OPINION

The Big Bang of Business Naming

Suddenly, some explosively positive and futuristically pragmatic policies about the Internet and global e-commerce are creating amazing galaxies of business naming. With already 1.7 billion online users and 1 billion more on their way, the new business-naming capabilities allowing advance and intricate platforms of global cyberbranding provide mega opportunities.

Depending on types and styles of businesses, for a nominal cost, several dozen Web sites in multilingual formats with the right type of domain names worldwide can easily catapult sales and raise visibility to a brand new stratosphere.

First, the floodgates are now open to create foreign language domain names while so many highly populated countries are lined up to create their own colorful and dynamic galaxies of business names. Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic domain names will become very popular and push away English as the only language of domains and cyberspace. A smart business strategy would be to fully comprehend and understand the nature of these dramatic changes on the global scene and immediately start an action plan around it.

Second, only those business names that can orbit freely will be fine, as tens of millions of others with nomenclature problems will come crashing down on top of each other, causing serious damage to their business models and totally wasting their advertising and marketing, without getting any value or desired attention in the marketplace.

Here are the five critical issues for the CEOs of any size or type of organization around the world:

Nomenclature 101

How is your current corporate name identity structured? How does this name play into various sub-products, services and divisions?

Is it unique and one-of-a-kind, or highly diluted surrounded by identical and similar names? How much does it change its personality in translation and foreign connotations?

Would it survive in this new global arena? What are the best options available today?

Multilingualization 101

What would be the direct benefits of creating multilingual name identities to capture additional exposure in the expanding e-commerce markets? What would be the best model to apply?

How should you position your existing current names, and what sub-cyberextensions should be created to maximize marketing and advertising dollars?

What are the greater economies of scale in savings and additional market share?

Domainization 101

How powerful is your current domain name system? What is the value, and how can you fortify it with additional support?

What are the options available to play parallel to advance platforms and newly announced policies for the global markets?

What type of domain nomenclature will dramatically increase your e-commerce presence at minimal cost?

Minimalization 101

How much unnecessary overhead with layers of excessive branding and packaging is being wasted?

How can you converge via aggressive digitalization to make your operation highly streamlined, dramatically economical and focused on key global target markets?

How can you minimize costs in reaching for different type of targeted and diverse global markets?

In order to achieve superior performance, the following are prerequisites:

Appoint a Director of Internal Naming. This person would be responsible for the daily routines of monitoring all the names of the enterprise and deal with hundreds of other issues and opportunities that are floating around so as to acquire and tabulate comprehensive information for the management with solid recommendations. This person has to be an open-minded, objective fact finder analyst and does not necessarily have to be an advertising-branding-executive or a linguist. This dedicated person would be willing to deal with the complexity of the major global markets with open-mindedness toward various cybertsunamis approaching, where some will bring great opportunities and some require immediate barricades.

The Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has so many new great offerings, and the complexity demands dedicated efforts to minimize huge losses currently taking place where massive marketing campaigns are not producing sales. The new gTLD and TLD programs alone are extraordinary moves as they create revolutionary tools for the right marketing combinations. In return, cyberbranding and all digital platforms are not only the cheapest, but also the most futuristic and simplistic way for market expansion. This is a specialized field and requires deeper understanding — just like when the Internet started, and eBay, Netscape, Amazon, E-Trade and thousands of others ideas erupted on the global stage overnight.

Obtain a Professional Name Evaluation Report. Your business team must be fully aware of not only the obvious, but also the mysterious and hidden messages your business name identity may be projecting in the marketplace. Ninety-nine percent of the time, corporations are not aware of all the secrets resulting in lost sales opportunities. We are living in a new-name-economy, where countries and regions with ownerships of most of the name-brand-identities go out and declare wars in targeted markets to achieve trade superiority.

The economic meltdown created brand-new opportunities for new players to come in and fill the gaps. Discover the rules of engagement and study in detail the Five Star Standard of Naming, available on the Internet — as without this, a great deal of time can be wasted on naming issues. A deeper understanding of name evaluation and how it can make or break a business is critical, as we are all living in a highly diluted and convoluted business name environment, with identities piled like huge garbage dumps.

Mobilize a Five-Year Plan. Include a mandate to acquire leadership via cyberbranding and advanced level name management policies to multiply your sales potential to new heights. Great products, services or ideas demand exceptional visibility to become popular and interactive with the global populace. Any structural or perceptual handicaps in naming would keep the operation struggling and always short on sales.

Most name management applications are minuscule in cost, while most cybermediums to play in are almost free. With such great opportunity, it is the core knowledge about such landscapes and the real art of corporate nomenclature that is seriously missing from the scene.

Create Internal Expertise or Get Outside Help. Advertising, marketing and branding professionals must aggressively adopt world-class level training to replace their serious lack of naming expertise and prepare for open debate on this hot subject. Once properly trained, they would be able to offer highly specialized business nomenclature based on naming laws, languages, translations, perceptions and trademark rules, alongside their core expertise of logos, slogans and general branding.

The Name Evaluation Report is the best place to start this business development process. This new Big Bang of business naming will create a dynamic flavor for any business anywhere in the world, and open greater access to prosperity.


Naseem Javed is recognized as a world authority on global naming strategies and corporate nomenclature issues. Author of Naming for Power, he introduced the Laws of Corporate Naming in the 1980s. Currently he is advising corporations and lecturing on global cyberbranding and the ICANN’s new gTLD platforms. He can be reached at[email protected].

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