Marketing Communications for Tech Startups: From Idea-to-Launch Part 1 and 2

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Our friend William Shakespeare was very poetic, but did not have a clue about branding. Your brand name is the first and most important element in your marketing communications program. Building brand is about burning your company’s unique and positive attributes into the mind of your customers. Selecting a company name that reflects your firm’s unique value, and is memorable, will aid in your long-term success.

By Frances Mann-Craik

Naming Trends: Founder’s Name, Generic, Made Up, Evocative…

A recent Business 2.0 article titled “The New Science of Naming” provided a timeline of naming trends over the past century. Yet a review of these trends shows very little “science” and a great deal of ego, art, and at times desperation in company naming. (The name “Accenture” is often cited as an example of desperation.)

While a well-chosen company name will by no means determine the success of your company, a poorly chosen company name can have a very negative affect.

Naming approaches have changed over time. Names have moved from straightforward descriptions to words used out of context to quirky made up words and back again.

In the pre-Internet days, a brand always had a visual component: Coke has the shape of the bottle and the stylized writing; McDonald’s has golden arches. In the Internet-era, the brand name alone without a visual component must carry the entire responsibility for being the key “memory tag.”

Naming Approaches

Founder’s Name(s) – popular in the early days of industry, company founder’s used their own names: Ford, Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble. Founder’s names were also popular in the early days of the computer industry: Hewlett-Packard, Varian and more recently Siebel Systems.

Straight Forward Descriptive Terms/Acronyms – General Motors (GM), International Business Machines (IBM) and Systems Analysis and Program Development (SAP) are all examples of company names that become acronyms with meaning.

Real words used out of context – Apple and Orange are catchy but without a suggestion of the business. This type of name requires marketing work to establish meaning and build the brand. If they are catchy, unique, and well marketed, they are likely to be remembered.

Made up words – Xerox, Vivendi, Google, as with real words used out of context, these made up words require significant marketing to build meaning in the minds of customers. The longer and harder your name is to spell, the more marketing effort will be required to build name awareness.

Generic Common Noun – cars.com, wine.com, pets.com generic common noun names are straight forward, but contain an element of risk. In the US, common noun product names are generally associated with “generic” products, which are recognized as “cheap” products. Overtime, the market has proven that proper nouns, to which people can attribute a brand value, are the names remembered as having value.

Real words suggestive of the business – Jawbone, Oracle, Blackboard and Research In Motion (RIM) are simple names that are intuitive and have real meaning “in the spirit” of what the company does.

The Naming Process

Whether you seek the professional advice of a naming and branding firm, or take the project on internally, the steps will be similar (although the costs could be dramatically different). You want to name your company in a way that highlights the uniqueness of your business. Therefore, much like the process of positioning, the process of naming starts with identifying your unique value proposition versus your competition for your target audience.

1) Marketplace and Competitive Research – define market opportunities, understand the business context of target customers and evaluate competitors.

2) Develop your “Unique Value Proposition” for your target customer. What is the “promise” your company strives to make that differentiates it from its competition? Identify your core values, personality and identity.

3) Creative Brainstorming – pull together your team to review your unique value proposition and get creative. In brainstorming, every idea is a good idea (as it may lead to another better idea). This exercise is often most successful with the addition of popcorn and beer.

Consider the following elements while brainstorming your company name:

# Unique and memorable – Hotmail, Yahoo, Boo.com. The latter was one of the biggest flops in Europe’s dot.com history, but failure was not due to the name – which will be long remembered – but due to Boo.com being unable to deliver on its promises.
# Suggestive – A word or words suggestive of a category without being generic.
# Pronounceable – Word-of-mouth is the most effective publicity, be sure people can say your name, and in multiple languages.
# Easy to spell – In the Internet era your website is one of your most powerful tools, so customers must be able to find it.
# Appropriate for you target customers – Blue Martini, for example, would not work as a children’s website.
# Cross-cultural – think about a global name. The old story of the US auto manufacturer that introduced a car called the “Nova” into Mexico, not realizing that in Spanish Nova means “no go,” is a perfect example of the potential problem.

4) Make a short list of the best name ideas and see which ones meet the key requirements:

a) Internet domain address available b) Trademark available c) Works internationally (if applicable) d) Easy to say e) Easy to spell f) Memorable

5) Test the names that make your short list with your target market audience, advisors, employees, friends and family.

6) Select your name.

7) Own your name.

Once you have chosen a great name, start the ownership process. You’ll likely be investing a great deal of time and money in promoting your name and do not want to have to change it after you have created good will and market awareness.

Register your domain name (preferably a “.com”) in every country where you plan to do business. In addition to registering your name with your own local domain, you may want to consider other domains .de, .fr, .uk, .com, .ne. You may also want to register name variations that are close to your name.

Trademark your company name if the company name will be used to identify your products or services. The International Trademark Association (www.inta.org) has useful information and links on worldwide trademark issues.

Part 1: http://www.tornado-insider.com/news/Article.asp?id=13578

Part 2 – Positioning – The Power of Targeted Marketing

“Our product works for everyone,” is often the response from an enthusiastic startup entrepreneur when asked, “Who is your target customer?”

Indeed, your product or service may be truly horizontal and work for everyone; however, unless you have a Microsoft-size marketing budget, you cannot initially market to everyone.

You need to initially focus on a specific target customer. For a prospective customer to make a bet on your unknown company and product, the value your product brings must tightly match a painful problem they’re trying to solve, compelling them to take the risk on your unknown product.

Positioning helps you clearly focus on a select target market in which you can find willing “early adopters” to try out your product. Once satisfied, these early customers will serve as references to help you sell to the next customer in your initial target market and, overtime, to adjacent target markets.

Focus, Focus, Focus

Positioning is often very difficult because it requires hard choices. Giving up all possible targets to focus on just one requires a great deal of discipline. Interesting opportunities seem to lurk everywhere, tempting you away from your targeted goal.

Not narrowing down to a specific target audience will cause your startup to be like a rudderless ship sailing whichever way the wind blows. Ultimately, as you chase each new and exciting opportunity, your resources will be stretched beyond capacity and you will not be able to satisfy any customer completely. With no satisfied customers you will have no positive word-of-mouth. Without word-of-mouth, you cannot benefit from the huge marketing advantages the successes of satisfied customers will provide.

First Customer – Critical Success Factor

As a startup your first objective is to find a customer who will try out your new product, give you insightful feedback, and provide word-of-mouth testimonial and references to help you entice customer #2. Your positioning must appeal to this first customer’s specific needs and be a product or service that clearly is a tailor fit solution for their problem. Otherwise, they just will not have the time or interest to work with you.

Once you have a very satisfied customer #1, you market to customer #2, who has the same problem/pain, by referencing customer #1. After you have established a foothold in this first targeted sector, you expand to adjacent sectors, leveraging the references of the first sector. The successes of your satisfied customers will provide huge marketing advantages.

Value Proposition, Positioning and Messages

The objective of positioning is to differentiate your company in a compelling way for competitive advantage in a selected market segment. If you are struggling with this, it may be that you are too close to your product/service – not unusual, as it is “your baby.” Crossing The Chasm, written by Geoffrey Moore, founder of The Chasm Group, provides tools for developing your own go-to-market strategy, as well as examples of approaches used by successful technology companies.

Many firms find bringing in a positioning expert to be the most effective and least divisive approach to developing positioning and messages. This expert will research and evaluate your product/service’s market space and competition in the context of your unique value proposition. They will then work with you to craft relevant positioning and messages to attract your target customers.

1) Choose a first target customer that is “bleeding from the neck”
Choosing the right first target customer is a critical step. “You develop a large market by developing a small market first,” says Paul Wiefels, Managing Director of The Chasm Group. “You need to create a beachhead, which is an accessible, well-funded target customer with a compelling reason to buy, . . . one that is bleeding from the neck,” Wiefels says. In order to be the market leader, you want to choose a target customer where there is no entrenched competition and one that will serve you well as a reference.

2) Understand the competitive landscape
Who are the entrenched competitors in the market space? What does their product do? How are they positioned? What do they say about themselves? The Internet makes it fairly easy to conduct competitive research. You need to determine your unique value, compared to your target market competitors.

3) Your “Unique Value Proposition”
The value proposition is the definition of your product: whom it targets, what it does and how it benefits the user. Once you have selected a first target customer and analyzed the competition you should be able to articulate your unique value proposition. This is how you are different and why the customer will buy from you.

4) Positioning
Once your company has determined its value proposition and the target customer, you are ready to develop positioning. Geoffrey Moore says, “Positioning is based on the target segment you intend to dominate and the value proposition you intend to dominate it with.” Positioning is rarely articulated in marketing materials. Rather, positioning provides the guidelines for product development, marketing and sales – giving the entire team a clear understanding of your company and product focus.

Positioning Statement Template
# For [target customers]
# Who have [compelling reason to buy]
# Our product is a [new product category]
# That provides [key benefit (which solves problem)]
# Unlike [competitor in new product category]
# We have [key differentiated] whole product most relevant for your industry

*Source: Crossing the Chasm, used with permission of The Chasm Group

5) Messages
Marketing messages are developed in concert with creating your positioning. These are the feature and benefit statements about your product that you will weave into all of your materials. Because they are based on your positioning work, they will be specific to the target market and resonate with your customers and prospects.

Effective, compelling positioning assures your company and product are competitively differentiated, relevant and compelling to target customers. This allows your company to gain a leadership position in the market segment. Leadership brings multiple benefits. Leaders receive an overwhelming share of publicity, are able to establish pricing models, have lower sales costs and access to decision-makers.

As your business grows, your target audience will broaden. “You’ll sell different applications to the same target segment or sell the same application to different segments,” says Wiefels. In addition, market conditions will change. Competition will change. Technology will change. Positioning must be revisited when any of these factors change.

Once positioning is established, you leverage this work to create your supporting corporate identity, website and marketing materials. The next article will focus on corporate identity and culture.

contact Frances at: [email protected]

Part 2: http://www.tornado-insider.com/news/Article.asp?id=13613