Practical Net branding for banks (page 2 of 2)

Dotnets, dotinfos, dotbizes are all easily forgotten and marketing suffers. Now, DotCom has become the only gold standard.

Today, naming of a banking product is not a simple creative exercise, rather a serious discipline where Rules of Naming and Laws of Corporate Nomenclatures must be applied. There is a big difference between a general branding exercise and a specialized naming expertise.

You can have a star quality and globally effective name with an identical Dot.com within 48 hours. It is the easiest thing to do under the laws.

Banks and money institutions of North America and around the world have mainly three types of names:

1- Long geographic names; that seriously hurt national and international marketing. These same long names get initialized cause massive confusion with strange companies worldwide and are almost impossible to find on the Net.

2- Words on a string; names of things combined either accidentally due to M&A or other strange reasons, sometimes making no connections at all.

3- Initials; this come about because the customers refuse to call out the long names.

Diagnostically, solutions are simple and here are three steps:

First, determine whether your names are Healthy, Injured or on a Life Support. It makes no difference, whether these names are of products, services, division or the main corporate names. To a customer a name is a name, no matter how it is offered.

Healthy names are easy, unique and one of a kind with global protection and a dotcom like CitiBank, SunTrust, etc... Injured names are long confusing or initialized, like UCBH, CIBC, BB&T or RBCFG.

While, Life Support names are tangled into serious trademark or obvious name confusion problems. Simple dictionary words also cause a lot of confusion. There are too many Firsts, Uniteds, or Nationals in just about every country and there are too many compass directions, East, West, North, and South and so on.

Online or completely virtual banks are also struggling for respectable and trustworthy naming identities and most important short and sweet URLs...the market is swamped with promotions, players like Everbank, Pc-banker, ING-direct, Earthstar, Giant-bank, and thousands others all chasing clicks and hits with a better URL, around the globe.

Second, quick analysis and the forward steps, after this proper check up, is to get a mandate to formally audit and analyze the name so management can take a specific direction to modify them.

These names can be for cards, special accounts or for various products or services. Most financial organizations have dozens of different names
and many hundreds of domain names clashing each other all over the continents. It's always better to have few strong and protected names as champions than hundreds of injured players.

Fast treatments and more forward steps, it is very easy, to reevaluate, reposition and rebuild a Name-Identity of any product or a service, provided it is done using the Laws of Naming.

Third, you may already be over funded. Great names will give you great results, with much less dollars. Weaker names will cost you ten times while bleeding your budgets and exhausting major resources in the process. Names on life support will constantly need oxygen.

There's no point in spending millions on weak names and risk losing the race. You may already be over funded. Just fix the KEY problem and open the gates.

Banking and Finance, is not the only industry facing this impact of names it's all over the globe and reaching the farthest corners. The old ideas of building brands using expansive billboards and banners are all now replaced by fluid web pages, which are being changed as you read along. URLs and domain names are now controlling access to the entire corporations.

In conclusion, there are major naming issues that executives must tackle in order to cope with the new challenges of this new name-economy.