Branding: WTF Are You Thinking

I don’t know…. branding is vital, so why the f#ck give your company a name of an already existing company? Don’t!!!

Ex-Barclays CEO, Antony Jenkins is launching a new core digital banking platform and decides it’s a good idea to call it 10x Future Technologies.

Terrible name, but whatever. People will reference it simply as 10x, as do they. How does one pronounce and or type 10x? Ten Times? 10 Times? Ten X? 10x’s? not by the “full name” 10x Future Technologies. It’s not like people call Amazon by its full legal name, Amazon Technologies, Inc.? It’s simply Amazon.

The sounds like (radio test) is going to be all over the board as to how people write/type the name. That is a problem in search, email, direct navigation and more. Also consider that there is a huge real estate firm that was once known as Auction.com, that rebranded to, well, TenX! That Ten X owns the domain names TenX.com, Ten-X.com, 10x.com and more.

So what domain name did 10x Future Technologies use? A hand registered one from June 2016, 10xBanking.com.

Branding is about standing out and being easily found. Not owning 10x.com is problem #1. Since they feel the need to brand as “10x” reference themselves as “10x”, they need to be 10x.com but can’t! They also join the ranks of 2,238 actively registered domain names that simply start with 10x. Talk about lost in the mix!

Even though this is a B2B product, it still needs to be promoted, marketed and communicated. This is ten times harder to do when you brand as something you are not online. 10x is cool and all but not owning 10x.com to go with your brand leaves you as something else! Do not brand yourself as something you are not fully covered to be!