May 2009

Today’s Boston Globe has an interesting article about the renaming of Jurys Boston Hotel to The Back Bay Hotel, in an effort by its Dublin-based parent company to rebrand all of its properties to reflect their geographic locales. In a time when I often hear the lament, “all of the good names are taken,” and “you need to make up a name to stand out these days,” this article made me think. Are companies who might otherwise benefit from the use of solid, descriptive names missing out in their corporate and product naming efforts because of our own cynicism?

The last quote in the article should make any naming expert, corporate executive, or product manager take a pause. Stephen Johnston, general manager of the hotel stated it simply. “It’s kind of amazing that the name hasn’t been used before.”

Yes, many of the “good” names are taken, but as you venture into the naming game don’t get discouraged. Perhaps you may best be served by having a unique name created just for you. But the lesson learned is don’t discard any options in the early stages of development. Use all of the search engines to your advantage before you settle. Name development is a critical element of your overall brand and any effort should be conducted thoughtfully, thoroughly, and with the aid of experts who know how to sort through the alphabet soup of naming.

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Last week I ventured out to sunny Santa Monica, CA to attend the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA with stellar marketer, Maura Welch from WeeWorld. Given the dreary weather we were having here in Boston, when I got the call from Maura to join her on this trip I said, “Why not!”  Maura was on a panel discussing changes, challenges, and innovations in advertising and marketing to consumers with the advent of the web, social media, and e-commerce.

OK, that was a mouthful, but I will press on since the conference was chockfull of information about advertising, innovation, blogs, podcasting, broadband, mobile, in-video, in-game, social networks…the list goes on. New media has definitely made information more accessible but personally (my true confession), it has become a bane to my existence. As a marketing communications professional, keeping up with all of the new venues for spending ad dollars, coupled with the demand to prove a direct correlation between spending and sales, makes this job more challenging than ever. And that doesn’t just go for those of us who are going it alone. Any senior marketing executive faces the same challenges, whether he or she is in a corporate environment or working in an advertising, marketing or creative agency.

However, gaining conversion data that is real and adds value is not always easy. Too often useless numbers are thrown around to fool clients (or senior management) into approving a program that may or may not work. For example, if you use click-through data to measure the effectiveness of an online campaign that is being managed through your own site and shopping cart, you will get solid data. However, if you are trying to measure the effectiveness of an advertisement in a consumer magazine in the sale of products that are carried in thousands of retail chains (say for example, toothpaste) that’s a different animal. More direct research that may not, in reality, be worth the expense is the only way to get viable data.

The point here is that in some cases you just have to work with experience. A solid advertising campaign, designed for reach and awareness in a targeted market, is still a valuable element of your marketing strategy, and will help to drive sales even if not directly measurable.

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