Sunday, 7 August 2005
Branding for Analytics: Another Reason Vista is a Stupid Name
« Nat, Nat the Nantucket Cat | Main | Wonder Brand Powers... Activate! »I've been meaning to weigh in on the new name of Microsoft's latest Windows – Vista. It's stupid. Everyone's said as much. I agree. But in addition to the fact that it's just a stupid name, it's stupid for another reason – it doesn't take web analytics into account.
I've spent a lot of time playing with BlogPulse and other tools and one think I've discovered is that it is way easier to trend stuff with certainty if the thing you're looking at has a unique and unambiguous name. Think back to my Brand Strength post – remember all the work I had to do just to tell whether we were talking about Apple computer or an apple a day? And even with then the results were suspect. As a brand name Apple is neither unique nor unambiguous. But Microsoft on the other hand is an easy thing to trend – only Mirosoft is Microsoft – unique without ambiguity.
Just as we learned to design for manufacture in the 80's and 90's, today we need to learn to brand for analytics. If you are a brand manager and are in the process of coming up with a name – make it unique and unambiguous in additional to all the other stuff it needs to be for other reasons.
Ironically, Apple has has some great product names in this regard - iPod, iMac, PowerBook, iBook where as Microsoft has the worst product names – Windows, Vista, Word, Excel, Access.
It's a lot easiser to find a needle in a haystack than it is to find the same needle in a stack of needles. The less time, effort, money you have to put into separating the Apples from the apples or the Windows from the view, the more time, effort, energy you can spend on trying to get information out.
