Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

If you need a name for your service, start with your own.
Names: The Information-per-Inch Test
Why do many Fortune 500 companies pay over $35,000 for a name?
Because names make a company’s first impression. First impressions count
—and often convey much of the little information about you that your prospects
have.
Given what a good name is worth, how do you measure a name’s value?
Put the name to this test: How much valuable information per inch does your
name imply?
A wonderfully named San Francisco company perfectly illustrates the

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Information-per-Inch Principle— and given its business, it should. The company
is NameLab—a company that specializes in naming products.
With lightning speed, NameLab’s name suggests the company takes a near-
scientific, analytic approach to developing names, something distinct in its
industry. Beyond that, the freshness and slight whimsy of the name NameLab
also suggests the company’s capacity for creative, right-brain thinking. So
NameLab conveys a powerful double meaning to its prospects, with an excellent
information-per-inch ratio.
Ask yourself: If you needed a good name for your service, whom would you
call first? Names Inc., The Name Company, or NameLab?
If you were a journalist writing a story on product or service names, which
company would you call first? (So far, every journalist’s answer has been
NameLab, as you may have noticed in dozens of publications.)
A week later, which company’s name would you remember?
And when that time came to name your company, which company would you
probably call for help?
Give every name you consider the Information-per-Inch Test.
The Cleverness of Federal Express
The master packer of naming—the company that may have squeezed more good
information into each inch of its name—is Federal Express.
“Express” was not being widely used when Fred Smith chose Federal
Express’s name. Thanks to its usage in Pony Express and other places,
“Express” connotes “rapid mail delivery”—faster than conventional mail.
Now came the company’s next question: What else should our name
communicate? “Nationwide,” they agreed. Quickly, Smith probably considered
the names National Express, Nationwide Express, and US Express—the obvious
names that come quickly to mind.
By contrast, “federal,” a legalistic term for a political system of states with a
central government, does not come quickly to mind—a great asset in a name. To
give the name even more impact in the company’s competition with government
postal services,
“federal” also connotes an official government sanction or status. (Smith
admitted that he liked “Federal” because it sounded patriotic, although his main
reason for fixing on “Federal” was that his initial business plan called for his
company to deliver air freight for the Federal Reserve.)

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So Federal is a more distinctive, more memorable, and more authoritative
way to convey “nationwide.”
Now look at Federal Express in color. The colors again hint at the
government-sanctioned theme with their twist on red, white, and blue, but
connote better quality by replacing the government’s ordinary blue with a richer
purple-blue.
So Federal Express conveys a distinctive and powerful message—“like the
US mail, only faster and better”—in just two words and two colors—a terrific
information-per-inch ratio.