious meaning. Some are simply silly - Google, Boodle, Foofoo. Other would-be Amazons are flocking overseas to plunder foreign dictionaries. Thus you've got Akamai (Hawaiian), Xuma (Chinese), Roku (Japanese), Taecan (Latin), Flooz (Persian), Esus (Greek), Akili (Swahili), Habama (Malinese) and Moai (Easter Island), to name just a few.

Visit the respective sites and you might learn that "flooz" is an ancient form of currency, or that "habama" is how, at the close of a deal, the Dogon tribe of Mali says, "We have done well together." But meaning is secondary - the goal is to lodge the name in people's brains long enough for them to type it into their browsers. As for what the dot-com is or does, well, you'll find out when you get there. "It's the empty-vessel approach," says Goodgold. "You get to fill it with whatever you want." But, she warns, without the marketing clout of an Excite or a Yahoo, few of these vessels will stay afloat for long.

Naming Names

Where do all these names come from? Some are hatched in pricey identity incubators like Landor Associates or NameLab. Others are dreamed up by smaller firms that help with naming as well as doing trademark searches and scrounging the InterNIC database. And in some cases it's pure serendipity, a bolt of inspiration.

Last year, when Hewlett-Packard (HWP) decided to spin off its $8 billion testing and instrumentation business, it went to Landor. The firm, which christened Touchstone Films for Disney and persuaded Federal Express to slim down to FedEx, spent four months working with HP to create a new corporate identity. The result, Agilent Technologies, was lauded by some and lampooned by others.

"We didn't know what the company would look like in five or 10 years," says David Redhill, Landor's executive director for communications. "The technology simply is changing too fast. So we looked long and hard at what the company stands for and what it does. We wanted a name that suggested agility, flexibility and responsiveness to the market." Hence Agilent, a word (like other Landor creations Lucent, Livent and Derivium) that you won't find in any dictionary.

Such services don't come cheap. Although few are as pricey as the Agilent project - which reportedly cost in excess of $1 million - soup-to-nuts branding efforts can easily run from $75,000 to $100,000.

"Landor is not just a naming shop," says Redhill. "The name is not just the last detail you think of. It has to be consistent with your brand identity, the site architecture, a whole mix of things." For most Web startups, Redhill says, the process is usually faster and the fees smaller. But he acknowledges that "when you come to Landor, you'll pay more than you would to a two-person naming shop down the road."

"This naming stuff is just ridiculous," counters Lois Kelly, aka the Namechick, a one-person shop in Providence, R.I. "I see people getting so ripped off. On one end of the spectrum you have people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just for a name. On the other hand, everyone thinks they're a naming expert, and they come up with some really bad ones."

Kelly tells of one software firm whose executive VP squirreled away one weekend to brainstorm names. "Then he came in on Monday and tried to convince everyone to name the company 'White Hot' - as if they were bunch of strippers. The scary thing is that people were buying into it."

Still, when you hire a consultant, you're usually paying for more than just a name. Most branding companies also offer services such as domestic and international trademark searches, market research and linguistic screening to make sure a name doesn't mean or sound like something distasteful in a foreign language.

Consultants may also try to ferret out how many similar names are already in use. "I can't tell you how many people have called me to say they were all set up with a name, and then they came up with something like Infinium (INFM) or Infinia," says Kelly. "I tell them, 'Do you know how many Infini there are out there?'" Countless.

Inside a company, the process can resemble a massive group-therapy session. Employees and experts may gather for weeks of brainstorming in closed rooms, only to find that the names everyone likes are taken or that no one can agree.

"Going through this process you find out a lot about your coworkers," says Vinnie Grosso, CEO of Into Networks (formerly Arepa) in Cambridge, Mass. For three months Grosso and colleagues grappled with how to move from the old name (a type of breakfast tortilla) to something that reflects what they do - delivering CD-ROM content over the Web.

"You learn a lot about who people are, how they see the world," says Grosso. "There's nothing like getting to a short list of names and having people finally say, 'I hate that,' or, 'I love that.'"

Scott Eagle faced a similar problem when researching a new name for e-Guard, which makes software for managing Web passwords. Eagle's search took him to a pillow factory in San Francisco, where he took off his shoes, washed his hands in rose petal soap, ate a light vegetarian dinner and sat around on big pillows with a nuclear physicist, a journalist and four other strangers. "We told jokes, we sang songs and we ended up with a list of fascinating names, none of which made our top five," he says.

In the end, they went with Gator.com, based on a suggestion from a consultant. Like the reptile, Eagle explains, Gator software lurks below the surface of your browser, protecting your personal data. Nominally VP of marketing, Eagle is now known within the company as its Chief Insti-Gator.

Then there are those who say, "Screw the consultants, we can do this ourselves." Like Abuzz, which operates the Web discussion forum at the New York Times site. The company founders came up with the name four years ago over dinner at a Boston eatery. President Andres Rodriguez says they wanted a name that suggested "a massively large social tool that was like insects helping each other." They boiled it down to three species: bees, ants or apes. For market research, they went to Boston's South Station and asked commuters which names they liked best. The bees won.

I Think ICANN

Naming your company used to be a lot easier. In the first half of the 19th century, firms were typically named for their founders - people like Milton Hershey, David Wesson and Oscar Mayer (yes, there really was an Oscar Mayer). They sold products regionally; everyone had their own local brand of cooking oil or packaged meats.


Then the railroads came and, with them, national distribution. Suddenly you didn't have to live in Pennsylvania to eat Hershey's chocolate. However, as Nuancing Group's Goodgold points out, if you sold Smith's Jam, you might be forced to compete with 12 other Smiths on the shelves. "So companies had to create brands that were more distinctive than a person's last name."

The Internet is changing the rules again. The playing field is now global, yet the choices are much more limited. For one thing, you must obey the peculiar rules of URL syntax - for example, you can't use spaces or ampersands. So when Barnes & Noble went digital, it became Barnesandnoble.com, then Bn.com. And once you cross borders the situation gets worse.

"We're sincerely worried about the Internet division of 'Venootschap Voor Vlietleiglease Venlease,' a Dutch aircraft leasing company," jokes Aidan Kirby of Wolff-Olin, a brand consultancy with offices in New York, London, Lisbon and Madrid. "Perhaps V4 would make a good URL."

In fact, experts say it's easier to obtain a trademark patent than it is to secure a good domain name, in part because trademark rules are more flexible. "The classic example is the name 'Delta,'" says Gerald Ferrera, coauthor of a textbook on cyberlaw and a professor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. "You have Delta Air Lines (DAL) , Delta Dental and Delta Faucets, and you can trademark them all because they don't compete directly with each other. But there can be only one Delta.com."

However, some relief may be on the way. After years of debate, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has approved the addition of new top-level domain names like .arts or .web. But what those names will be, when they'll be available and how they'll be implemented have yet to be decided. The group also has to work out issues such as whether owners of existing "famous" trademarks will get first crack at the new domains, or how Netizens will sort through the confusion of a dozen different Web addresses that start with the same word.

But we probably won't see another gold rush of domain name speculators, says Ferrera. In November, President Clinton signed an anti-cybersquatting statute that makes it harder for people to register personal or trademarked names and sell them for a profit. So even if you're able to snag, say, www.disney.web, you'll be liable under the new law if you try to sell it to the Mouse House, engage in a competing business or do anything else to dilute the trademark.

"It's the end of selling names, quite frankly," Ferrera says.

Brand on the Run Ask any naming expert and he'll tell you the same thing: It's not just a name, it's a brand - just like Kellogg (K) 's Rice Krispies or Crest toothpaste. But you can't pour milk on a Web site, and it won't leave your mouth feeling minty fresh. On the Net, branding starts with the name. Unfortunately, it often ends there, too.

"Internet people are pretty inept at branding," says Mickey Belch, professor of marketing at San Diego State University and author of a leading textbook on advertising and promotion. "They all rely on the same things to get people back to their site."

In cyberspace perception of a brand starts long before consumption of the product, says Venky Shankar, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Maryland in College Park. Shankar, who's studying digital branding, says a site's appearance and how it operates are key. "Look at Amazon. They go all out to make sure the consumer's experience is really satisfying, starting with the homepage."


The other key difference, Shankar says, is that in the traditional marketing world, companies use brands as a way to avoid talking to consumers. "Coca-Cola doesn't do one-on-one with its customers," he says. "The brand does the talking. But in the cyberworld, you can't afford to do that. People come to your Web site to send e-mail, get responses, see how interactive you are. That's one reason why AOL (AOL) is successful - they're very good at talking one-on-one."

In short, the areas in which dot-coms most often fall down - site navigation and customer service - have the greatest impact on their success or failure. No matter how many high-priced consultants you hire, naming sessions you hold and foreign dictionaries you devour, if your site doesn't deliver the goods you might as well be Deadmeat.com (an actual site, by the way, but more literary than e-commerce-related).

"You don't want to create a high-sounding name with too many expectations," Shankar warns, citing Prodigy as an example. When the online service first appeared in the 1980s, it was so slow and limited that it was perceived as anything but prodigious. More recently, when fashion retailer Boo.com stumbled, critics were quick to pounce on the name and use it against them.

"I could position myself as Superprof.com," Belch says. "But if you come to my class and say, 'You're basically a jerk, you don't know what you're talking about,' then the name doesn't mean anything. There's an old saying I use in my class all the time: Nothing will kill a poor product faster than great advertising." Or a really great name.
The Industry Standard, April 17, 2000. Reprinted with permission.