Here’s Why Brand Names Matter (But Can Still Be Fun!)

If your name is John or Joe or Mary or Melissa, you’re probably used to hearing your name called and finding out you weren’t the John or Joe or Mary or Melissa they were looking for.
Sometimes that even happens to brand names. I mean, who knew there was another Perficient Digital Something that was famous, right?
Witness the following Twitter encounter (Dave Mustaine is the co-founder of the thrash metal band Megadeth):

We at Perficient Digital (not Pilots) are still waiting for the call from Megadeth. Eric and I are ready to tour!

See our hard rocking video on the possible return of Google Authorship at the end of this post!

Or take this bit of fun that happened when I noticed that the backwards-F logo of Fullsteam, my favorite hometown brewery in Durham, NC, looked like the mirror image of the logo of Flipboard, my favorite content aggregation app, and I introduced the two brands to each other on Twitter:

And sometimes a too good to be true brand name story is just too good to be true (see snopes.com):

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Names matter

I remember how much time and care my wife and I put into coming up with the names of our two daughters, Sarah and Hannah. Sure, those are both traditional names, but at the time they reflected values and traditions we cared about. We didn’t just pull them out of thin air.

I’ve known parents who agonized so much over the name of their new baby, they didn’t have a name until a month or two after the birth!

While I hope none of us loves our brands as much as we love our children, our brands are still pretty darn important to us. We go through a very similar process of agonizing over just the right name to represent our company, service, or product.

And well we should.

Our brand names are the entry point to the connections we want to have with prospects. If they remember nothing else, we want them to at least know our name. Our name is the handle, the hook, by means of which we hope eventually to draw people deeper into our brand experiences.

I hope this more lighthearted post makes you think not only about how important it is to invest thought and care into choosing the name of your brand, but also to be ready to have some fun with it when the moment is right.

Now, watch Eric and me keeping alive the Perficient Digital name’s proud association with rock ‘n’ roll!