JULY 25, 2003

What’s in a name?

The wrong one can make you hard to find online.

 

By: Naseem Javed

Only yesterday, the image of a bank was of a Roman arch, and huge columns. Today, the banks are in your pockets, palm pilots, PDA’s and laptops, quietly completing transactions 24/7. American banks which discovered globalization and e-commerce way before the words came into our daily lingo are stuck with a lot of old-fashioned name identities and iconography. In the past, long and monopolistic names-The First Charted Bank of the Dominion, The Amalgamated of the De-Amalgamated bank of the Western Commerce, provided assurance and attracted customers. Today there are INGs and MBNA’s, a thick forest of them, and one can easily get lost.

Banks need simple, clean identities that do not create confusion. For e-commerce visibility, they need powerful dot-com domain names.

Naming is a serious discipline, but the big identity firms that created brilliant logos and designs farmed out naming responsibilities to subcontractors that hired skateboarding freelancers. The buck-a-name standard was formed. $500 got you 500 names.

Banks in American have mainly three types of names, which tend to be very
old-fashioned and sometimes problematic:

Long geographic names seriously hurt national and international marketing. The same long named get initialized, causing massive confusion with strange companies worldwide, and are impossible to find on the Net.

Words on a string – names of things combined either accidentally through M&A or for other strange reasons, and sometimes making no connections at all.

Initials - that come about because the customers refuse to call out long names.

DIAGNOSIS

            The first step I’d recommend to U.S banks is to determine whether your names are healthy, injured, or on life support. (It makes no difference whether these names are of products, services, divisions, or the main corporate name. To a customer, a name is a name, no matter how it is offered.)

Healthy Names are easy, unique, and one of a kind, with global protection, and a dot-com name like Citibank, SunTrust, or KeyCorp.

Injured Names are long, confusing, or initialized like UCBH, CIBC, BB&T or RBCFG.

Life-Support Names are tangled in serious trademark or obvious confusion problems.

Simple dictionary words also cause a lot of confusion. There are too many Firsts and Uniteds, and too many banks with compass directions in their names – East, West, North, South and so on,

Online or completely virtual banks are also struggling for respectable and trustworthy naming identities and most important, short and sweet URL’s. The market is swamped with promotions; players like Everbank, pcbanker, ING Direct, Earthstar, giantbank, and thousands of others, all chasing clicks and hits with a better URL around the globe.

Analysis and Treatment

The second step, after a proper checkup is to get a mandate to formally audit and analyze the name so management can take specific steps to modify them.

These names can be for cards, special accounts, or for various services. Most banks have lots of different names, and domain names, clashing with each other.

It’s always better to have a few strong and protected names; this way long-term brand values are established.

As for the third step, it is very easy to reevaluate, reposition and rebuild the name identity of and product or service if you do so using the Laws of Naming.

There is a big difference between general branding expertise and specialized naming. Healthy names are fit to run the race, so they cost less to promote, and promoting them builds huge brand value. Injured names cost 10 times more.

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Mr. Javed the author of “Naming for Power”, and the founder of ABC Namebank International, a consulting firm with offices in New York and Toronto. nj@njabc.com