What has the Starbucks name got to do with coffee? Absolutely nothing.
Starbuck, the character in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick after whom the coffee chain is named did not drink a drop of coffee. Starbucks is a brand forged around founder Howard Schultz’s vision of recreating the Italian coffee bar culture in the US, not the generic product.
“Customers must recognize that you stand for something”, he once said.
[picapp align=”center” wrap=”false” link=”term=starbucks&iid=4922611″ src=”1/8/a/1/Starbucks_Coffee_Located_42f1.jpg?adImageId=10057047&imageId=4922611″ width=”500″ height=”330″ /]Fancy a coffee? No, I’ll go to Starbucks.
Naming a company around a product is a trap many entrepreneurs fall in to. They have a brilliant idea for a new product. Then they reason that the product, or the technology it is based on, is what they sell so therefore the company name just has to describe what the company sells. Fine. But, sooner or later, they are forced to address the question of the name again as the technology becomes obsolete (as it will), the product is commoditized by competition, or the business evolves into other product areas.
National Cash Register, American Telephone & Telegraph, International Business Machines and General Electric (to mention just a few well-known examples) managed to overcome the limiting specificity of their names as the businesses evolved by collapsing them to initials. International Harvester took a different route when it started making different types of vehicles. It changed its name to Navistar.
MP3Car.com has a similar dilemma.
The company traces its roots to a worldwide online community of geeks in the 1990s who installed personal computers filled with electronic music files, or MP3s, in their cars. Along the way, MP3Car’s engineers developed increasing expertise in building and integrating mobile computers, and they started consulting and selling computers to companies and government agencies.
“MP3Car.com is obviously a misnomer at this point,” said Heather Sarkissian, the company’s chief executive officer, in an interview with the Baltimore Sun. “It’s a very well-known brand. However, it is very confusing to our [business-to-business] enterprise customers.”
The company has experienced steady growth in sales of the off-the-shelf mobile computing packages that it assembles for corporate and government clients. But the name is a stumbling block for potential clients and even investors, Sarkissian said.
“One investor thought all we do is put MP3 players in cars,” Sarkissian said. “He told us we’d be out of business in two years. … I had to explain to him what we really do.”
MP3Car.com, which has five full-time employees, is trying to save money by doing its renaming and branding itself. It isn’t easy, as the company is finding.
“I’m telling you, it’s all been thought of. … It’s crazy,” she joked recently in her company’s offices. “This has been an incredible challenge.”
“Our biggest challenge,” Sarkissian said, “is figuring out what our products are going to look like five years from now.”
Wrong focus again, Heather. Brands are built around powerful ideas, not products.
