Running out of names for businesses
Yahoo’s decision to change identity to Altaba smacks of a lack of options
Still, there is a finite universe of potential names out there. For words of seven letters or fewer, there are 8.4 billion possible letter combinations — and that includes Aaaaaaa and Zzzzzzz.
The number of plausible, pronounceable names is much, much smaller. In pharmaceuticals, where US Food and Drug Administration and European Medicines Agency rules aimed at preventing misprescription and consumer confusion sharply limit drug namers’ options, there are clear signs of exhaustion.
What else would you call Onzetra Xsail, Vemlidy and Taltz (all drugs approved by the FDA last year)?
Weird to familiar
For the rest of the corporate world, I guess we’re not quite there yet. The success of Google and Facebook is evidence that what at first seem like really weird or mundane choices can still become familiar and hugely valuable brands.
It might be that longer, stranger, clunkier names could eventually become familiar and valuable, too. I’m a big fan of 1980s Chinese business-naming conventions: How about calling your company Fujian Jinjiang Chendai Xibian’s No. 2 Daily Necessities Factory?
Still, the very existence of consultancies specialised in naming — Placek started Lexicon in 1982, and he thinks it was one of the first — is indication that the work has gotten harder. It is surely going to get harder still.
It strikes me that this may be yet another way in which the room to innovate and carve out market space is being crimped.
There’s been a recent flurry of economic research into the apparent decline in entrepreneurship and business dynamism in the US since 2000. One paper I saw presented at the American Economic Association annual meeting asked, Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
Maybe, maybe not. But names for those ideas definitely are.