Is Your Firm Name Hurting You?

Imagine this. What if you were to strip away everything from your brand, leaving behind its single most visible component? What would you have?

No, it’s not your logo. It’s your name.

Of course, a brand is a lot more than your name (or your logo). At its essence, your brand is what prospects and clients think and say about you. It’s your reputation magnified by your visibility. And it’s the thing (or things) people associate with your firm in their minds.

But to unleash those associations requires a trigger. And for most firms there is just one trigger. You guessed it—your name.

Your name is a proxy for your firm and everything your business represents in the minds of your audiences.

As a symbol of everything you represent, then, it carries a lot of weight. Yet many firms give their name very little love or thought.

Why is that? And how can a name affect a firm’s fortunes?

Those are the questions I want to answer today.

Why Your Name Matters

Think about it. You can’t have a business without a name. Without a name, people can’t think about or talk about you. You would have no referrals. No business. No future.

Of course every firm has a name. But some names are better than others.

What does a bad name look like? I don’t want to embarrass anyone, so let me give you a few fictional examples*:

An accounting or law firm:
Delgado, Roderick, Cannon, Nguyen & Munoz

A consulting firm:
SHM Associates

A technology firm:
The Digital Transformation Group

What’s wrong with these names? It all boils down to the way people’s minds work. People don’t like complexity. They are drawn to simple concepts and words. In a world cluttered with thousands of businesses and marketing messages, people can also have trouble recalling names. So any help we can give them can make a big difference.

In the case of the firm Delgado, Roderick, Cannon, Nguyen & Munoz, nobody is going to remember this long string of partner names. Clients and prospects do what any of us would do: they lop off everything after the first name. They call it Delgado. People will simplify every time. It might as well be a law of physics. I’ll call it the Law of Reduction.

In a situation like this, a firm would be smart to follow the lead set by their clients. Change the name—or register a fictitious name (also known as a “dba”)—to a single partner’s name. It doesn’t have to be the first one in the string, though that might be the easiest for your clients to recognize. You might, instead, opt for the most interesting name in the list.

If all of the named partners have retired or died, shortening the name can be easy. Many firms have taken this route, and it makes a ton of sense. A multi-word name is confusing and difficult to remember. A short name, on the other hand, fits readily into people’s crowded minds.

What about SHM Associates?

First of all, let’s take a moment to appreciate what’s happened here already. Clearly, the Law of Reduction has been at work. That SHM stood for something at one time. Maybe it was a string of names. Maybe three descriptive words. At some point, people stopped calling the firm by its full name, collapsing it like an accordion into a compact initialism. Before long, the firm started calling itself that, too.

But there’s a problem with initialisms. They are hard to keep straight. “Was it SHM or SMH?” This can lead to some embarrassing mixups. And when interested parties type the URL into their web browser, a transposed letter can stop them in their tracks. Lead flow suffers. Initialisms are also boring and easy to confuse with similar-looking names. (How many three-letter competitors can you think of?) There is nothing about SHM that is memorable or interesting.

Then there’s that “Associates” dangling on the end like a loose muffler. It too will fall away and everyone will call the company SHM. Appendages—usually added to make a firm sound more substantial—just detract from a name and are almost universally ignored.

Finally, let’s consider The Digital Transformation Group.

At first blush, you might think this is a good name. After all, it says exactly what the organization does. But there’s a problem. Let’s call it The Law of the Generic.

Descriptive names are generic. While they do a good job of describing the business they are in, they do a very poor job of distinguishing themselves from the sea of other generic names in the marketplace. Because they describe, they also tend to be long. Again, that makes them less interesting and harder to remember.

And remember what inevitably happens to long names? Yep. The Law of Reduction kicks in. Before long, The Digital Transformation Group will become TDTG or, because it’s shorter, DTG. That descriptive name has just become an inscrutable initialism.

There’s another reason generic names are usually a poor choice. They don’t age well. Chances are, the words “digital transformation” will feel dated in a few years as some newer, more swanky term takes its place. Also, businesses evolve. Names aren’t so flexible. Many firms that outgrow their generic, descriptive names turn them into initialisms to avoid confusing their clients and prospects.

Next Steps

Take a hard look at your firm’s name. Is it short, memorable and easy to pronounce? Is it well differentiated from your competitors? Or does it fall into one of the categories above?

It’s never too late to change your name, and many firms go through the process with great success. The payoff? Improved brand retention, tighter differentiation and greater brand loyalty. Not bad for a choice word or two!

If you’d like to learn more about the types of names a firm can have and how to choose a good one, check out this short blog post.

Happy Marketing!

Related: What Drives Exceptional Growth in an Unpredictable Marketplace?