Walking through a farmers’ market a couple of days ago, I saw a shop with BBQ sauces, spices, supplies, and seasonings. One unique product I saw was seasoned skewers, which are grilling skewers that contain seasonings on the outside, allowing your chicken or beef to be seasoned from the inside while being grilled. Seems like an interesting concept.
I think the company did a great job choosing a name for its product. Had the company been called XYZ seasoned skewers or something brandable like Taste Skewers, I probably would have forgotten what they are called. Smartly, the company owns and brands its product as “SeasonedSkewers.com”
I think it’s smart because it’s branded as its product description. The company could have chosen a cutesy brand, but people probably would have referred to the product as seasoned skewers. Additionally, if they hadn’t called themselves the product name, it would have given a competitor an opportunity to enter the space, since the product is unique but not one of a kind.
If your company develops a new product, sometimes the smartest thing to call it is exactly what it should be called.
“If your company develops a new product, sometimes the smartest thing to call it is exactly what it should be called.”
So simple yet why is that hard for so many companies to even consider.
On my latest blog post there is a graphic of exactly what you are talking about (logos of mostly dead dotCOM companies). Bet you can’t tell me what a single one of those companies does or did. And no surprise, that likely contributed to their demise. Yes we know of the success of invented names like e-bay and yahoo and amazon- in fact most of the highest trafficked sites online are brands versus generics. That’s easy for brands with the capital for PR and Advertising to make their names known. But for every one of these branded Internet successes, there are 10,000 or even more failures due to choosing a name that communicates nothing.
Great post!
That’s what I call a food webpage: fresh, savory, and appetizing! Thanx, Elliotm for an interesting observation. What pulls Seasoned Skewers .com together as a brand is the pic of shrimp kabobs on the homepage, and other food pics, along with the cheery graphics. The company features other products from the left menu which fit with the seasoned skewers brand, such as “seasoned grilling planks.”
You think, so what, another gimmick, but the excitement the company has translates through the homepage.
This guarantees them type-in traffic from any current or future potential “seasoned skewers” customers what better way to get your company off and running… nice site design too!
“On my latest blog post there is a graphic of exactly what you are talking about (logos of mostly dead dotCOM companies”
Hey Owen…can I guess that this post too was about Rick Schwartz? At some point you guys either need to get married or move on.
Elliot, the problem IMO is that many small businesses are delusional by thinking that they will build a brand and open stores everywhere…It’s good to dream but many times it’s good to cash in.
Good looking website that makes me rightfully hungry…if you mouseover the links you hear “sizzles”.
Great post. By branding a name that completely matches their product, they save themselves huge amounts of money that they would need to spend to get more well known. And Rob’s point above is so valuable – when somebody is interested in the generic product, they’ll end up going to this specific brand instead of a competitor’s. How valuable is that? And as Owen pointed out above, for every branded internet success, there are countless failures because branding is so damn expensive.
Thanks for the article. Having the generic sure does help, but it doesn’t give a company an edge over their competitors. for the most part, people also remember catchy names too.
Many companies that have a subdomain of the generic and catchy names are squashing the generic competition. You have to spend money to promote the generic name to get traffic. The searche engines will favor your generic name. Cheesecake.com will never over overtake The Cheesecake Factory.
That’s my perception of generic names.
They may have an exact generic name for their product, but their traffic has been very low the past year. You would think their traffic should be higher in the Summer, but it’s the complete opposite.
The majority of their traffic took place in the later Winter and during the Spring. The Summer months have dropped off quite a bit.
Either there’s little demand for the product, or the company still needs more time to grow. I know of one company has the generic name of a popular industry, but only has only 3% of the traffic of their nearest competitor. And that competitor has a subdomain of their name.
The trick is to do more with the name instead of depending on it to do the work.
IMO, smart branding (domain name) and poor marketing results in a failed business.
It is not that tough to develop a seasoned skewers company. Write content on ways to cook meat for all occasions to drive traffic.
The company seems to have failed (IMO). In this case, the generic name is not enough to deliver success.