"It's All In A Name"

I've always been a fan of Al Ries. He's also an ongoing contributor to Ad Age. He recently authored an article on the failure of Isuzu as they recently announced they'll be pulling their cars off the U.S. market.

Al's take on the failure of the car company is this "..."The cause of its death: failure to innovate, misjudgment of the market and woeful underspending on marketing."

He further notes "and most important of all, Isuzu is a terrible name. Consumers can't spell it; consumers can't pronounce it. (The name is pronounced "e-suzu," not "i-suzu.") and continues "You can't build a brand with a weak name. It's like building a house on sand."...

"The name is the hook that hangs the brand on the product ladder in the prospect's mind. In the positioning era, the single most important marketing decision you can make is what to name the product."

With that said...Isuzu's advertisting agency never questioned the name and just started marketing as usual. Despite the early success of the "Joe Isuzu" campaigns the brand ultimately became obsolete.

This is a great example of one of the great pitfalls of marketing. In coming up with an idea, we should always make sure we 'do our homework first". One of my mentors and media mogul David Martin instilled that in me in the mid 90's.

If the name of your product isn't easy to digest perhaps its consumption will be limited and more importantly misunderstood. We should really think through whether or not the product is simply a function of the 'now' or it is 'timeless'.

Once again we see new media services booming...all kinds of VC's are planting their stakes in the ground for social networking...but before we launch...we should think about its long term viability...one thing is certain, "MySpace" and "Facebook" certainly are clear in their meaning.