Free-Reprint Article Written by: Marcia Yudkin See Terms of Reprint Below.
***************************************************************** * * This email is being delivered directly to members of the group: * * [email protected] * ***************************************************************** We have moved our TERMS OF REPRINT to the end of the article. Be certain to read our TERMS OF REPRINT and honor our TERMS OF REPRINT when you use this article. Thank you. This article has been distributed by: http://Article-Distribution.com Helpful Link: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Overview http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Article Title: ============== When It Comes to Business Names, Acronyms Are FUBAR Article Description: ==================== When you're dreaming up a new company name or product name, avoid acronyms. Here's why. Additional Article Information: =============================== 553 Words; formatted to 65 Characters per Line Distribution Date and Time: 2009-07-09 10:00:00 Written By: Marcia Yudkin Copyright: 2009 Contact Email: mailto:[email protected] Marcia Yudkin's Picture URL: http://www.thephantomwriters.com/client-img/marcia-yudkin.jpg For more free-reprint articles by Marcia Yudkin, please visit: http://www.thePhantomWriters.com/recent/author/marcia-yudkin.html ============================================= Special Notice For Publishers and Webmasters: ============================================= If you use this article on your website or in your ezine, We Want To Know About It. Use the following URL to let us know where you have used this article, and we will include a link to your website on thePhantomWriters.com: http://thephantomwriters.com/notify.php?id=6809&p=load HTML Copy-and-Paste and TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of Article Are Available at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/y/avoid-business-name-acronyms.shtml#get_code --------------------------------------------------------------------- When It Comes to Business Names, Acronyms Are FUBAR Copyright (c) 2009 Marcia Yudkin Creative Marketing Solutions http://www.yudkin.com/ Maybe you'll read the following sentence as it was intended, but I sure didn't. It was the lead sentence in an article in my local business journal: "CA is a fundamentally different company than it was when I arrived two years ago." To me, "CA" means California, and that's how I read it. But when I reached the end of that sentence, that obviously did not make sense. Then I thought, "Must be a misprint - they left a letter out - but what?" Only in the fourth paragraph of the article did my bafflement clear up. "We simplified 'Computer Associates' to 'CA' and brought the 'C' and 'A' on our brand mark closer together." "Oh my gosh, 'CA' is a company name?!" Too bad you couldn't see the expression on my face. This illustrates one of the problems in creating a company name out of letters. With just about any combination of letters you choose, the acronym is probably already in use somewhere. Indeed, CA is also in use for Cocaine Anonymous, as well as an abbreviation for Canada. On the web, a new company name consisting of an acronym will be impossible for the average person to get useful results for from a search engine. According to the Web Directory All Acronyms, the letters NSA stand for more than 100 different entities, including No Such Agency. Incorporating an acronym as part of a longer name doesn't resolve the issue of multiple meanings. For example, if you named your company SME Services, thinking of "Small and Medium-sized Enterprises," SME could still call up more than 60 other meanings in common usage, including Subject Matter Expertise and Solid Metal Embrittlement. Second, because acronyms have no self-evident meaning, they require a very heavy investment of resources to become recognizable and memorable as a company name. True, the now-global fast-food company KFC has done well with its initials by trading on its previous incarnation as Kentucky Fried Chicken. But unless you're also serving more than a billion customers a year with a marketing budget to match, that shouldn't encourage you to follow their example. And third, acronyms invite ridicule. There are scores of jokes purporting to explain what the letters in IBM really mean: * I've Been Moved (because of the company's relocation policy) * I've Been Misled * It's a Broken Machine * Immoral Brand and Management * I Blame Mathematics * Idiots Became Managers * Imbecilic Bad Micros * Invented By Murphy * and on and on. Perhaps because we dislike how we tend to be treated by governmental and technical acronym-named organizations, many of us find acronyms geeky and off-putting rather than cuddly and comforting. "Acronyms tend to keep non-experts at arm's length," wrote language critic Amy Gahran in 2003. For example, "the original full name for RSS [which most people believe stands for Really Simple Syndication] is 'RDF Site Summary' - a nested acronym that requires two levels of decoding, and it gets geekier at the second level," Gahran noted. Most of the time, keeping people at arm's length is not a desirable state of affairs or a goal for a new company name. So ditch the acronyms. By the way, in case you're wondering what "FUBAR" means, since before World War Two it's been an American military expression for the more vulgar version of "Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition." --------------------------------------------------------------------- Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a company that brainstorms creative business names, product names and tag lines for clients. For a systematic process of coming up with an appealing and effective name or tag line, download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm --- END ARTICLE --- Get HTML or TEXT Copy-and-Paste Versions Of This Article at: http://thePhantomWriters.com/free_content/db/y/avoid-business-name-acronyms.shtml#get_code ..................................... TERMS OF REPRINT - Publication Rules (Last Updated: May 11, 2006) Our TERMS OF REPRINT are fully enforcable under the terms of: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c105:H.R.2281.ENR: ..................................... *** Digital Reprint Rights *** * If you publish this article in a website/forum/blog, You Must Set All URL's or Mailto Addresses in the body of the article AND in the Author's Resource Box as Hyperlinks (clickable links). * Links must remain in the form that we published them. Clean links should point to the Author's links without redirects having been inserted into the copy. * You are not allowed to Change or Delete any Words or Links in the Article or Resource Box. Paragraph breaks must be retained with articles. You can change where the paragraph breaks fall, but you cannot eliminate all paragraph breaks as some have chosen to do. * Email Distribution of this article Must be done through Opt-in Email Only. No Unsolicited Commercial Email. * You Are Allowed to format the layout of the article for proper display of the article in your website or in your ezine, so long as you can maintain the author's interests within the article. * You may not use sentences from this article as an input for any software that steals sentences from others in order to build an article with software. The copyright on this article applies to the "WHOLE" article. *** Author Notification *** We ask that you notify the author of publication of his or her work. Marcia Yudkin can be reached at: [email protected] *** Print Publication Reprint Rights *** If you desire to publish this article in a PRINT publication, you must contact the author directly for Print Permission at: mailto:[email protected] ..................................... If you need help converting this text article for proper hyperlinked placement in your webpage, please use this free tool: http://thephantomwriters.com/link-builder.pl ===================================================================== ABOUT THIS ARTICLE SUBMISSION http://thePhantomWriters.com is a paid article distribution service. thePhantomWriters.com and Article-Distribution.com are owned and operated by Bill Platt of Stillwater, Oklahoma USA. Learn more about our article distribution services by visiting: http://thephantomwriters.com/x.pl/tpw/info/article-distribution/index.html The content of this article is solely the property and opinion of its author, Marcia Yudkin http://www.yudkin.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ---------------------------------------------------------------------
